Microsoft is clearly pouring a great deal of money into the XBox. A lot of it is, of course, going to nVidia. nVidia in turn, uses this big bag of free money to create a killer 3D accellerator (200 million triangles / second I believe?) for the XBox. Clearly it's unlikely that nVidia would not simultaneously (or a shorttime thereafter the XBox is released) present video card manufacturers with this technology. I also doubt that nVidia would do anything to limit this accellerator by making it DX8 specific. It'll support OpenGL too. (Why wouldn't they support OpenGL? After getting their act together with XF86 support, they're regained the loving affection of the Linux community.) So, after all that wordiness, my point is that we can actually thank Microsoft for helping to fund a truly great product on the part of nVidia. Thanks Bill!
THANK you so very much! You are a life saver! It's a shame that the articles are just scans (or at least from what I've seen of the demo), but still, the quality is so good that OCRing should not be a problem.
A professor of mine as well as myself and a number of other students are doing some indepth research on language and how it changes over time. One of our biggest problems at this point is finding sufficient samples of text data from strict editorial sources, so we have had to resort to using photocopied->scanned->OCR'ed National Geographic articles. However, now that we're moving on to a new phase of the project, we need ten times as much data to realize the accurracy of our results. As of now, sources of digital text are few and far inbetween, with no sources going back very far. Why is it that organizations in our society haven't invested the money and time into, say, digitizing the Library of Congress? I realize it's incredibly expensive and timeconsuming - that's what we discovered, but it would be oh so useful to be able to read publications from a hundred years ago on my web browser. It's also great to see modern material produced by our society being archived, but there's a lot of ancient history that should be put into a format that should last forever as well.
I have a few rebukes to this move. This doesn't shake-up or improve the Palm platform at all. Number one, there are almost no apps available for Palm OS that even use color to begin with. Second, the Dragonball, even at 30MHz, does not have the computing power to take advantage of 65,000 colors. Also, considering the standard resolution of the Palm, you cannot even display half that many colors (approximately 26,000 pixels - I forget the exact dimentions). Being that most apps would use repeated colors for various window widgets and so forth, this increase in colordepth would show no improvement in useablility - and since games typically show a limited number of colors on the display at any one time, why bother? It's a step in the wrong direction. Why not focus on making them smaller (Handsprings are still bigger than my Palm Vx) and cheaper (it still costs the same as my PalmVx did nearly 4 months ago) instead of adding as of yet unneeded features (because if people want something that 'looks' like their PC desktop, they'll probably buy a WinCE device - the rest of us use Palms for pure, serious functionality - not pretty graphics).
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Microsoft is clearly pouring a great deal of money into the XBox. A lot of it is, of course, going to nVidia. nVidia in turn, uses this big bag of free money to create a killer 3D accellerator (200 million triangles / second I believe?) for the XBox. Clearly it's unlikely that nVidia would not simultaneously (or a shorttime thereafter the XBox is released) present video card manufacturers with this technology. I also doubt that nVidia would do anything to limit this accellerator by making it DX8 specific. It'll support OpenGL too. (Why wouldn't they support OpenGL? After getting their act together with XF86 support, they're regained the loving affection of the Linux community.) So, after all that wordiness, my point is that we can actually thank Microsoft for helping to fund a truly great product on the part of nVidia. Thanks Bill!
THANK you so very much! You are a life saver! It's a shame that the articles are just scans (or at least from what I've seen of the demo), but still, the quality is so good that OCRing should not be a problem.
Many, many thanks for your suggestion!
A professor of mine as well as myself and a number of other students are doing some indepth research on language and how it changes over time. One of our biggest problems at this point is finding sufficient samples of text data from strict editorial sources, so we have had to resort to using photocopied->scanned->OCR'ed National Geographic articles. However, now that we're moving on to a new phase of the project, we need ten times as much data to realize the accurracy of our results. As of now, sources of digital text are few and far inbetween, with no sources going back very far. Why is it that organizations in our society haven't invested the money and time into, say, digitizing the Library of Congress? I realize it's incredibly expensive and timeconsuming - that's what we discovered, but it would be oh so useful to be able to read publications from a hundred years ago on my web browser. It's also great to see modern material produced by our society being archived, but there's a lot of ancient history that should be put into a format that should last forever as well.
I have a few rebukes to this move. This doesn't shake-up or improve the Palm platform at all. Number one, there are almost no apps available for Palm OS that even use color to begin with. Second, the Dragonball, even at 30MHz, does not have the computing power to take advantage of 65,000 colors. Also, considering the standard resolution of the Palm, you cannot even display half that many colors (approximately 26,000 pixels - I forget the exact dimentions). Being that most apps would use repeated colors for various window widgets and so forth, this increase in colordepth would show no improvement in useablility - and since games typically show a limited number of colors on the display at any one time, why bother? It's a step in the wrong direction. Why not focus on making them smaller (Handsprings are still bigger than my Palm Vx) and cheaper (it still costs the same as my PalmVx did nearly 4 months ago) instead of adding as of yet unneeded features (because if people want something that 'looks' like their PC desktop, they'll probably buy a WinCE device - the rest of us use Palms for pure, serious functionality - not pretty graphics).