While it might be coincidence, it's a sign that Ewan knew it was coming. Hopefully it won't be too long until we actually see the boards coming out. Something with only half the surface area of even mini-ITX is gonna be fun.
Another option would be to build something on a USB bus - there are controller chips which make working with that feasable as a hobby. Not that I've done it, but it'd be fun...
I used Win3.1 briefly recently when I got a laptop at a thrift store. I don't see the resemblence at all - KDE 3.1 looks *much* more like Windows 95, but with AA fonts and more themability;)
The end result would probably be something akin to Chii in the early eps of Chobits... I can almost imagine it walking around muttering "pantsu... pantsu..." ^_^
Seriously, a program like this would be good, especially given the depressed economy makes engineering projects like this in the private sector untenable. It'd be great if the US could have another Apollo project or two. Instead we get the War on Terror and Enron-ish things... sigh.
Word of mouth spreads a LOT faster than it used to. It means that the movie has to actually be good and/or at least properly entertaining to make it up to the $200-250 million range, which is how it *should* be.
Basically, if you properly market a good movie then it's not going to tank... and good riddence to the practice of pumping up mediocrity with a ton of marketing to get first weekend gross w/o legs.
Unfortunatly Warner Brothers "lost" them. When the last B5 related movie was made all that was available were the models made for the aborted video game.
The other thing about C++ is that most of the sensible concepts in it can be done in regular C anyway. And are - look at the Linux kernel a bit - there are some OO-in-C concepts in there.
Probably even some of the stuff that makes my brain hurt, but it would probably make for ugly code anyway;)
It won't happen all at once - since for a while it'll be cheaper to keep human employees than to buy robotic ones. But with human-level intelligences and the ability to work 24 hours a day w/o distractions, we might all be out of jobs:P
Kinda spooky thinking we might have Persocoms in 40-50 years or so... chii!
- testing/unstable *does* have fresh software, and reasonably free of bugs. It has KDE 3.1.2 for instance. (and apt-get can keep testing and unstable straight)
- It works the same way on many, many platforms. I can run the same Linux on my iBook and my x86 boxes, and I only have to remember one way of doing things.
- It has a leaner core installation, which makes it good for setting up firewalls and/or on small hard drives.
- It runs well on old hardware. I'm working on a P133-eleron (no L2 cache) notebook for a friend and it *needs* XFree 3.3.6 to work, and Debian still has that. Heck, I even got KDE running somewhat decently on it. (having 72MB helps)
- Very hackable. Look at Knoppix, which is itself very hackable. My main home 'puter runs Knoppix on a 1GB CF card with an IDE adapter. (It's a tweaked version, but the regular version works on CF too!)
[it's ironic that Knoppix, arguably the easiest type of Linux to get running, is based on Debian which has one of the more complex installers;) ]
... only independants will think of doing this, I bet, but you could put dolby digital 5.1 tracks on a DVD Video disk (no CSS etc) for a pretty reasonable price, and then it'll probably be pirated into mp3's which would be vastly inferior to the original.
The RIAA companies won't do it since they can't put decent enough encryption around it, but it's a great opportunity for independants who could use it to make something that would lose quality when ripped.
Actually the C3 is a newer version of what used to be the Centaur Winchip. VIA shut the Cyrix team(s) down. The chip runs integer code pretty well, but falls behind in FPU. The next version should help with the latter. BTW, the processors are soldered onto these motherboards, they're supposedly somewhat like the VIA EPIA boards, but I haven't seen one yet.
Sounds like what you need then is the Heart of Gold from HHGTG... occupying all points at once sounds infinitely improbable, and the HoG can do just that, so it can definitely go warp 10...
The restrictions have to do with things like HyperZ which are ATI proprietary technology, and S3TC support which has patents held by VIA/S3 which the DRI developers are trying to get permission to support.
XFree 4.3 might be faster than 4.2 - there are optimizations in both the drivers and Mesa which might help. Unfortunately the 7500 is not supported by these new drivers... one of my friends got the Sapphire 7500 (didn't want to spend the money on the 8500 alas) and has the same issue.
The specs are available to developers registered with ATI. I'm not one of 'em. 3dfx only released their specs publicly well after their peak, BTW.
For Radeon cards (up to the 9000 ATM) there are free software DRI drivers as well. They cannot perform as well as these and the Windows drivers because of restrictions on what can be released as source, but they work well on BSD, which the ATI driver's don't do and NVidia didn't do until very recently.
The FreeBSD porter did a good job with the dri-devel tree - it goes through the tedious process of building and installing a new XFree86 DRI setup for you. I was running my 8500 under FreeBSD the same night I installed it, to my pleasant suprise.
You can have both the R200 (8500/9000) and R300 (9500/9700) branches seperate so that optimized code is run for each chip. For all I know it has two totally different drivers for those two families.
The DRI drivers have seperate R100 (original/7x00) and R200 drivers, btw.
The original drivers were for the professional FireGL 8800-type cards only. Then people figured out they could be made to work on the regular 8500 as well, and instead of putting the smack down decided to officially support it as well. Now these new drivers have xvideo and s3tc support so that desktop and gaming users will enjoy them a lot more, and work on 8500-9700 ATI cards. Keep up the good work, and don't forget DRI people too:)
Going up that thread, I have one thought... she would have been soooo much better putting a promise card on her original mobo... especially since it was a Gigabyte 7IXE4 - the *only* all-AMD chipset single-cpu socket a board that I know of.
- Not making a small, widely available motherboard that hobbiests and integrators could just go out and buy. VIA came out with this and there's a whole small scene (mini-itx.com, et al) playing with it. This market could have been Transmetas, but they only recently put out a motherboard for developers that costs ~$600.
- Switching from IBM to TSMC before the latter worked out their.13u production issues. This cost them *a lot* of momentum.
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While it might be coincidence, it's a sign that Ewan knew it was coming. Hopefully it won't be too long until we actually see the boards coming out. Something with only half the surface area of even mini-ITX is gonna be fun.
Another option would be to build something on a USB bus - there are controller chips which make working with that feasable as a hobby. Not that I've done it, but it'd be fun...
Yeah... that time they dumped formula AD into MAE-West realllly messed things up over here. *sigh* ;)
I used Win3.1 briefly recently when I got a laptop at a thrift store. I don't see the resemblence at all - KDE 3.1 looks *much* more like Windows 95, but with AA fonts and more themability ;)
The end result would probably be something akin to Chii in the early eps of Chobits... I can almost imagine it walking around muttering "pantsu... pantsu..." ^_^
Seriously, a program like this would be good, especially given the depressed economy makes engineering projects like this in the private sector untenable. It'd be great if the US could have another Apollo project or two. Instead we get the War on Terror and Enron-ish things... sigh.
Considering Pirates of the Carribean is at about $250mil, and Finding Nemo made ~$320mil, yes, it's bad ;)
Looking at the grosses at IMDB, Pixar has nothing to worry about from this trend...
Word of mouth spreads a LOT faster than it used to. It means that the movie has to actually be good and/or at least properly entertaining to make it up to the $200-250 million range, which is how it *should* be.
Basically, if you properly market a good movie then it's not going to tank... and good riddence to the practice of pumping up mediocrity with a ton of marketing to get first weekend gross w/o legs.
Unfortunatly Warner Brothers "lost" them. When the last B5 related movie was made all that was available were the models made for the aborted video game.
They would be cool to have a copy of though...
The other thing about C++ is that most of the sensible concepts in it can be done in regular C anyway. And are - look at the Linux kernel a bit - there are some OO-in-C concepts in there.
;)
Probably even some of the stuff that makes my brain hurt, but it would probably make for ugly code anyway
If you look at the NIC pictures on the web, you'll see why they have such a high failure rate - they were made by PC (Cow) Chips!
It won't happen all at once - since for a while it'll be cheaper to keep human employees than to buy robotic ones. But with human-level intelligences and the ability to work 24 hours a day w/o distractions, we might all be out of jobs :P
Kinda spooky thinking we might have Persocoms in 40-50 years or so... chii!
- testing/unstable *does* have fresh software, and reasonably free of bugs. It has KDE 3.1.2 for instance. (and apt-get can keep testing and unstable straight)
;) ]
- It works the same way on many, many platforms. I can run the same Linux on my iBook and my x86 boxes, and I only have to remember one way of doing things.
- It has a leaner core installation, which makes it good for setting up firewalls and/or on small hard drives.
- It runs well on old hardware. I'm working on a P133-eleron (no L2 cache) notebook for a friend and it *needs* XFree 3.3.6 to work, and Debian still has that. Heck, I even got KDE running somewhat decently on it. (having 72MB helps)
- Very hackable. Look at Knoppix, which is itself very hackable. My main home 'puter runs Knoppix on a 1GB CF card with an IDE adapter. (It's a tweaked version, but the regular version works on CF too!)
[it's ironic that Knoppix, arguably the easiest type of Linux to get running, is based on Debian which has one of the more complex installers
Basically, it's what works for me.
The RIAA companies won't do it since they can't put decent enough encryption around it, but it's a great opportunity for independants who could use it to make something that would lose quality when ripped.
Amen to that, the taiwanese/chinese super I/O cards were usually the least reliable parts of a system... sigh.
The Lycoris version is a lot better, as Lycoris comes with things you have to pay the Lindows people for. And it dosen't make you run as root :)
Actually the C3 is a newer version of what used to be the Centaur Winchip. VIA shut the Cyrix team(s) down.
The chip runs integer code pretty well, but falls behind in FPU. The next version should help with the latter.
BTW, the processors are soldered onto these motherboards, they're supposedly somewhat like the VIA EPIA boards, but I haven't seen one yet.
I don't have links... but the Mesa 4.1 branch is set to be merged into dri trunk this weekend, which may make things a bit faster.
Sounds like what you need then is the Heart of Gold from HHGTG... occupying all points at once sounds infinitely improbable, and the HoG can do just that, so it can definitely go warp 10...
Ooops, I meant to say the 7500 is not suported by the proprietary drivers. It will still be supported by DRI in 4.3.
The restrictions have to do with things like HyperZ which are ATI proprietary technology, and S3TC support which has patents held by VIA/S3 which the DRI developers are trying to get permission to support.
XFree 4.3 might be faster than 4.2 - there are optimizations in both the drivers and Mesa which might help. Unfortunately the 7500 is not supported by these new drivers... one of my friends got the Sapphire 7500 (didn't want to spend the money on the 8500 alas) and has the same issue.
The specs are available to developers registered with ATI. I'm not one of 'em. 3dfx only released their specs publicly well after their peak, BTW.
For Radeon cards (up to the 9000 ATM) there are free software DRI drivers as well. They cannot perform as well as these and the Windows drivers because of restrictions on what can be released as source, but they work well on BSD, which the ATI driver's don't do and NVidia didn't do until very recently.
The FreeBSD porter did a good job with the dri-devel tree - it goes through the tedious process of building and installing a new XFree86 DRI setup for you. I was running my 8500 under FreeBSD the same night I installed it, to my pleasant suprise.
You can have both the R200 (8500/9000) and R300 (9500/9700) branches seperate so that optimized code is run for each chip. For all I know it has two totally different drivers for those two families.
The DRI drivers have seperate R100 (original/7x00) and R200 drivers, btw.
The original drivers were for the professional FireGL 8800-type cards only. Then people figured out they could be made to work on the regular 8500 as well, and instead of putting the smack down decided to officially support it as well. Now these new drivers have xvideo and s3tc support so that desktop and gaming users will enjoy them a lot more, and work on 8500-9700 ATI cards. Keep up the good work, and don't forget DRI people too :)
Going up that thread, I have one thought... she would have been soooo much better putting a promise card on her original mobo... especially since it was a Gigabyte 7IXE4 - the *only* all-AMD chipset single-cpu socket a board that I know of.
- Not making a small, widely available motherboard that hobbiests and integrators could just go out and buy. VIA came out with this and there's a whole small scene (mini-itx.com, et al) playing with it. This market could have been Transmetas, but they only recently put out a motherboard for developers that costs ~$600.
.13u production issues. This cost them *a lot* of momentum.
- Switching from IBM to TSMC before the latter worked out their