Sure...30 quid is not much, but think portable computers. Most of them come with a winmodem. Okay, you decide not to use it, that's okay. A coworker of me, who is a convinced Linux user, was pissed of by this fact and ran off to buy a PCMCIA modem. His pick: a 3Com modem because of the brand. He came home and installed it, and behold, it was a WinModem!!! You can bet he was disappointed. He -just like me- was convinced that a quite expensive PCMCIA modem would have been a hardware modem. Well, they are not. It's not written on the box, but next time I see "designed for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP" on a modem box I will know what that means: don't try under Linux. He asked the salesperson if it would work with Linux, but they are so badly informed that they had no clue ("Harware modem? What's that? It's a modem...") Just go and look at the brand-name PCMCIA modems around, you'll be astonished how many are actually WinModems.
Note that he found a hardware PCMCIA modem, inexpensive no-name, but he insisted to the salesperson to try it in his laptop before purchasing. He was lucky the salesperson allowed it. Oh, if you want a 3Com PCMCIA WinModem, I think he'll be happy to sell it to you. It won't be used anyway.
I only have one modem, and old 33.6 TDK which I use occasionaly in my old laptop (for downloading email). That modem dates back from the times that softmodems were nonexistent, and everyone would have found it very strange to actually emulate a modem in software. Ah, the good old times.:-)
Depends, if it uses NTFS or FAT32 and you use Symantec Ghost it resizes the partition. I'm not very used to dd, I may lack of knowledge in the parameters doing advanced stuff:-) I used it occasionally and then used Partition Magic afterwards to resize and gain the space. Perhaps parted could do the trick too. I saw it in action on a machine of a coworker, very sleek.
Now, you may be better informed than me, but as I understood it APG cards use the system memory to store textures and PCI card don't. So indirectly it fills up the memory that otherwhise could have been used by the game and thus resulting in swapping dropping game performance when you do not have enough memory. Just set for kicks your aperture gate size to your whole system memory, fun eh?
AGP memory usage can be read here
Okay, so if I'm wrong, please explain me why my Pentium Pro 200, 128Meg EDO RAM and a VooDoo2 card with 16Meg onboard (PCI, I don't think those come in AGP) kicks the hell out of my P-III 800, 128Meg SD-Ram and NVidia GeForce MX2 with 32Meg onboard (Aperture set to 64Meg, as set by default in my BIOS). Both systems ran under a stock Windows 2000 install, after bootup ideling at about 55Meg Memory used as reported by the taskmanager. Both had the latest available drivers installed. The game in occurence is Half-Life, which has good support for both graphic cards: Glide for the VooDoo and Direct3D for the NVidia. Why did the P-III suddenly used about 196Meg Ram instead of 128Meg on the PPro. Both games were set to 800x600x16bit and maximum details. The only plausible explanation I found was that the P-III reserved a huge amount of memory for graphics data in main memory and the machine got low on memory and had to swap. Proof to my theory (for me) was that adding 128Meg (more now) to the P-III fixed the problem.
I'm not a big gamer, but I was really astonished by those results.
Interesting. I didn't know that. But isn't essentially AGP doing the same stuff? The graphics card hogging your system RAM and disallowing access to it for the rest of the system. My previous system had 128Meg RAM and a 64Meg Aperture...now games woudn't fluidly play at all. Upgrading the mem was enough. Another system with 128Meg RAM and a PCI card ran the games I tried fluently even with a lot of lesser specs and same OS.
To me it looks to me that if you want to port, let's say Linux, to it you would have to define the address range you want to use for graphics displaying and the rest for the system. "Just" separate them in software, you know the amount of RAM anyway for the hardware. Not that I could do it, but it probably is a quite simple exerice for someone with the right experience.
The XBox looks really as advertised made of "standard components". Looks like it shoudn't be too hard to replace the harddisk for example.
Also I was wondering, does that GeForce3 have a standard VGA-out, or only television? I mean, if this this is hackable or even if you would be able to run some Windows verions(Hey Bill: release "Windows XBox", killer sale!) on it (or Linux, even better) it would have great potential for budget PC-replacement. Some people just don't have the dough to pay a budget-PC (no kidding, I recently helped someone still using his 286), or it represents two paychecks.
For the rest the components are really tightly fitted together. Fan on the CPU (graphic chip?) and behinde the huge heatsink. I'd just fear for overheating. It think it shoudn't be put close to the VCR and DVD player but somewhere well aerated.
Well as for disassembling these things: I admire the people who do this. I couldn't shell out that amount of money to disassembe it and have the risk that I can't put it back togehter. On old hardware okay, but on new it would break my heart.
Bizarre...we are working here on a Java based e-banking application and our Bugzilla has been empty for three weeks, despite testers turning our application inside out.
Actually I think the code looks elegant most of the time, and the error-handling is very robust. It just looks to me that you never saw good Java code. I'm sorry for you, you missed something:-)
Oh, yes....and C++ hasn't got his bizarre constructs? Ever seen projects with overuse and inconsistent use of templates? Hoplessly obscured and wicked #defines that change every second include file. Or triple/quadruply-inherited classes that don't make a real sense anymore?
Come on, every language has it's inherent problems....and guess what, that is because no language really is perfect.
You don't like introspection? Now, well, I don't use it often either but it is way more flexible to a pointer to method. How do you know what parameters that method use in the specific library that is around? In Java you can at least intercept the fact that a certain method exists or not and handle it accordingly...even perhaps offering a good alternative.
I used to program C++, and I liked it... I switched to Java because I found it interesting. Now perhaps it is time try switch back to C++ for some time and apply everything I learned about good OO.
It's all about bad programmers, not about bad languages.
Crippled? Hmmm, I don't know if that is true. Java in itself is an elegant language which has some limitations due to trying to support such a wide range of platforms transparently. You have to know what you are doing, that is all...but that counts for any language. Java code runs fast (really fast) in a lot of cases, mostly the only thing that "feels" slow is the GUI. You can really enhance responsiveness by including intelligent Threading. You can also avoid creating of throwaway objects, thus limiting Garbage collection.
For the GUI, just don't use Swing if you don't need to... AWT is enough for simple frontends, yes it is not perfect, but it is faster. I suppose it is even possible to write your own native implementation linking to, for example, QT libraries or W32 libraries. Not portable, lot of work, but speed ensure. Some people tend to forget: using a vitual machine inherently takes some performance, but that is the price to pay for excellent multi-platform support. Note that it's still is better to do test on all the platforms you want to support, but the implementation is done once. Especially when using applications (not applets, because of browsers (non)support ), mult-platform Java applications tend to work astonishingly well in my experience.
Ehm...was there that much nudity in that movie? Frankly, we watched it recently with the whole family and I did not feel uncomfortable one second...nor did my mom. There is worse stuff on cable TV, I think.
since so many of us have issues getting Linux up on laptops
Well, I have a 5 year old Toshiba, and the disto I use (older laptop, small harddisk) is Peanut Linux . Everything works, XFree86, sound, network PCMCIA card and modem PCMCIA card. Give it a try. I ditched KOffice and parts of KDE2 (well, most of it, not everything) because it's too heavy for my laptop, but with WindowMaker it works fine.
If you really just use your laptop for emacs editing (in console mode) and use Linux, why don't you just use an older latop? I'm sure you can find some cheap on ebay.
My only laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 210CT, which is a P120 with 32Meg RAM and it has CD-Rom and 1.3 Gig harddisk and TFT 800x*600 screen (2 dead pixels). I use this machine more than my "big" desktop machine. It does basic surfing and email with WindowMaker (browser:Opera), so I guess doing emacs on console shouldn't be a problem at all. Okay, compile time (I suppose you develop C/C++) could take a while but everyone needs a good coffee/tea/mountain dew-break once in a while.
Hey, don't be pessimistic...I agree on this one!:-) Note aside: it was really hard not to answer all your sentences ending with a question mark... I just asumed they were rethorical and don't need answering, your mind is set anyway and so is mine. Future will tell who was right, don't you think?
Well in that case, the virtual realm would need a own law...and I propose the common subset of all laws of all countries:-)
The problem is that current laws (in any country) are not yet ready for real international entities, nor are countries around the world ready to cope with real initernational laws. Even most multinational companies can be traced back to a country (harbouring the HQ) and/or define the "responsible courts" in case of dispute in contracts. I think it's a complete mess, but then I like clearly defined things, and law is in no way such a thing.
I should have noticed your nick "Malcontent", doesn't it say everything?
Now, from a terrorist point of view attacking a company like MS is not a prime target. How many people are "proud" about Microsoft? Sure, there must be some that take it as the "greatest software company of all". No, as a terrorist you want to stab the soul of the country, something that *everyone* can identify with. Your *only* argument is that it would impact the economy *hard*. Unfortunately for you, the capitalist dogma says that a void in a market will fill in no time. So MS gone means opportunities for other companies. Those will create jobs, the stocks of those companies will soar, clever investors will make tons of money. Since I presume that "retirement funds" are managed by clever investors, the only ones that will get hit are the people retiring within the next 5 years of the catastrophy. It's a toll to pay. For your argument that "companies in a tight partnership with MS" will go down, well, some will..again, making opportunities for others...others will stay, simply because they will put the workforce behind it to save the company and thus creating jobs. Besides, if Microsoft explodes suddenly, would your Windows 2000, Office 2000 CD's, IIS CD's go stale from one day to the other? I doubt so.
Biological attack: yes of course, anyone would get scared, but *that* is the point of terrorism. The only thing that counts is "bussinness as usual": Do you see pilots sh*t in their pants because some terrorists could hijack the plane and crash it somewhere? Nope, most say they will go on as usual. Any smallpox attack on a larger company would result in stronger screening of employeess, tighter security in the buildings, etc... Vaccination would reassure employees at least a bit. Let the cowardly go, if they want, not a good choice in the current economy, isn't it? Facing death each time you go to work? The "facing death" part is ridiculous: I face death each morning because I go to work, I might slip over the soap while showering and break my neck, I might skid on the slippery roads on my way to work and crash into a tree, I might fall in an elevator shaft because the elevator malfunctions... Living is facing death, in small probabilities, every day. Now, in your eyes those probabilities have risen for MS employees, in my eyes those probabilities have risen for everyone.
H&M....I don't know if it's true that people stopped eating beef during the crisis. I just think they wanted to show the consumer "look we are doing something", that this implied killing millions of innocent healthy animals is outrageous. Well, I and my whole family didn't stop eating our nice steaks during the H&M crisis. Neither KJD had an impact on our eating habits. Why would it? The problem was identified, and (too extreme) measures taken by authorities...everything is okay. The public always panics easily, but it is so easily soothed. Look it only took a couple of millions of cows to sacrifice. Besides, it is just what your president is doing: soothing the public by attacking Afghanistan, sorry, I mean "the terrorist camps in Afghanistan", because "We are not the enemy of the Afganistani People". Your only premisse is that the "public" is dumb and uninformed. Probably true, but if it is, just give it another point of attention and you are done. Manipulating people is easy, you know. Even if ranching is so important to the US economy, do you really think those ranchers are going to sit there and weep. No, they will sit down, weep, wash their tears away and get going like real enterpreneurs.
Look, you don't need terrorists to destabilise a country according to your statements. Yesterday, in Belgium, the national airline went bankrupt. You can imagine that it will make a *lot* unemployed people and that a lot of other industries (travel agencies, cleaning companies, catering services,...) are heavily impacted by the bankrupcy. So it will impact on Belgian economy, sure... This "destabilisation" is caused by incompetent management and it cost about 0$ to cause....only incompetence.
This all, just to prove you that terrorists are just only one new factor that can cause harm to a country.
Now for people hating the US. They probably have a reason, don't you think? Even if the reason is valid (in their eyes), how many will become terrorists? Not many. Probabilities are slim, and that is the whole point. People will die, but that doesn't matter at all...people die every day, that's just because their time had come.
I actually do know the limitations of floating point, don't worry....I did pay some attention during the mathematical programming courses during my computer science study. (For my defense, that's some years ago and I don't usually have to cope with floating point calculations often in my current job) I could on top of my head mention the nice gap around th "0" of floating point (normalisation anyone?). The accuracy of a single (32bit) is about 7 digits, and the accuracy of a double (64bit) is about 17 digits. Let's take the single, this would mean that you cannot accurately represent a big number like 221219.7625 (10 digits) in a 32 bit single. Besides an implicit cast from a int (32bit integer) to single (32bit floating point) would generate a warning in any compiler. This last statement just to say that any halfway informed programmer should have had halfway a clue about FP limitations.
Now for the fixed point, I know they have some distinct problems, but I should hit the books again to be specific.
Obviousley, I do not know anything about MP3 decoding, so I stand corrected. As you can see (well I hope), Intel marketing hasn't had too much influence me.:-)
(Didn't I defend fixed point in my original post? Yup, I did...)
Oops, well... I didn't have an atlas handy and geography isn't my strong point anyhow. Since I'm European, my uninformed remark is akin to Americans saying that Amsterdam is near Paris. We laugh with you, now you can laugh with me.;-)
I'll be more carefull next time....
1a) A company woulnd't be a good target for an atomic attack by terrorists. Yes, MS would get hit hard because they have no more workforce, true.... the economy? Probably a decent hit, but 1929 was hard too. For atomic attack, I would more chose a symbolic large city in order to crush the american pride and kill as many as possible...Washington? (Yes, I know Redmond is near Washington)
1b) Unlikely scenario. Smallpox is indeed very infectious, but there are still large stocks of vaccines. Once the first smallpox victim would be detected, whole Redmond would be vaccined. No fear from then on, thus no MS failing and no stock impact (or just minor).
Honestly I think the above two scenarios were pointless slashdot karmawhoring (including Microsoft for no good reason, I mean)
2) Hoof and mouth disease? I don't want to be picky, but do you know what farmers did 50 years ago when it hit their herd? Well, they isolated sick cows and waited until they died or got well from themselves. Unlike most people think F&M disease can be cured and the massive slaughtering over here in Europe was absolute overkill . I don't know why authorities did it, probably just an extreme measure to contain contagion. Note also that bovine F&M can be transmitted to humans, but it feels like a flu and that's it. No danger at all.
3) Same as above
4) Interesting. Would result in destruction of the tainted crops and importing rice/grain from Asia/Europe. A financial loss, but no global catastrophy. (Bad weather with bad crops can do the same).
Reading your comment, I can only conclude that terrorists did a good job on you: your comment seem scared and paranoid. That's why there is the word "terror" in "terrorist", you know.
...and next time I should read your comment to the end before shouting out. You knew about fixed point.:-)
Of course fixed point won't help your mpg123 player, because the accuracy and range is not enough with fixed point. Games and MP3 players are however in a different league: games should "look good" (nowadays at least) and all tricks are allowed. MP3 decoding is more like the "sticking back together a fourrier decomposed wave", which sounds quite like what is it: exact maths.
StrongArm processor which lacks a floating point unit
Oh, well...that could be a problem, but it isn't. Simply because at that point they use fixed point for "scientfic calculation". Way back in the days, it was very common to use long or int with a fast library that implemented fixed point. In a stric sense this is not exactly "emulation" of floating point. I know there are accuracy problems and other limitations, but it has been done and it is most probably enough for this kind of game. I'm pretty sure these guys used this method. As an example, I would like to state "Mechwarrior" (which some of the screenshots reminded me of), that was completely written in fixed point IIRC. Gorgeous game, back in the days.
I was thinking exactly the same when reading the parent post. RAM upgradability of systems like laptops. I'm posting this from a 5 year old Toshiba laptop: P120/32Meg RAM ( 64Meg swap indeed) running Linux. It does everything I need, and I just don't see a reason replacing the machine. Linux saved one of two years of extra lifetime for that machine, and I saved some cash:-) (which ended up in other hardware, but that's another story)
Strangely enough a lot of people tell me to buy a new one because it is "obsolete"....those are Windows users, yup, no kidding. Obsolete? I can play MP3's while working (okay, I admit, in mono...)
I didn't even consider trying OpenOffice on this machine....now thanks to your post, I'll give it a shot! I really start to wonder why I bought a huge desktop machine. Besides, that one has 768Meg RAM and Windows 2000 still uses swapspace. I don't know why: it has more than enough memory available. It probably just swaps out some unused DLL's.
My sympathy... I know that kind of code... I know some parts in my current project littered with it too, luckily I'm *not* responsible for maintaining it. I'm still not quite sure what use it has, but I'm thinking someone wanted to try out creating Exceptions of their own just for the sake of it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Note that he found a hardware PCMCIA modem, inexpensive no-name, but he insisted to the salesperson to try it in his laptop before purchasing. He was lucky the salesperson allowed it. Oh, if you want a 3Com PCMCIA WinModem, I think he'll be happy to sell it to you. It won't be used anyway. :-)
I only have one modem, and old 33.6 TDK which I use occasionaly in my old laptop (for downloading email). That modem dates back from the times that softmodems were nonexistent, and everyone would have found it very strange to actually emulate a modem in software. Ah, the good old times.
Depends, if it uses NTFS or FAT32 and you use Symantec Ghost it resizes the partition. I'm not very used to dd, I may lack of knowledge in the parameters doing advanced stuff :-) I used it occasionally and then used Partition Magic afterwards to resize and gain the space. Perhaps parted could do the trick too. I saw it in action on a machine of a coworker, very sleek.
Ehm....take X-box disk out, insert disk in real PC, then ghost (or dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy). Doesn't sound hard to me.
AGP memory usage can be read here
Okay, so if I'm wrong, please explain me why my Pentium Pro 200, 128Meg EDO RAM and a VooDoo2 card with 16Meg onboard (PCI, I don't think those come in AGP) kicks the hell out of my P-III 800, 128Meg SD-Ram and NVidia GeForce MX2 with 32Meg onboard (Aperture set to 64Meg, as set by default in my BIOS). Both systems ran under a stock Windows 2000 install, after bootup ideling at about 55Meg Memory used as reported by the taskmanager. Both had the latest available drivers installed. The game in occurence is Half-Life, which has good support for both graphic cards: Glide for the VooDoo and Direct3D for the NVidia. Why did the P-III suddenly used about 196Meg Ram instead of 128Meg on the PPro. Both games were set to 800x600x16bit and maximum details. The only plausible explanation I found was that the P-III reserved a huge amount of memory for graphics data in main memory and the machine got low on memory and had to swap. Proof to my theory (for me) was that adding 128Meg (more now) to the P-III fixed the problem.
I'm not a big gamer, but I was really astonished by those results.
...will we finally see a nude and petrified Nathalie Portman? ;-)
To me it looks to me that if you want to port, let's say Linux, to it you would have to define the address range you want to use for graphics displaying and the rest for the system. "Just" separate them in software, you know the amount of RAM anyway for the hardware. Not that I could do it, but it probably is a quite simple exerice for someone with the right experience.
Also I was wondering, does that GeForce3 have a standard VGA-out, or only television? I mean, if this this is hackable or even if you would be able to run some Windows verions(Hey Bill: release "Windows XBox", killer sale!) on it (or Linux, even better) it would have great potential for budget PC-replacement. Some people just don't have the dough to pay a budget-PC (no kidding, I recently helped someone still using his 286), or it represents two paychecks.
For the rest the components are really tightly fitted together. Fan on the CPU (graphic chip?) and behinde the huge heatsink. I'd just fear for overheating. It think it shoudn't be put close to the VCR and DVD player but somewhere well aerated.
Well as for disassembling these things: I admire the people who do this. I couldn't shell out that amount of money to disassembe it and have the risk that I can't put it back togehter. On old hardware okay, but on new it would break my heart.
Actually I think the code looks elegant most of the time, and the error-handling is very robust. It just looks to me that you never saw good Java code. I'm sorry for you, you missed something :-)
Come on, every language has it's inherent problems....and guess what, that is because no language really is perfect.
You don't like introspection? Now, well, I don't use it often either but it is way more flexible to a pointer to method. How do you know what parameters that method use in the specific library that is around? In Java you can at least intercept the fact that a certain method exists or not and handle it accordingly...even perhaps offering a good alternative.
I used to program C++, and I liked it... I switched to Java because I found it interesting. Now perhaps it is time try switch back to C++ for some time and apply everything I learned about good OO.
It's all about bad programmers, not about bad languages.
Crippled? Hmmm, I don't know if that is true. Java in itself is an elegant language which has some limitations due to trying to support such a wide range of platforms transparently. You have to know what you are doing, that is all...but that counts for any language.
Java code runs fast (really fast) in a lot of cases, mostly the only thing that "feels" slow is the GUI. You can really enhance responsiveness by including intelligent Threading. You can also avoid creating of throwaway objects, thus limiting Garbage collection.
For the GUI, just don't use Swing if you don't need to... AWT is enough for simple frontends, yes it is not perfect, but it is faster. I suppose it is even possible to write your own native implementation linking to, for example, QT libraries or W32 libraries. Not portable, lot of work, but speed ensure.
Some people tend to forget: using a vitual machine inherently takes some performance, but that is the price to pay for excellent multi-platform support. Note that it's still is better to do test on all the platforms you want to support, but the implementation is done once. Especially when using applications (not applets, because of browsers (non)support ), mult-platform Java applications tend to work astonishingly well in my experience.
The only *real* benchmark, of course, is Bogomips! ;-)
Ehm...was there that much nudity in that movie? Frankly, we watched it recently with the whole family and I did not feel uncomfortable one second...nor did my mom. There is worse stuff on cable TV, I think.
How do you fit W98 and Mandrake Linux on a 40 Megabyte harddisk? I never managed ;-)
Well, I have a 5 year old Toshiba, and the disto I use (older laptop, small harddisk) is Peanut Linux . Everything works, XFree86, sound, network PCMCIA card and modem PCMCIA card. Give it a try. I ditched KOffice and parts of KDE2 (well, most of it, not everything) because it's too heavy for my laptop, but with WindowMaker it works fine.
My only laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 210CT, which is a P120 with 32Meg RAM and it has CD-Rom and 1.3 Gig harddisk and TFT 800x*600 screen (2 dead pixels). I use this machine more than my "big" desktop machine. It does basic surfing and email with WindowMaker (browser:Opera), so I guess doing emacs on console shouldn't be a problem at all. Okay, compile time (I suppose you develop C/C++) could take a while but everyone needs a good coffee/tea/mountain dew-break once in a while.
Hey, don't be pessimistic...I agree on this one! :-)
Note aside: it was really hard not to answer all your sentences ending with a question mark... I just asumed they were rethorical and don't need answering, your mind is set anyway and so is mine. Future will tell who was right, don't you think?
Well in that case, the virtual realm would need a own law...and I propose the common subset of all laws of all countries :-)
The problem is that current laws (in any country) are not yet ready for real international entities, nor are countries around the world ready to cope with real initernational laws. Even most multinational companies can be traced back to a country (harbouring the HQ) and/or define the "responsible courts" in case of dispute in contracts. I think it's a complete mess, but then I like clearly defined things, and law is in no way such a thing.
Now, from a terrorist point of view attacking a company like MS is not a prime target. How many people are "proud" about Microsoft? Sure, there must be some that take it as the "greatest software company of all". No, as a terrorist you want to stab the soul of the country, something that *everyone* can identify with.
Your *only* argument is that it would impact the economy *hard*. Unfortunately for you, the capitalist dogma says that a void in a market will fill in no time. So MS gone means opportunities for other companies. Those will create jobs, the stocks of those companies will soar, clever investors will make tons of money. Since I presume that "retirement funds" are managed by clever investors, the only ones that will get hit are the people retiring within the next 5 years of the catastrophy. It's a toll to pay.
For your argument that "companies in a tight partnership with MS" will go down, well, some will..again, making opportunities for others...others will stay, simply because they will put the workforce behind it to save the company and thus creating jobs. Besides, if Microsoft explodes suddenly, would your Windows 2000, Office 2000 CD's, IIS CD's go stale from one day to the other? I doubt so.
Biological attack: yes of course, anyone would get scared, but *that* is the point of terrorism. The only thing that counts is "bussinness as usual": Do you see pilots sh*t in their pants because some terrorists could hijack the plane and crash it somewhere? Nope, most say they will go on as usual.
Any smallpox attack on a larger company would result in stronger screening of employeess, tighter security in the buildings, etc... Vaccination would reassure employees at least a bit. Let the cowardly go, if they want, not a good choice in the current economy, isn't it? Facing death each time you go to work? The "facing death" part is ridiculous: I face death each morning because I go to work, I might slip over the soap while showering and break my neck, I might skid on the slippery roads on my way to work and crash into a tree, I might fall in an elevator shaft because the elevator malfunctions... Living is facing death, in small probabilities, every day. Now, in your eyes those probabilities have risen for MS employees, in my eyes those probabilities have risen for everyone.
H&M....I don't know if it's true that people stopped eating beef during the crisis. I just think they wanted to show the consumer "look we are doing something", that this implied killing millions of innocent healthy animals is outrageous. Well, I and my whole family didn't stop eating our nice steaks during the H&M crisis. Neither KJD had an impact on our eating habits. Why would it? The problem was identified, and (too extreme) measures taken by authorities...everything is okay. The public always panics easily, but it is so easily soothed. Look it only took a couple of millions of cows to sacrifice. Besides, it is just what your president is doing: soothing the public by attacking Afghanistan, sorry, I mean "the terrorist camps in Afghanistan", because "We are not the enemy of the Afganistani People".
Your only premisse is that the "public" is dumb and uninformed. Probably true, but if it is, just give it another point of attention and you are done. Manipulating people is easy, you know.
Even if ranching is so important to the US economy, do you really think those ranchers are going to sit there and weep. No, they will sit down, weep, wash their tears away and get going like real enterpreneurs.
Look, you don't need terrorists to destabilise a country according to your statements. Yesterday, in Belgium, the national airline went bankrupt. You can imagine that it will make a *lot* unemployed people and that a lot of other industries (travel agencies, cleaning companies, catering services,...) are heavily impacted by the bankrupcy. So it will impact on Belgian economy, sure... This "destabilisation" is caused by incompetent management and it cost about 0$ to cause....only incompetence.
This all, just to prove you that terrorists are just only one new factor that can cause harm to a country.
Now for people hating the US. They probably have a reason, don't you think? Even if the reason is valid (in their eyes), how many will become terrorists? Not many. Probabilities are slim, and that is the whole point. People will die, but that doesn't matter at all...people die every day, that's just because their time had come.
Let's take the single, this would mean that you cannot accurately represent a big number like 221219.7625 (10 digits) in a 32 bit single. Besides an implicit cast from a int (32bit integer) to single (32bit floating point) would generate a warning in any compiler. This last statement just to say that any halfway informed programmer should have had halfway a clue about FP limitations.
Now for the fixed point, I know they have some distinct problems, but I should hit the books again to be specific.
Obviousley, I do not know anything about MP3 decoding, so I stand corrected. As you can see (well I hope), Intel marketing hasn't had too much influence me. :-)
(Didn't I defend fixed point in my original post? Yup, I did...)
Oops, well... ;-)
I didn't have an atlas handy and geography isn't my strong point anyhow. Since I'm European, my uninformed remark is akin to Americans saying that Amsterdam is near Paris. We laugh with you, now you can laugh with me.
I'll be more carefull next time....
1b) Unlikely scenario. Smallpox is indeed very infectious, but there are still large stocks of vaccines. Once the first smallpox victim would be detected, whole Redmond would be vaccined. No fear from then on, thus no MS failing and no stock impact (or just minor).
Honestly I think the above two scenarios were pointless slashdot karmawhoring (including Microsoft for no good reason, I mean)
2) Hoof and mouth disease? I don't want to be picky, but do you know what farmers did 50 years ago when it hit their herd? Well, they isolated sick cows and waited until they died or got well from themselves. Unlike most people think F&M disease can be cured and the massive slaughtering over here in Europe was absolute overkill . I don't know why authorities did it, probably just an extreme measure to contain contagion. Note also that bovine F&M can be transmitted to humans, but it feels like a flu and that's it. No danger at all.
3) Same as above
4) Interesting. Would result in destruction of the tainted crops and importing rice/grain from Asia/Europe. A financial loss, but no global catastrophy. (Bad weather with bad crops can do the same).
Reading your comment, I can only conclude that terrorists did a good job on you: your comment seem scared and paranoid. That's why there is the word "terror" in "terrorist", you know.
Of course fixed point won't help your mpg123 player, because the accuracy and range is not enough with fixed point. Games and MP3 players are however in a different league: games should "look good" (nowadays at least) and all tricks are allowed. MP3 decoding is more like the "sticking back together a fourrier decomposed wave", which sounds quite like what is it: exact maths.
Oh, well...that could be a problem, but it isn't. Simply because at that point they use fixed point for "scientfic calculation". Way back in the days, it was very common to use long or int with a fast library that implemented fixed point. In a stric sense this is not exactly "emulation" of floating point.
I know there are accuracy problems and other limitations, but it has been done and it is most probably enough for this kind of game. I'm pretty sure these guys used this method.
As an example, I would like to state "Mechwarrior" (which some of the screenshots reminded me of), that was completely written in fixed point IIRC. Gorgeous game, back in the days.
I'm posting this from a 5 year old Toshiba laptop: P120/32Meg RAM ( 64Meg swap indeed) running Linux. It does everything I need, and I just don't see a reason replacing the machine. Linux saved one of two years of extra lifetime for that machine, and I saved some cash
Strangely enough a lot of people tell me to buy a new one because it is "obsolete"....those are Windows users, yup, no kidding. Obsolete? I can play MP3's while working (okay, I admit, in mono...)
I didn't even consider trying OpenOffice on this machine....now thanks to your post, I'll give it a shot! I really start to wonder why I bought a huge desktop machine. Besides, that one has 768Meg RAM and Windows 2000 still uses swapspace. I don't know why: it has more than enough memory available. It probably just swaps out some unused DLL's.
My sympathy... :-)
I know that kind of code... I know some parts in my current project littered with it too, luckily I'm *not* responsible for maintaining it. I'm still not quite sure what use it has, but I'm thinking someone wanted to try out creating Exceptions of their own just for the sake of it