I did say combo file. It's especially bad when gradients are partially transparent and cover a bitmap. And the color calibration has to convert all bitmaps anyway, adding to processor and memory overhead.
So LockheedMartinSucksSucks.com would not be found confusingly similar to LockheedMartinSucks.com, while guinness-really-sucks-really-sucks.com would be found similar to guinness-really-sucks.com?
Nevermind, no coffee yet -- ah, the chocolate covered espresso beans, now I'm better.
BTW, it took us about 5 hours to get that file to print at a print shop down at LWE
Exactly how old is their equipment? Modern wide format printers can print several square meters per hour, and I've ripped 250+MB combined CMYK bitmap and vector files (with meshed CMYK gradients and other complicated goodies) on a Fiery ZX in under 10 minutes.
In any case, compress that thing before sending since vector PS files compress quite well.
As soon as Attorney General Ashcroft is in charge, there will be a sweet settlement with a light slap on MS's wrist (see Salon article -- they have a good point).
I don't know what to think of this guy. Okay, right-winger puritan, but for privacy and reduced government interference, pro free speech but believes in severe restrictions when the speech is against his puritanical bent.
I'll check the DU training slides I have at work. I don't think they're classified or "For Official Use Only" (although as soon as you start getting into this kind of stuff, things do tend to get classified, whether they need to be or not). I'm sure I can post the relevant info.
NATO's use of DU(Depleted Uranium) based weapons is deplorable
Don't believe the hype. I used to be in an M1A1 Heavy tank brigade. It is a very low level of radiation in those rounds that is only dispersed in a small amount of breathable form such as particles when the round hits something. If you were in what got hit, you're probably already dead, and if you go near something that just got hit, are you fucking insane? I've seen burning tanks after a hit -- STAY AWAY.
I know, from a reliable source, of a tank that got a non-deadly hit from a DU round (butt-shot disables, but doesn't usually kill). The geiger counter registered radiation around the hit, but nothing close to dangerous levels. You probably saw worse in your high school science classes.
Remember, it's depleted uranium. Might as well get everyone paranoid and tell them that the tank armor itself is partially made of DU.
I could go on with the technical details of DU rounds, but that would get to be a kind of long post. Tell me if you want it.
Anyway, ensuring color consistancy on all platforms has been solved a while ago.
heh heh... ha ha... HA HA HA HA
Whew, haven't had a good laugh like that in a while. Across platforms, with rooms with different lighting at different times of the day (the sun moves), people with different color perception, monitor phosphor aging, etc? That's funny.
From what I remember, Carbonized apps can do SMP, just in a different way than Cocoa or Java apps. Even if your app isn't specifically written to use SMP, you'll still get a benefit because the system housekeeping will be done on the other processor, plus many of the system libraries you call from your Carbonized app are in themselves multithreaded and SMP capable.
The whole Classic system, including apps running in it, works on one processor only, but you do get better system response because again because of the housekeeping done on the other processor.
So, basically no matter what your software situation is, you will get better system response in OS X with SMP.
The Iraq situation is quite debatable, and that site is a good little propaganda outlet.
I still remember the WBAI Clinton interview (go to 2600). He got quite pissed when confronted with this issue. Apparently, Iraq has more income now than before the invasion, and it isn't getting to the people. The holes in the sanctions are huge, especially going by truck through neighboring friendly countries, so he could buy what his people needed if he wanted to.
Let's see, leave your own people without medical attention to make a political point? I wouldn't put that past him. Remember, this is the guy who moved military forces into hospitals and schools during the war so there'd be less chance we hit them (and if we do hit them, who cares? Better PR for Saddam).
The early T-55 series has basically no electronics if you don't count the starter motor. But later versions are fairly loaded with vulnerable electronic fire control systems, just like the M1. Most modern tanks are.
Anyway, if an EMP could take out an M1's heavily shielded electronics, it'd mainly be taking out targeting and imaging (night-vision) equipment. I still wouldn't want to go up against one.
To be fair, the probable amount of people that it will effect is relatively small, and even if you do want two monitors, most companies are just using the Matrox G450
I can't agree with that. The PIV is marketed (and indeed seems only to be good for) graphics and video. This market segment relies heavily on two monitor configurations, and the G400/450 isn't always the card we want.
And for video production, which is the PIV's strongpoint, I guess the Matrox RT2000 (an excellent low-cost real time video production & digitizing card) is out. It uses the dual head G400 as the base video card, but you can only do video editing with it in single-monitor mode (plus a TV screen). To edit video with dual screens, which makes it much easier, you MUST get another G400 video card on the PCI bus. And you're out of luck with the PIV.
Read the 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 paperbacks and check out the author's notes. Clarke talks about various predictions he made that later explorations either confirmed or established the plausibility of them.
Also, the screenplay and book for 2001 were written at the same time, and while Kubrick did direct, the movie was a very close Kubrick/Clarke collaboration.
And don't forget that, as is usual in the case, Clarke was laughed at for his geosynchronous communications satellite idea. Maybe he should have patented it?
I used to program for the Atari 8-bits. It is plenty fast enough to do what they want it to do, and those joystick ports are extremely easy to program for. In fact the 6502 was very easy to program for in general if you don't mind only having two registers and an accumulator.
As far as replacement equipment goes, you can pick up a replacement 800XL (or 400, 800 or any of the XL or XE series, depending on the program's memory requirements) for less than $10 on e-Bay. $100 for some Intel equipment is a little pricey for a Czech hospital.
The only thing I don't understand is why they use a cassette player instead of a disk drive (a few $ on e-Bay). My only guess is that's the way DoDDS-Europe donated it and they never looked any further. I was part of donations of military equipment to hospitals former east bloc countries in the early 90s, and that is how it often went (no jokes about why hospitals need tanks, the military here had beaucoup excess medical and other equipment after the drawdown).
Atari trivia: did anyone else notice that the first Terminator's POV vision had 6502 assembler getting listed down the right side?
SMP isn't just for servers. Don't use Photoshop much?
Or, try and start printing what will be a 400MB PostScript file and wish you had a dual processor system so the OS can run the print engine on one processor while you use the other one to keep working.
Na, Oliver Wendell Jones used a Bananna Junior (parody of the original Mac). It's still the funniest strip ever -- "Olive loaf mime whacker" that's deranged.
Whenever something is happening in the news, I always wonder what take Berke Breathed would do on it in Bloom County. With Pat Buchannan hijacking the Reform Party, I wonder who would be hijacking the Meadow Party right now.
Re:Of modems and other things...
on
Patent Warfare
·
· Score: 1
IIRC, Zmodem didn't compress, and it may have been after '91 (not sure on the dates). But long before this patent, I was downloading 3D raytracing GIFs and Monty Python WAVs from BBSs that zipped them before transmitting with Xmodem, and my terminal program unzipped them for me.
Since their files were in a database (hell, an indexed CD can be considered a database), and there was compression and decompression along with the transmission, there's your prior art.
I'm usually telling people to caugh up the prior art when they criticize patents (and they rarely do), and now I'm in the position to provide exactly that, and so are thousands of others.
Crank up your Linux box and run the same Perl script he did and check your results for yourself. Of course, CyberPatrol has probably cleaned out the first 1000 like Bess did, so change the script to run on the second or third 1000.
To date (one month) ZoneAlarm has blocked 139 attempts at unauthorized access.
Only 139? I'm using an analog dialup in Germany (poor me -- no DSL in my area until December) and I get an average of 10-15 hits per day.
Offering DSL or cable to the uneducated masses without at least telling them they should be running at a minimum ZoneAlarm is so fucking irresponsible! If you have a Windows 9x machine on DSL or cable, you're walking naked down Al Gore's Information Superhighway
Read this testimony on electoral college reform. A few votes in the right place can matter, and can swing an election (in this case though, the example is of how the election could swing to the actual loser).
Check out the following items in the story if you don't want to go there:
In the 1916 presidential election, a shift of only 2,000 votes in California would have given Charles EvansHughes the necessary electoral votes to defeat Woodrow Wilson, despite Wilson's half-million vote nationwide
plurality.
In 1948, a shift of only 30,000 votes in three states would have delivered the White House to Governor Dewey, in spite of the fact that he trailed President Truman by some 2.1 million popular votes.
In 1960, a shift of only 13,000 votes in five states (5,000 in Illinois, 5,000 in Missouri, 1,200 in New Mexico, 1,300 in Nevada and 200 in Hawaii) would have made Richard Nixon president.
In 1968, a shift of 42,000 votes in three states (Alaska, Missouri and New Jersey) would have denied Nixon an electoral college victory and thrown the election into the House of Representatives.
In 1976, a shift of only 9,300 votes (5,600 from Ohio and 3,700 from Hawaii) would have elected Gerald Ford, even though he trailed Jimmy Carter in the popular vote by 1.6 million ballots.
/.ers are always screaming for the government to stop trying to legislate things it doesn't understand or has no business in, like the 'net, encryption, etc. Therefore, it's a wonder we don't all vote for the only party interested in removing government interference in our lives -- Libertarian.
I know they're pretty extreme in their desire to dismantle the government, but we need that extreme to counter the extreme of the two current big-government parties, especially to counter a possible Ralph (government control to the max) Nader-influenced government.
In the past, you could send an anonymous letter exposing what a company or the government is doing. This is necessary for accountability because people can "blow the whistle" without fear of retribution, which history shows can be quite severe, thus our current ineffective whistleblower laws.
You also can publish a book anonymously.
Some are simply hoping that these rights can be removed from the new electronic media before a history there is firmly established.
Sometimes you just have to use what they use at work for at least one machine. Besides, my beloved Id shoot-em-ups only recently became available on other platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
I did say combo file. It's especially bad when gradients are partially transparent and cover a bitmap. And the color calibration has to convert all bitmaps anyway, adding to processor and memory overhead.
So LockheedMartinSucksSucks.com would not be found confusingly similar to LockheedMartinSucks.com, while guinness-really-sucks-really-sucks.com would be found similar to guinness-really-sucks.com?
Nevermind, no coffee yet -- ah, the chocolate covered espresso beans, now I'm better.
BTW, it took us about 5 hours to get that file to print at a print shop down at LWE
Exactly how old is their equipment? Modern wide format printers can print several square meters per hour, and I've ripped 250+MB combined CMYK bitmap and vector files (with meshed CMYK gradients and other complicated goodies) on a Fiery ZX in under 10 minutes.
In any case, compress that thing before sending since vector PS files compress quite well.
As soon as Attorney General Ashcroft is in charge, there will be a sweet settlement with a light slap on MS's wrist (see Salon article -- they have a good point).
I don't know what to think of this guy. Okay, right-winger puritan, but for privacy and reduced government interference, pro free speech but believes in severe restrictions when the speech is against his puritanical bent.
Ah, forget it, can't be any worse than Reno.
I'll check the DU training slides I have at work. I don't think they're classified or "For Official Use Only" (although as soon as you start getting into this kind of stuff, things do tend to get classified, whether they need to be or not). I'm sure I can post the relevant info.
NATO's use of DU(Depleted Uranium) based weapons is deplorable
Don't believe the hype. I used to be in an M1A1 Heavy tank brigade. It is a very low level of radiation in those rounds that is only dispersed in a small amount of breathable form such as particles when the round hits something. If you were in what got hit, you're probably already dead, and if you go near something that just got hit, are you fucking insane? I've seen burning tanks after a hit -- STAY AWAY.
I know, from a reliable source, of a tank that got a non-deadly hit from a DU round (butt-shot disables, but doesn't usually kill). The geiger counter registered radiation around the hit, but nothing close to dangerous levels. You probably saw worse in your high school science classes.
Remember, it's depleted uranium. Might as well get everyone paranoid and tell them that the tank armor itself is partially made of DU.
I could go on with the technical details of DU rounds, but that would get to be a kind of long post. Tell me if you want it.
Anyway, ensuring color consistancy on all platforms has been solved a while ago.
heh heh... ha ha... HA HA HA HA
Whew, haven't had a good laugh like that in a while. Across platforms, with rooms with different lighting at different times of the day (the sun moves), people with different color perception, monitor phosphor aging, etc? That's funny.
From what I remember, Carbonized apps can do SMP, just in a different way than Cocoa or Java apps. Even if your app isn't specifically written to use SMP, you'll still get a benefit because the system housekeeping will be done on the other processor, plus many of the system libraries you call from your Carbonized app are in themselves multithreaded and SMP capable.
The whole Classic system, including apps running in it, works on one processor only, but you do get better system response because again because of the housekeeping done on the other processor.
So, basically no matter what your software situation is, you will get better system response in OS X with SMP.
The Iraq situation is quite debatable, and that site is a good little propaganda outlet.
I still remember the WBAI Clinton interview (go to 2600). He got quite pissed when confronted with this issue. Apparently, Iraq has more income now than before the invasion, and it isn't getting to the people. The holes in the sanctions are huge, especially going by truck through neighboring friendly countries, so he could buy what his people needed if he wanted to.
Let's see, leave your own people without medical attention to make a political point? I wouldn't put that past him. Remember, this is the guy who moved military forces into hospitals and schools during the war so there'd be less chance we hit them (and if we do hit them, who cares? Better PR for Saddam).
The early T-55 series has basically no electronics if you don't count the starter motor. But later versions are fairly loaded with vulnerable electronic fire control systems, just like the M1. Most modern tanks are.
Anyway, if an EMP could take out an M1's heavily shielded electronics, it'd mainly be taking out targeting and imaging (night-vision) equipment. I still wouldn't want to go up against one.
To be fair, the probable amount of people that it will effect is relatively small, and even if you do want two monitors, most companies are just using the Matrox G450
I can't agree with that. The PIV is marketed (and indeed seems only to be good for) graphics and video. This market segment relies heavily on two monitor configurations, and the G400/450 isn't always the card we want.
And for video production, which is the PIV's strongpoint, I guess the Matrox RT2000 (an excellent low-cost real time video production & digitizing card) is out. It uses the dual head G400 as the base video card, but you can only do video editing with it in single-monitor mode (plus a TV screen). To edit video with dual screens, which makes it much easier, you MUST get another G400 video card on the PCI bus. And you're out of luck with the PIV.
Read the 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 paperbacks and check out the author's notes. Clarke talks about various predictions he made that later explorations either confirmed or established the plausibility of them.
Also, the screenplay and book for 2001 were written at the same time, and while Kubrick did direct, the movie was a very close Kubrick/Clarke collaboration.
And don't forget that, as is usual in the case, Clarke was laughed at for his geosynchronous communications satellite idea. Maybe he should have patented it?
Actually, this is the only movie I can think of that got it right. See James Oberg's page on space myths and scroll down to "Blow Up."
I used to program for the Atari 8-bits. It is plenty fast enough to do what they want it to do, and those joystick ports are extremely easy to program for. In fact the 6502 was very easy to program for in general if you don't mind only having two registers and an accumulator.
As far as replacement equipment goes, you can pick up a replacement 800XL (or 400, 800 or any of the XL or XE series, depending on the program's memory requirements) for less than $10 on e-Bay. $100 for some Intel equipment is a little pricey for a Czech hospital.
The only thing I don't understand is why they use a cassette player instead of a disk drive (a few $ on e-Bay). My only guess is that's the way DoDDS-Europe donated it and they never looked any further. I was part of donations of military equipment to hospitals former east bloc countries in the early 90s, and that is how it often went (no jokes about why hospitals need tanks, the military here had beaucoup excess medical and other equipment after the drawdown).
Atari trivia: did anyone else notice that the first Terminator's POV vision had 6502 assembler getting listed down the right side?
SMP isn't just for servers. Don't use Photoshop much?
Or, try and start printing what will be a 400MB PostScript file and wish you had a dual processor system so the OS can run the print engine on one processor while you use the other one to keep working.
Graphics work loves dual processors.
Na, Oliver Wendell Jones used a Bananna Junior (parody of the original Mac). It's still the funniest strip ever -- "Olive loaf mime whacker" that's deranged.
Whenever something is happening in the news, I always wonder what take Berke Breathed would do on it in Bloom County. With Pat Buchannan hijacking the Reform Party, I wonder who would be hijacking the Meadow Party right now.
IIRC, Zmodem didn't compress, and it may have been after '91 (not sure on the dates). But long before this patent, I was downloading 3D raytracing GIFs and Monty Python WAVs from BBSs that zipped them before transmitting with Xmodem, and my terminal program unzipped them for me.
Since their files were in a database (hell, an indexed CD can be considered a database), and there was compression and decompression along with the transmission, there's your prior art.
I'm usually telling people to caugh up the prior art when they criticize patents (and they rarely do), and now I'm in the position to provide exactly that, and so are thousands of others.
This has got to be a troll, right?
Crank up your Linux box and run the same Perl script he did and check your results for yourself. Of course, CyberPatrol has probably cleaned out the first 1000 like Bess did, so change the script to run on the second or third 1000.
To date (one month) ZoneAlarm has blocked 139 attempts at unauthorized access.
Only 139? I'm using an analog dialup in Germany (poor me -- no DSL in my area until December) and I get an average of 10-15 hits per day.
Offering DSL or cable to the uneducated masses without at least telling them they should be running at a minimum ZoneAlarm is so fucking irresponsible! If you have a Windows 9x machine on DSL or cable, you're walking naked down Al Gore's Information Superhighway
Read this testimony on electoral college reform. A few votes in the right place can matter, and can swing an election (in this case though, the example is of how the election could swing to the actual loser).
Check out the following items in the story if you don't want to go there:
/.ers are always screaming for the government to stop trying to legislate things it doesn't understand or has no business in, like the 'net, encryption, etc. Therefore, it's a wonder we don't all vote for the only party interested in removing government interference in our lives -- Libertarian.
I know they're pretty extreme in their desire to dismantle the government, but we need that extreme to counter the extreme of the two current big-government parties, especially to counter a possible Ralph (government control to the max) Nader-influenced government.
I'd love to see the source for that.
Even if they did have a contract, they could probably get out of it due to non-delivery of faster chips by Moto.
In the past, you could send an anonymous letter exposing what a company or the government is doing. This is necessary for accountability because people can "blow the whistle" without fear of retribution, which history shows can be quite severe, thus our current ineffective whistleblower laws.
You also can publish a book anonymously.
Some are simply hoping that these rights can be removed from the new electronic media before a history there is firmly established.
Sometimes you just have to use what they use at work for at least one machine. Besides, my beloved Id shoot-em-ups only recently became available on other platforms.
Who else thinks this is the first step towards the societal "genetic discrimination" concept put forth in Gattica?
Obviously our friendly /. people, since the initial post is "from the GATTACA dept."