Now that computers are becoming more popular, the meaning of the terms megabyte and kilobyte are shifting back to compatibility with normal English usage.
I don't think that normal English is consistent here. Why do you say "a ton" instead of "a megagram"?
Words are defined by usage. Specific, technical words (as "megabytes") can have a different meaning than the common-sense one.
How many people here know that "gigabytes" is actually supposed to be pronounced "jigabytes"? Many I would presume, but that would be 0.0001% of the world. "a hundred jigs" just sounds so ridiculous now.
That's funny... in Italy the correct sound for "gigabytes" is exactly the (English) ridiculous way. Saying "giga" with a hard "g" would have everyone ROTFL.
By the way, the population is about 0.9% of the world:-)
Otherwise think of people in Europe paying $120 a month for 64Kbps "cable" with a cap on download.
Which part of Europe are you talking about? I'm in Italy (hardly the most advanced country here) and I pay about $40/month for 640Kbps down / 128Kpbs up DSL , unlimited download. That's what is written on the contract, but I often get 1Mbps downloads.
That's my previous contract. The current one is $30/month for only 320Kbps, but download speed seem to be uncapped as well, since I hit 900Kbps all the time.
This story is spreading out bigtime. It was on the front page of the Internet site of a major Italian newspaper, just between the Argentina crisis and the euro/lira switch. No doubt it will take an entire page on the paper version as well
The force of gravity effectively propogates instantly
Gravity propagates at the speed of light. If you knocked the Sun away with a big hammer, the Earth would continue to orbit around it for 8 minutes, before noticing something strange.
The automatic creation/destruction of screens on an as-needed basis, the persistence of the application associations with particular screens, and the ability to name each screen, tend to be missing from X window managers. You flicked between screens by clicking the top-right hand corner of the screen, and you could drag them up and down to partially expose screens behind.
This is another great feature of the Amiga that used directly the hardware: the OS painted multiple screens on the same monitor changing the screen pointer in the middle of the refresh. Fast and reliable, if you have a specialized hardware. Emulating this on a PC is difficult, because when you move a screen you have to repaint everything in sight. Ouch.
(anyway, I still DON'T UNDERSTAND how GeForces and co. are not able to blit some megs of memory fast enough).
If you do it the with the "2D platformer scrolling" method, then it should be fast enough ('cmon , if it was fast enough on my Amiga years ago, a 1GHz PeeCee should be able to cope...):
Basically,
On the Amiga was fast, because scrolling the entire screen required exactly *one* memory write (to the horizontal/vertical "screen address", let's say). The hardware did everything else for you.
Thus, making 2D scrollers was easy: scroll 1 pixel, paint just 1 tile in the hidden area, using a little amount of CPU. Scroll another 1 pixel, paint another tile. By the time you have scrolled dx pixels (where dx is the x size of the tile), you will start to see the new tiles, and you begin to paint a new hidden column. You need a buffer twice the size of the screen + 1 column.
Actually, I don't use Windows at all (I'm a UNIX person), so I don't know, but I've never seen Visual Studio or Word running with anything but a white background... is it even possible to change this?
Yes, it's possible. My Win98 has gray backgrounds on every application.
You can change screen colors from the Display settings in the Control panel. Actually, it's a very detailed customizer where you can change the color and the size of most widgets.
However, back in the real world, I'm now ripping MP3's (at 12x speed+), running Seti@home at full speed (realtime priority, just for fun), surfing the web, and running Komodo/Mozilla, and still only running at 70% CPU usage... it's not like I need more power right now! q:]
Something is wrong, here: Seti@home should take ALL processor cycles not used by other applications. My CPU is at 99.5% since months (the.5% less must be the Windows scheduler not-so-state-of-the-art, on Linux it's more like 99.9%)
Re:Corporate Thinking or Public Service?
on
J#
·
· Score: 1
So maybe Microsoft didn't kill Unix after all, but Microsoft and Linux together sure might.;)
Strictly speaking, they cannot: Linux is a Unix operating system, so if Solaris, AIX etc. disappear replaced by Linux, you still have lots of Unix servers.
Re:Interesting also is that i86 is WAY ahead...
on
Netcraft Survey Updated
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What if next time the virus is a nifty I86 Assembly worm ?
Writing a worm in x86 assembly does not mean that you have an OS-independent worm.
Every worm needs a method to infect other hosts, and the only way is to exploit known vulnerabilities in legit services - ie, you are using applications' (IIS, Apache, bind, sendmail) and operating system's (Windows, Linux, Solaris) services to infect the host. The reason is that, on a network, you are not talking directly to the processor like you do with a local process. You are talking with software layers that manage your connection.
After you have unscrewed the software protections, you make your payload execute on the target host, using a nifty x86 assembly snipped designed to gain privileges. But this is still dependent on the OS.
In fact, many old-fashioned viruses (infected disks,.EXEs etc.) are written in pure x86 assembly. But they still are OS-specific.
I don't know if it's a good thing that a mp3 streaming service is slapped down. But it's a Good Thing (tm) that Universal was stopped replicating mp3.com, after that the same company claimed high damages from it. Consider this sequence of events:
MP3.com starts streaming, high complaints from label records (including Universal)
label records (including Universal) sue the shit off MP3.com
Universal starts Farmclub.com, Also Know As MP3.com 2
Now what we do with Farmclub?
I believe that the court decision is right. You cannot start a service after you sued an identical service out of business (the court reasoning is different, btw...)
UAE is released under the GPL, and full source is available.
Fot the amiga hardware details, I don't know any web sites with details. I have the Amiga Hardware Manual at home, which explains almost everything. I googled out this reference: amigarealm which seems to have the complete book online, on.txt format. The book looks more pretty:-)
Re:Hmmm.... where have I seen this before?
on
NVidia nForce Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is interesting to note that the blitting capabilities of an Amiga can be emulated in software on a 486 and still be significantly faster than the Amiga hardware. It wasn't _that_ fast.
The Blitter, yes, that can be emulated in realtime. But the Copper, it's an entirely different story.
The Copper (it stands for CoProcessor) was a very simple processor, that executed simple statements trigged by the SCANLINE POSITION of the monitor!!! With the bang-the-hardware programming model typical of the Amiga, you could do some terrific tricks without ANY main processor overhead:
- at position 10,30 change the background color from black to yellow
- at line 125, change SCREEN RESOLUTION (!!) from low-res to hi-res
...and so on
It was widely used for graphical demos. I had UAE (an Amiga Emulator) installed on my K6-2 300Mhz, and some scenes of "State of the Art" couldn't go faster than 9 fps (they were 50fps on a 7Mhz Amiga). I didn't try on my 850Mhz Duron...
There are a number of good things about the P4's new instruction set and architecture like 128 integer and 128 floating point registers, not to mention making use of predication and data speculation at the hardware level.
You are talking about the Itanium (IA64)!
The P4 is a strictly x86 architecture, designed to reach crazy clockspeeds (hence the long pipeline).
The most interesting thing about the P4, speaking of chip architecture, is the trace cache. Basically, the L1 instruction cache is replaced by a micro-op cache, saving two or three pipeline stages and some silicon (the three x86 decoders in the Athlon are VERY complex and play a big role in achieving its performance. Something like a trace cache would benefit a lot, IMHO).
Slashdot Mirror
On sourceforge:
http://flac.sourceforge.net
Now that computers are becoming more popular, the meaning of the terms megabyte and kilobyte are shifting back to compatibility with normal English usage.
I don't think that normal English is consistent here. Why do you say "a ton" instead of "a megagram"?
Words are defined by usage. Specific, technical words (as "megabytes") can have a different meaning than the common-sense one.
How many people here know that "gigabytes" is actually supposed to be pronounced "jigabytes"? Many I would presume, but that would be 0.0001% of the world. "a hundred jigs" just sounds so ridiculous now.
:-)
That's funny... in Italy the correct sound for "gigabytes" is exactly the (English) ridiculous way. Saying "giga" with a hard "g" would have everyone ROTFL.
By the way, the population is about 0.9% of the world
Dude, 375kbps means "375 kiloBIT per second", no need to multiply by 8.
Otherwise think of people in Europe paying $120 a month for 64Kbps "cable" with a cap on download.
Which part of Europe are you talking about? I'm in Italy (hardly the most advanced country here) and I pay about $40/month for 640Kbps down / 128Kpbs up DSL , unlimited download. That's what is written on the contract, but I often get 1Mbps downloads.
That's my previous contract. The current one is $30/month for only 320Kbps, but download speed seem to be uncapped as well, since I hit 900Kbps all the time.
Actually, the Drake equation is useless to calculate how many civilizations are in the Galaxy, simply because many of its parameters are unknown.
It's mainly intended as a framework for discussions about SETI topics.
How are *users* supposed to know about this?
This story is spreading out bigtime. It was on the front page of the Internet site of a major Italian newspaper, just between the Argentina crisis and the euro/lira switch. No doubt it will take an entire page on the paper version as well
The force of gravity effectively propogates instantly
Gravity propagates at the speed of light. If you knocked the Sun away with a big hammer, the Earth would continue to orbit around it for 8 minutes, before noticing something strange.
Or for a matter of fact Microsoft, whose Windows NT powers US Navy submarines, that potentially can be used to destroy lives as well?
That's dangerous for the submarines only.
being able to advance science be it math or cancer
:-)
That's a kind of science that I didn't know about
The automatic creation/destruction of screens on an as-needed basis, the persistence of the application associations with particular screens, and the ability to name each screen, tend to be missing from X window managers. You flicked between screens by clicking the top-right hand corner of the screen, and you could drag them up and down to partially expose screens behind.
This is another great feature of the Amiga that used directly the hardware: the OS painted multiple screens on the same monitor changing the screen pointer in the middle of the refresh. Fast and reliable, if you have a specialized hardware. Emulating this on a PC is difficult, because when you move a screen you have to repaint everything in sight. Ouch.
(anyway, I still DON'T UNDERSTAND how GeForces and co. are not able to blit some megs of memory fast enough).
If you do it the with the "2D platformer scrolling" method, then it should be fast enough ('cmon , if it was fast enough on my Amiga years ago, a 1GHz PeeCee should be able to cope...):
Basically,
On the Amiga was fast, because scrolling the entire screen required exactly *one* memory write (to the horizontal/vertical "screen address", let's say). The hardware did everything else for you.
Thus, making 2D scrollers was easy: scroll 1 pixel, paint just 1 tile in the hidden area, using a little amount of CPU. Scroll another 1 pixel, paint another tile. By the time you have scrolled dx pixels (where dx is the x size of the tile), you will start to see the new tiles, and you begin to paint a new hidden column. You need a buffer twice the size of the screen + 1 column.
Believe it or not, that would be locked out in a 'locked down' system, especially since that is, after all, part of the registry. :)
Man, I love illinformed folks.
Man, I love people who DO NOT read the posts they answer to.
We were NOT talking about the locking.
Actually, I don't use Windows at all (I'm a UNIX person), so I don't know, but I've never seen Visual Studio or Word running with anything but a white background... is it even possible to change this?
Yes, it's possible. My Win98 has gray backgrounds on every application.
You can change screen colors from the Display settings in the Control panel. Actually, it's a very detailed customizer where you can change the color and the size of most widgets.
Corrected URL:
n ray1.scalability.wp.pdf
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/whitepapers/su
Why IE keeps rendering this with an extra space between "sun" and "ray" ??
I'm sure the next version of RedHat will be based on gcc 3.x, which will break binary compatibility
Break binary compatibility?? Can anyone enlight me on this point?
It could be the first step in "educating" AOL users...
...hmmmmm...
then, after a few years, we geeks we'll thank AOL for taking all the hassle...
The world is a strange place, isn't it?
However, back in the real world, I'm now ripping MP3's (at 12x speed+), running Seti@home at full speed (realtime priority, just for fun), surfing the web, and running Komodo/Mozilla, and still only running at 70% CPU usage... it's not like I need more power right now! q:]
.5% less must be the Windows scheduler not-so-state-of-the-art, on Linux it's more like 99.9%)
Something is wrong, here: Seti@home should take ALL processor cycles not used by other applications. My CPU is at 99.5% since months (the
So maybe Microsoft didn't kill Unix after all, but Microsoft and Linux together sure might. ;)
Strictly speaking, they cannot: Linux is a Unix operating system, so if Solaris, AIX etc. disappear replaced by Linux, you still have lots of Unix servers.
What if next time the virus is a nifty I86 Assembly worm ?
.EXEs etc.) are written in pure x86 assembly. But they still are OS-specific.
Writing a worm in x86 assembly does not mean that you have an OS-independent worm.
Every worm needs a method to infect other hosts, and the only way is to exploit known vulnerabilities in legit services - ie, you are using applications' (IIS, Apache, bind, sendmail) and operating system's (Windows, Linux, Solaris) services to infect the host. The reason is that, on a network, you are not talking directly to the processor like you do with a local process. You are talking with software layers that manage your connection.
After you have unscrewed the software protections, you make your payload execute on the target host, using a nifty x86 assembly snipped designed to gain privileges. But this is still dependent on the OS.
In fact, many old-fashioned viruses (infected disks,
I believe that the court decision is right. You cannot start a service after you sued an identical service out of business (the court reasoning is different, btw...)
You can also use this account:
Username: slash2001
Password: slash2001
Let's see how long it will work, after 1.000 people start using it
Do you have links handy for the UAE emulator (ideally source) and for details of the amiga hardware (ideally complete)?
.txt format. The book looks more pretty :-)
For UAE, you can go here:
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/
UAE is released under the GPL, and full source is available.
Fot the amiga hardware details, I don't know any web sites with details. I have the Amiga Hardware Manual at home, which explains almost everything.
I googled out this reference:
amigarealm which seems to have the complete book online, on
It is interesting to note that the blitting capabilities of an Amiga can be emulated in software on a 486 and still be significantly faster than the Amiga hardware. It wasn't _that_ fast.
...and so on
The Blitter, yes, that can be emulated in realtime. But the Copper, it's an entirely different story.
The Copper (it stands for CoProcessor) was a very simple processor, that executed simple statements trigged by the SCANLINE POSITION of the monitor!!! With the bang-the-hardware programming model typical of the Amiga, you could do some terrific tricks without ANY main processor overhead:
- at position 10,30 change the background color from black to yellow
- at line 125, change SCREEN RESOLUTION (!!) from low-res to hi-res
It was widely used for graphical demos. I had UAE (an Amiga Emulator) installed on my K6-2 300Mhz, and some scenes of "State of the Art" couldn't go faster than 9 fps (they were 50fps on a 7Mhz Amiga). I didn't try on my 850Mhz Duron...
...the new instruction set the P4...
There are a number of good things about the P4's new instruction set and architecture like 128 integer and 128 floating point registers, not to mention making use of predication and data speculation at the hardware level.
You are talking about the Itanium (IA64)!
The P4 is a strictly x86 architecture, designed to reach crazy clockspeeds (hence the long pipeline).
The most interesting thing about the P4, speaking of chip architecture, is the trace cache. Basically, the L1 instruction cache is replaced by a micro-op cache, saving two or three pipeline stages and some silicon (the three x86 decoders in the Athlon are VERY complex and play a big role in achieving its performance. Something like a trace cache would benefit a lot, IMHO).