It wouldn't actually be much cheaper for Microsoft to include the DVD player kit. The entire reason it's a separate kit anyway (and the reason you can't play DVDs with just the stock machine and the controller, like the PS2 can) is because the MPAA / DVD consortium require a licensing fee for selling such a machine, IIRC around $30. Microsoft elected to make the XBox unable to play DVDs by default to avoid this fee and keep the system cost down. They then rolled the licensing fee cost into the cost of the remote.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it's not necessarily cheap.
Peter
Re:The (Hopefully) Great April Fools Blackout
on
CPAN Shifts Focus
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· Score: 1
You're precisely right. Anti-personnel land mines are often designed to (seriously) injure, not kill. Not so much for economic damage, but as a tactical matter - if your buddy gets wounded by a mine, you're going to go help him and not keep up the pursuit, whereas if your buddy gets killed by a mine, you're going to keep pursuing. Plus smaller mines are cheaper.
And how do you get that into your C++ program? What if the guy who originally wrote operator*() made it do dot product because that was the only thing that was needed at the time?
You've somewhat missed my point (unless you're just being pedantic...).
The chief problem I have with operator overloading, and which your example demonstrates nicely, is that it's not always nearly so intuitive. For example:
Matrix a,b,c;
a = b * c;
Now quick, tell me whether that '*' means dot product or cross product? Oh wait, you can't, you have to go find the matrix.cpp file and look it up.
Nevermind what happens when you encounter the line "a=b*c;" in the middle of some code, and it isn't immediately clear what types a, b, and c are.
Basically, operator overloading is a fun toy for the people doing the implementing, and a pain for the people doing the maintaining (which, I probably don't need to tell you, takes more effort than the implementation). Is it really that much more difficult to type "a = b.plus(c);" or "a = b.cross(c);"?
Probably because the 10k drive is just the system drive, that's how they normally come set up. Usually if you actually need beefy storage, you'd either hook up your SCSI RAID tower or hook into your SAN.
Note the option they list for a Fiber Channel card - that'll be a popular option. Too bad for them it's not ready yet....
I don't know about games, but SGIs still get used an awful lot for film and TV. For starters, you can't get enough bandwidth to deal with even HDTV on a PC yet, forget high-res film work. Also, SGIs are fairly optimized for this sort of thing, and talk nicely to all the film/video equipment in the machine room.
There's been some move towards PC-based platforms, especially on the lower end, but just about any major film these days goes through at least an Octane2 before it gets released, if not an Onyx2.
Check your math - 4 * 8 = 32bit, i.e. your PC graphics card does 8 bit per channel for 24/32 bit colour (RGB/RGBA) total. SGI lets you use 12 bits per channel, for a total of 12 * 4 = 48 bits per RGBA pixel.
Of course, sometimes you have to lay out the images at 16 bits per channel, but that's just so memory access is fast - you can't display at that bit depth (nor do you really need to - 48 bits is a lot!)
If by "now" you mean "for the past couple years," then yes:) The Octane2 at least has been doing it for a while - it's a fairly basic requirement for doing special effects for film.
Of course, to get 12bit per channel, you had to shell out for an Octane2, so hopefully this will make it a bit more accessible at least.
The key manufacturing difference is the reduced amount of cache. This cuts down piles of space from the die, saving a decent amount of money. You can see this idea most clearly in the original Celerons, which had no cache at all. However, with no cache performance sucked ass, so they later rejigged the Celeron line to have some cache (Celeron 300A and later).
Peter.
Re:Anyone have a problem with Mozilla and GIF imag
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
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· Score: 1
I get this too, but I've found a couple of workarounds. It seems to only happen when I scroll the page with the arrow keys or the mouse wheel (or sometimes on load); thus, it can be fixed by simply doing a page-down and then page-up, or by right-clicking near the image so the popup menu obscures it - this fixes whatever area was obscured by the popup. It sometimes takes a few clicks, but once you get good it takes fewer:) I do it when I'm feeling too lazy to reach for the keyboard.
Also, sometimes clicking on images fixes the problem, but that obviously doesn't work well for images that have hyperlinks....
No kidding - in Canada, the drinking age is 18-19 (depending on the province), and all I can say is that once I turned legal, I drank a lot less, and a lot less often.
Being able to drink whenever you want really takes away from the illicit thrill....
That's the most depressing part of the whole browser war. Netscape 4 has the world's crappiest renderer (at least out of what's still in use), but they managed to do a very good job with the UI - especially in Windows, it's fast, functional, and responsive.
So if you switch from Netscape 4 to Mozilla, all of a sudden the UI doesn't quite live up (it's getting closer though), and no sites look right either because everyone designed them around NS4's bugs.
Someday when NS4 is a distant horrible memory, we'll all look back and shake our heads....
There's an extraordinarily simple solution to this - standardized exams. No, not the SAT/ACT kind, but honest-to-goodness exams for each subject of importance. Yes, just like your school's final exams, except everyone across the province is taking the same one. It's really not complicated, though I'm not sure how many Canadian provinces are doing it any more.
His whole point was that no matter what anti-aliasing you do, you incur a 4x bandwidth penalty for the simple reason that you're dealing with 4x the data. This method is nice because it avoids the 4x fill rate penalty, and so helps anything that would otherwise be fill-rate limited.
Based on my recent experiences with 4Dwm, here's how to simulate it easily on Linux by using fvwm2.
1. Enlist a friend. Get them to administer a strong kick to your head. This will make you forget about the extensive customizability of fvwm, and stick with changing a small number of useless settings.
2. Get your friend to administer another strong kick to your head. This will mess up your vision so that fvwm's window titles and desktop pager appear very large, taking up a disproportionate amount of the screen. It should also affect your motor control, so you have to click twice to change desktops.
3. A third strong boot to the head may be required to forget all the keyboard shortcuts you have in fvwm. This may have already taken place due to the previous steps.
If you haven't guessed, I've got a favourite between fvwm and 4Dwm....
Check page 47 of that Pentium III datasheet. Table 24 has a column "Processor Thermal Design Power (W)" which they say is the maximum amount of power the thermal solution is required to dissipate - sounds like what we're looking for.
A 500MHz PIII only dissipates a maximum of 13.2 Watts, apparently - that's way lower than I'd have thought. This goes up to about 30W for the 1GHz, which is fairly reasonable since I remember hearing that the PII 400MHz (which was the fastest Intel could make for a long time) drew about 24W. As a comparison point with the G4, the PIII dissipates a maximum of 14W at 533MHz - that's the same as the _average_ for the G4.
Either Intel's a lot better than I thought, or we're comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended) here.
Yeah, it's dirt cheap in Newfoundland ($30/month for cable modem, plus modem rental) - that's because the government gave the cable monopoly huge subsidies to run fiber all across the province. Thus, their infrastructure upgrade was, if not free, a whole freakin' lot less than anyone else had to pay.
This was remarkably farsighted for the government - they did this maybe 4 or 5 years ago, so cable modems have been available for the past 3 years or so. In Newfoundland, of all places. Who'd have thunk it?
Oh yeah, I think they said it was "so hospitals and schools can have broadband connections" or somesuch too...I don't doubt they did that, but I suspect that they don't account for much of the usage....
I use CIBC, and their web banking works great in Linux. I've never tried, but it should work fine in Mac or Lynx - the only requirement is that the browser must support 128-bit SSL. That's a nice touch too, I find. Beyond SSL, it doesn't even require images - there's a few for the header and to make it a bit more visually appealing, but that's it.
Now I don't know about any features that might be missing, or if the rest of CIBC's policies suit you, but the internet banking is certainly no problem - it's how I've paid all my bills for the past year.
>In 2/3 of the WTO countries, the public would >have been severely restricted a priori, if not >having "dissidents" rounded up and jailed weeks >before the meeting.
For any people doubting this statement, check out what happened two years ago (almost exactly) in Vancouver for the APEC summit - protest leaders were arrested before the protest on spurious charges (e.g. "assault with a megaphone", an event which had occurred weeks before); protesters had signs seized and were arrested, since their signs were a "security risk" to the visiting leaders, travelling in motorcades a hundred meters away; protesters were pepper-sprayed for sitting down on a road the APEC leaders were about to travel down; etc. etc.
My point: not much of a coherent one, I guess, except for people (esp. Canadians!) not to expect too much out of their police and politicians, and to point out to people in other countries that yes, it can happen to you too. I mean, who'd have thought it'd happen in Canada, of all places! We're not exactly known for militant police here, all Mountie stereotypes aside. And I suppose, strange as it seems for me to be doing, I should commend the Seattle police for not throwing basic rights to the wind when visiting heads of state show up (though the fact that it needs commendation says something....)
Sorry I don't have any links or references, but CBC Newsworld only seems to keep archives back one year and that, newspapers, and first-hand reports was where I got most of my info.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't actually be much cheaper for Microsoft to include the DVD player kit. The entire reason it's a separate kit anyway (and the reason you can't play DVDs with just the stock machine and the controller, like the PS2 can) is because the MPAA / DVD consortium require a licensing fee for selling such a machine, IIRC around $30. Microsoft elected to make the XBox unable to play DVDs by default to avoid this fee and keep the system cost down. They then rolled the licensing fee cost into the cost of the remote.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it's not necessarily cheap.
Peter
T(H)GAFB will be during April 1 through April 1.
Inclusive?
Peter.
Well, it is surrounded by the ocean, if that counts.
You're precisely right. Anti-personnel land mines are often designed to (seriously) injure, not kill. Not so much for economic damage, but as a tactical matter - if your buddy gets wounded by a mine, you're going to go help him and not keep up the pursuit, whereas if your buddy gets killed by a mine, you're going to keep pursuing. Plus smaller mines are cheaper.
Just another reason why they're so evil....
My favourite was always "Sun No Longer the Dot in Dot Com" when the root name servers switched over to some other vendor's hardware :)
Peter.
And how do you get that into your C++ program? What if the guy who originally wrote operator*() made it do dot product because that was the only thing that was needed at the time?
You've somewhat missed my point (unless you're just being pedantic...).
Peter.
The chief problem I have with operator overloading, and which your example demonstrates nicely, is that it's not always nearly so intuitive. For example:
Matrix a,b,c;
a = b * c;
Now quick, tell me whether that '*' means dot product or cross product? Oh wait, you can't, you have to go find the matrix.cpp file and look it up.
Nevermind what happens when you encounter the line "a=b*c;" in the middle of some code, and it isn't immediately clear what types a, b, and c are.
Basically, operator overloading is a fun toy for the people doing the implementing, and a pain for the people doing the maintaining (which, I probably don't need to tell you, takes more effort than the implementation). Is it really that much more difficult to type "a = b.plus(c);" or "a = b.cross(c);"?
Peter.
If you're really willing to shell out, you could always pick up a copy of Discreet's smoke* :)
Note that smoke* is a professional-grade non-linear film/video editing tool, that happens to have some audio editing features, but it runs on IRIX....
Peter
Probably because the 10k drive is just the system drive, that's how they normally come set up. Usually if you actually need beefy storage, you'd either hook up your SCSI RAID tower or hook into your SAN.
Note the option they list for a Fiber Channel card - that'll be a popular option. Too bad for them it's not ready yet....
Peter.
I don't know about games, but SGIs still get used an awful lot for film and TV. For starters, you can't get enough bandwidth to deal with even HDTV on a PC yet, forget high-res film work. Also, SGIs are fairly optimized for this sort of thing, and talk nicely to all the film/video equipment in the machine room.
There's been some move towards PC-based platforms, especially on the lower end, but just about any major film these days goes through at least an Octane2 before it gets released, if not an Onyx2.
Peter.
Check your math - 4 * 8 = 32bit, i.e. your PC graphics card does 8 bit per channel for 24/32 bit colour (RGB/RGBA) total. SGI lets you use 12 bits per channel, for a total of 12 * 4 = 48 bits per RGBA pixel.
Of course, sometimes you have to lay out the images at 16 bits per channel, but that's just so memory access is fast - you can't display at that bit depth (nor do you really need to - 48 bits is a lot!)
Peter.
If by "now" you mean "for the past couple years," then yes :) The Octane2 at least has been doing it for a while - it's a fairly basic requirement for doing special effects for film.
Of course, to get 12bit per channel, you had to shell out for an Octane2, so hopefully this will make it a bit more accessible at least.
Peter.
The key manufacturing difference is the reduced amount of cache. This cuts down piles of space from the die, saving a decent amount of money. You can see this idea most clearly in the original Celerons, which had no cache at all. However, with no cache performance sucked ass, so they later rejigged the Celeron line to have some cache (Celeron 300A and later).
Peter.
I get this too, but I've found a couple of workarounds. It seems to only happen when I scroll the page with the arrow keys or the mouse wheel (or sometimes on load); thus, it can be fixed by simply doing a page-down and then page-up, or by right-clicking near the image so the popup menu obscures it - this fixes whatever area was obscured by the popup. It sometimes takes a few clicks, but once you get good it takes fewer :) I do it when I'm feeling too lazy to reach for the keyboard.
Also, sometimes clicking on images fixes the problem, but that obviously doesn't work well for images that have hyperlinks....
Peter
No kidding - in Canada, the drinking age is 18-19 (depending on the province), and all I can say is that once I turned legal, I drank a lot less, and a lot less often. Being able to drink whenever you want really takes away from the illicit thrill....
That's the most depressing part of the whole browser war. Netscape 4 has the world's crappiest renderer (at least out of what's still in use), but they managed to do a very good job with the UI - especially in Windows, it's fast, functional, and responsive.
So if you switch from Netscape 4 to Mozilla, all of a sudden the UI doesn't quite live up (it's getting closer though), and no sites look right either because everyone designed them around NS4's bugs.
Someday when NS4 is a distant horrible memory, we'll all look back and shake our heads....
Peter.
There's an extraordinarily simple solution to this - standardized exams. No, not the SAT/ACT kind, but honest-to-goodness exams for each subject of importance. Yes, just like your school's final exams, except everyone across the province is taking the same one. It's really not complicated, though I'm not sure how many Canadian provinces are doing it any more.
Peter
His whole point was that no matter what anti-aliasing you do, you incur a 4x bandwidth penalty for the simple reason that you're dealing with 4x the data. This method is nice because it avoids the 4x fill rate penalty, and so helps anything that would otherwise be fill-rate limited.
Peter.
Based on my recent experiences with 4Dwm, here's how to simulate it easily on Linux by using fvwm2.
1. Enlist a friend. Get them to administer a strong kick to your head. This will make you forget about the extensive customizability of fvwm, and stick with changing a small number of useless settings.
2. Get your friend to administer another strong kick to your head. This will mess up your vision so that fvwm's window titles and desktop pager appear very large, taking up a disproportionate amount of the screen. It should also affect your motor control, so you have to click twice to change desktops.
3. A third strong boot to the head may be required to forget all the keyboard shortcuts you have in fvwm. This may have already taken place due to the previous steps.
If you haven't guessed, I've got a favourite between fvwm and 4Dwm....
Peter
Check page 47 of that Pentium III datasheet. Table 24 has a column "Processor Thermal Design Power (W)" which they say is the maximum amount of power the thermal solution is required to dissipate - sounds like what we're looking for.
A 500MHz PIII only dissipates a maximum of 13.2 Watts, apparently - that's way lower than I'd have thought. This goes up to about 30W for the 1GHz, which is fairly reasonable since I remember hearing that the PII 400MHz (which was the fastest Intel could make for a long time) drew about 24W. As a comparison point with the G4, the PIII dissipates a maximum of 14W at 533MHz - that's the same as the _average_ for the G4.
Either Intel's a lot better than I thought, or we're comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended) here.
Peter.
Yeah, it's dirt cheap in Newfoundland ($30/month for cable modem, plus modem rental) - that's because the government gave the cable monopoly huge subsidies to run fiber all across the province. Thus, their infrastructure upgrade was, if not free, a whole freakin' lot less than anyone else had to pay.
This was remarkably farsighted for the government - they did this maybe 4 or 5 years ago, so cable modems have been available for the past 3 years or so. In Newfoundland, of all places. Who'd have thunk it?
Oh yeah, I think they said it was "so hospitals and schools can have broadband connections" or somesuch too...I don't doubt they did that, but I suspect that they don't account for much of the usage....
Peter.
I use CIBC, and their web banking works great in Linux. I've never tried, but it should work fine in Mac or Lynx - the only requirement is that the browser must support 128-bit SSL. That's a nice touch too, I find. Beyond SSL, it doesn't even require images - there's a few for the header and to make it a bit more visually appealing, but that's it.
Now I don't know about any features that might be missing, or if the rest of CIBC's policies suit you, but the internet banking is certainly no problem - it's how I've paid all my bills for the past year.
Peter
Q: Why did Intel call it the Pentium instead of the 586?
:)
:)
A: Because they added 100 to 486, and ended up with 485.9998975
Ok, that's making fun of the FDIV bug...but it's funny all the same
>In 2/3 of the WTO countries, the public would >have been severely restricted a priori, if not
>having "dissidents" rounded up and jailed weeks >before the meeting.
For any people doubting this statement, check out what happened two years ago (almost exactly) in Vancouver for the APEC summit - protest leaders were arrested before the protest on spurious charges (e.g. "assault with a megaphone", an event which had occurred weeks before); protesters had signs seized and were arrested, since their signs were a "security risk" to the visiting leaders, travelling in motorcades a hundred meters away; protesters were pepper-sprayed for sitting down on a road the APEC leaders were about to travel down; etc. etc.
My point: not much of a coherent one, I guess, except for people (esp. Canadians!) not to expect too much out of their police and politicians, and to point out to people in other countries that yes, it can happen to you too. I mean, who'd have thought it'd happen in Canada, of all places! We're not exactly known for militant police here, all Mountie stereotypes aside. And I suppose, strange as it seems for me to be doing, I should commend the Seattle police for not throwing basic rights to the wind when visiting heads of state show up (though the fact that it needs commendation says something....)
Sorry I don't have any links or references, but CBC Newsworld only seems to keep archives back one year and that, newspapers, and first-hand reports was where I got most of my info.