If you really want to you could hook it up to a laptop in your backpack connected to a GPS. With some clever scripts / programming you could have the same functionality. Not in one comfortable package though.
Resolution. That is the ability to resolve, as determined by an MTF/CTF test. In this aspect film is much much better than digital. This is due to much smaller particles being photosensitive in film than the pixel pitch of cmos sensors. It's pretty simple sampling theory.
Reality OTOH shows that this is not the case. So far I have read a lot of tests which show that digital cameras with full-scale sensors are a lot better than film in/all/ categories. The noise you get in film makes any theoretical advantage moot.
There are several tests linked in this story alone, go and read them. And these are done by professional photographers who (many of them at least) were very surprised with the results.
In some cases a 1Ds can even rival medium format (many with slighly poor indoor lighting). In the general case, medium format still provide the best images though.
Actually the tests I've seen when D1s is compared with medium format (a Pentax system IIRC) the digital was on the same level as a professionally scanned (ie $1000-3000/per photo/) medium format. It surpassed the medium format for the standard scanned formats. (The medium format was higher resolution, but the noise was a lot higher which made the higher resolution moot.)
And this new camera has even higher resolution. Although film is still better for the really low ISO values and some other cases. For most cases it seems digital has already surpassed analog. (The test was linked from discussions over at ArsTechnica, I bet links can be found on DPReview as well.)
But personally that was the only scene I wanted to see, I am not a big LoTR fanatic but I know what I like, and I fell in love with this scene and read it over and over in the book. I don't remember it to be full of windy speeches, what I remember is a truly magical, wonderful place that had more care and majesty built into it than most any other work I can remember. (Perhaps there are other good parts of Tolkien's books, if so please let me know).
Well if you did feel that the first time you read the book then I believe you are in a small minority. I don't think I've ever met anyone before that actually enjoyed the parts with Tom Bombadil in the beginning. Same really goes for the parts at the Shire in the beginning. Most people I've talked to feel it's just 200 pages of nothing before things happen. (I disagree with them, but it's been so long since the first time I read it I really can't recall what I though then. Since I as pretty young I imagine I just wanted them to get on with it, I stuck to it though.)
In order to see what is special about Bombadil you first have to understand the power of the one ring. At your first read through this it quite impossible since it's powers have barely been shown at that time. Furthermore you need to understand that even all the other powerful and old creatures are influenced by it. It wasn't until I re-read the books after watching the first movie that I noticed that Tom Bombadil is completely uninfluenced by it. You probably should read some of the additional material too in order to see what a peculiar thing that Tom Bombadil is.
Personally I much prefered the parts in the Shire (particularly on subsequent reads), Rivendell, Lothlorien and even Mordor (it wasn't nice, but that's interesting too) to Tom Bombadil on my first times through.
To me (wrong or not) Tom Bombadil's valley would have been a masterpiece if done by a true artist with an unlimited budget (or maybe just a true artist with just an ordinary budget, you know?), and it felt like a total cop-out.
The biggest problem is naturally time and money. If they could add another 30 minutes or an hour to the movie I'm sure they could add Tom Bombadil. OTOH I'm still not sure that is the best place to put those resources.
The fact remains that a movie and a book are two different things. You can't make them identical and expect both results to be good. Personally I'm content with reading the books and having that a slightly different experience from the movies.
First off, what stops you from taking a XBox2 games and playing on a G5 is the same which stops you from playing normal Xbox games on a PC. Different architectures. While it may be a pretty standard processor, graphics chip and sound chip they are put together in quite a non-standard way. Sooner or later you will be able to run the programs (barring encryption) on standard PCs but by then it will no longer look as hot. (Typically you need "next generation" stuff to emulate a console.)
If anything I imagine XBox2 will be harder to hack than current generation.
And furthermore, since current gen Xbox is basically a P3 I'd say that having it G5 compatible will make it relatively harder for homebrew people. Virtually everyone has Wintel compatible (and including X86 Linux and you have even more people) computers. The number of G5 developers is quite small in comparison.
But in case you haven't noticed there is quite a large XBox homebrew market. You still need a modded XBox to use it, and that is not likely to change with XBox2. It will probably take a while before you can run unlicensed code on it.
Well they have repeatedly said that Scourging of the Shire wasn't filmed; both in interviews and eg in the commentary track to FOTR (during the scene with Galadriels mirror which is a homage to the last chapter). There is also a lot of talk about why they did this and all that.
Personally I think it's a big conspiracy though. In 20 years time we will get a new release of LOTR the way "it was ment to be". Complete with 10 extra hours of songs in elvish noone understands, and in the new version Gandalf screams as he falls with the Balrog.
Seriously though, if you don't see the movies because of the lack of a specific scene then you're just stupid. Particularly the first movie is very beautiful and even the one with least digressions from the original story. Get the extended editions though.
Very few appreciate Tom Bombadil on the first read through. In order to understand his character you first need to know quite a bit about the world of middle-earth, and at that point on your first read through you still don't have that knowledge. (Just like the hobbits.) Considering that severe cutting had to be done it's no surprise that the 30+ minutes part which actually doesn't have any meaning in the rest of the movie was cut.
Scouring was cut for similar reasons. It is just yet an example of how the media differ. There are other changes I don't agree with in the movies, but these two I understand and agree with.
It would be interesting to know if the low speed means that the load on the network is significantly lower. A complaint with campus network people here is often that P2P sucks bandwidth like crazy.
I believe the client chatter on eD2k is higher than other systems though. Not sure just how much higer.
What I can't understand about eDonkey is how it can be so slow. DirectConnect is one of the most horrid pieces of mass accepted code ever (the protocol is a joke) but still runs circles around eDonkey.
You could say that "eDonkey values community", personally I think eDonkey is a piece of inefficient crap. If you want to build a comminity do it on a web site or using chats (like DC does). Don't do it by making the users wait 3 weeks to download a movie.
The only reason it's so big is that noone has finished their downloads yet.;-)
why haven't someone figured out a way of encrypting, or at least not sharing, the IP number of senders and recievers in a file sharing protocol? The only reason I can think of on the top of my head is that some kind of central server is needed (...) Am I correct?
No, not really.
Compare a P2P system with a telephone network. From the network you can get the IP (telephone number) of a person who has a file you want. How you get that number is irrelevant and can be done in millions of ways (this is where eg Napster is centralised as compared to other systems). To actually get the file you still have to dial that person, this is where RIAA/MPAA write down the phone number and report it to authorities.
However, what you can do is that the phone number you get doesn't necessarily go to the correct person. Instead the person you dial will forward the call (unknown to you) to a new phone number this forwarding can go on for quite some time.
This is the method most current systems use to hide IP AFAIK. It is typically called proxies or bouncers.
It doesn't really provide anynomity though. By sending edited requests into the network you can start to trick the callers to provide information. The most trivial being to use that systems like this has a "Time to live" which is "maximum number of forwards" to ensure that the call isn't continually routed around the network. If you call a person and say that "maximum number of forwards" is zero and you still get the file, then you know that person has the file. You can try to get around it by forwarding even on zero half the time, but some simple statistical attacks make that trivial to break.
The best way to get around all this is to use a system where you don't share files on your disk but instead dedicate an area on your HDD for the P2P system. This can still make you vunerable as you search for files though. (Downloading is becoming illegal as well, and hiding who the person searching is has the same basic problems as the original problem.)
In short, the reason there are no big anon networks is because it runs against how the internet works and it is a very hard problem to solve correctly. Basically if you have a true anon system it will be prohibitively slow.
Ok, then I see where you're coming from a bit better. And I agree with you too. And for the record I think that too much money tend to be bad for stuff like this.
I just saw the commentary on Starship Troopers for the first time and that movie could probably have been a lot better with a smaller budget. What annoyed me was always that it disguised itself as a big flashy "Beverly Hills in Space" standard SciFi movie with big colourful explosions. (And the fact that it had nothing to do with the book, naturally.)
Being forced to be inventive and not having squadrons of people probably make a better end product. It seems to be a recurring theme with big budget productions. (Things like LOTR being an exception IMHO.)
Big movies tend to have a lot of crap stuff in them "just because they could".
I have to say that I'm not well versed in the specifics of how a normal window manager works. From what I've understood of Avalon the idea there is to put as much as possible in the OS, and let the OS delegate stuff to the GPU as it sees fit. So your app would write stuff to a buffer but the OS handles double buffering and all things like that.
Putting all of X on a GPU would probably not be a good idea however. (For reasons to be mentioned later.) And while you can free up your CPU from the specifics of GUI handling even on my old 233MHz Pentium X and Fluxbox only use a percent or so of CPU power. We're not talking a significant amount of saving here. The main benefits would be lots more flash (some even useful) and perhaps things like really nicely rendered text.
Running general code on a GPU is not something you want to do though. The entire idea of having a processor optimized for parallel processing is to NOT run sequential code on it. Furthermore a standard GPU has very long pipelines (on the order of several hundred stages, compared to 20'ies for a CPU with long pipelines) this means that branching is expensive. Currently you can't even do real branching on GPUs, that stuff is still handled by the CPU.
Furthermore a GPU is only fast if you can use parallelism. Most common programs have very little parallelism, and even the most advanced compiler algorithms are hard pressed to extract what little parallelism there exist. To make things even worse GPUs want to execute in SIMD structure, so it uses the same general instruction but on many sets of data. Typical example is doing the same calculation on every pixel in an image, that is very parallel even if all the individual pixels may be different. Doing a histogram (where you sum all individual instances of each pixel value) is something which a CPU will be better at doing.
You could naturally spend a lot of time to make a GPU general enough to execute code like a CPU but then you'd only end up with another CPU. That's pretty stupid since it's much cheaper and efficient to just add one in SMP or SMT (or even hyper threading) manner.
And FYI all modern GPUs can run ARB shaders, which are general. (Well, in reality the drivers translate it to internal shaders, but the programmer doesn't have to care.) So you don't have to compile separately for each GPU. Much like how the internal micro-code on CPUs differ but the exposed assembly is x86 style.
Currently the biggest problem with General-GPU applications is that the AGP is pretty slow at reading data back from the card. Future standards will hopefully help us there though.
All that said, I recommend you and others to play around some with shaders on modern GPUs. It's quite fantastic what you can pull off with little effort.
You can use it for some things, like anti-aliasing for text and such. That is pretty much what all 3d accelerated window managers are doing. (Though I'm not aware of one for Linux, upcoming Avalon in Windows Longhorn is an example, possibly something like it in OSX too.)
Using GPU for searching in text and stuff like that is not useful though. The point with a GPU is that it is massively parallel and has very deep pipelines. As such it is perfect for doing the same computation on a large image but pretty useless for implementing a standard sequential search. Interestingly the chapter on parallel algorithms was removed from my edition of "An introduction to algorithms" and we got a copied ex of it. At the time I took the course (a few years ago) my though was "Why learn about algorithms which use multiple processors per element, that's never going to be useful." Naturally something like that is pretty trivial to implement with shaders.
In conclusion, with a normal GUI what you could do is to put the entire window manager and display stuff in shaders. Well not all, but a lot of it. Seems like a language like this (Sh) would be perfect for that job. It wouldn't be very useful though, but the amount of useless flashy stuff you could add is immense.;-)
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if George Lucas's genius isn't some sort of fluke or accident on some levels.
Are you dense? Let me spell it out for you J-A-R-J-A-R-B-I-N-K-S (although there are a lot better examples in the first and second movies which demonstrate that he has no functioning movie skills anylonger).
IMNSH both Lucas and Spielberg have gotten too big for their heads. They have no concept of what is good any longer, and apparently no close enough friends to tell them the truth.
As I mentioned before the main benefit of Matlab is that it is designed for this type of work. Numerical analysis is/easy/ in Matab. It typically turns out to be a major pain in any language for non-trivial programs.
In the end you end up prototyping and testing in Matlab and then redoing (using the Matlab system to compare results against) in another language.
The question is however if not Matlab is "fast enough", particularly if you spend some time optimising by compiling libraries and even some parts of your system.
And even if I like Java I have to say that math code in Java (or any other language for that matter) tend to be absolutely horrid. Both a debugging and maintanence nightmare.
Matlab m-files can be transformed into both Fortran or C and compiled if you need more speed. Naturally it is also possible to use compiled libraries directly from Matlab.
That said Matlabs main strength is the near infinite libraries (generally all numerical mathematical and engineering research is done in Matlab, so basically anything you can ever want is available) and prototyping speed. The m-files are interpreted at runtime and you can also "code" in interactive mode much like with Python (but Matlab is more complete in this area than the Python interactive stuff).
Matlab isn't for realtime stuff though (which I assume is what you mean, because if you are just simulating ms intervals aren't that bad). Typically you'd use Matlab to prototype and then either translate to C/Fortran or just redo based on the Matlab files. Since Matlab is a numerical system it's easy to make statistical checks on your data in order to ensure correctness. And that should be a major part of the development phase, I have tried to "just do the code first" a number of times and it seldom saves you time.
I've only used Matlab and Maple, well a smattering playing in Mathematica, but not much. Anyways, of Matlab and Maple, Matlab is the champ when it comes so numerical stuff. It is just a lot better at anything that has to do with numbers, it seems like all image processing and computer vision research is done in Matlab from my experience. Needless to say there is a ton of premade stuff.
Maple is the king when it comes to algebraic stuff though. I have sometimes worked out the problem in Maple and then calculated it in Matlab. (Nowadays Maple has a competent numerical library, but it's still not as advanced or complete as Matlab.)
I think that there are some other big programs for statistical stuff (though Matlab is competent in this area). Though I believe a lot of those other programs are mainly used by people who come from a non-engineering background.
Personally I prefer radial menues to plain mouse gestures. They accomplish the same thing but you don't need to memorize the gestures before you start using them. (My fave for Firefox is RadialMenues, it's a bit of a bother to find though.)
The victims had no chance to arm themselves or fight back, Johnson said. "There was no way they could really defend themselves."
So I guess it's not really relevant here.
Besides, I'd much rather have some baseballbat wielding maniacs than gun toting maniacs. The best defense against close combat weapons is to run away from them. Shooting people who are on drugs may not prove all that efficient either as they "just don't care". And those people are probably those that are most likely to break and enter when you're at home, as well as most likely to harm you.
Seriously, it's things like this that make me happy I don't live in the US. (Yeah, that comment was on the flame-bait side, I know...)
When I was in the service here in Sweden we were taught NEVER to have a bullet in the chamber unless you intend to shoot someone. Cocking the gun was actually the step after pointing it at someone, usually the first would be sufficient as a deterrent in a bad situation.
We were only allowed to have live rounds in special situations, mainly to ensure that stupid mistakes don't happen. (We actually had one guy fired off a blank round by mistake.) Stupid mistakes and assult rifles tend to kill people.
Having a mag/speedloader ready for your gun could be good. But I think you should contemplate that the risk is higher of an unaurthorized person (such as your kid, or neighbours kid) using the gun than that you need to use it to protect yourself.
And seriously I don't think having kids shoot is too good of an idea all the time. I know that I got used to being around guns and had a lot less respect for them by the time I had hauled around one for a year than in the beginning. Personally I think that if more people were scared shitless by guns there would be less people injured or killed by guns.
I could see then why Anime and Manga were popular - they were fresh and interesting and the Japanese perspective... There was an odd dichotomy the other day with a story article about outsourcing alongside one about a new anime which made me uneasy, and I tried to reason out why. Do you guys not realise that there are fantastic American cartoons out there, that you could spend your money on as well?
And as alternatives you give Penny-Arcade and User Friendly. Are you a troll? Given that you also compare buying products from Japan instead of American Alternatives as bad as out-sourcing working to India seems to suggest that is the case.
In case you're not getting it let me draw you a map. Now PA is a lot of fun, but it's a webcomic and extremely episodical. Even American comics at their most interesting is still in a bit of a rut. Although they have left the superhero phase; which is extremely boring and uninventive. Stuff like Preacher is new, but it's still in the situation that comics in the US has to be dystopian and violent in order to be serious.
American (or western for that matter) comics are hardly on the same level as asian. The best stuff like Shrek or Monsters Inc still suffer from the problem that it has to be cute and funny to be acceptable. What makes me interested in manga and anime is that there are a lot of good ideas explored there. It's really one of the few places you can find good SF and fantasy in a visual media.
Now that the basic premise that buying another countries products would be the same as out-sourcing is too trollish to even make me bother with a proper retort.
As has been mentioned before the extention is only used to give the user a hint on what link it is. Mozilla/Firefox will naturally do a proper determination if the link is hit.
It would be possible to do a real MIME lookup but that would cause unnecessary load on the receiving WWW server. I guess HTTP1.1 allows multiple requests so coupled with only headers it wouldn't be that bad. Still since it's not exactly critical I don't see the point in doing that.
AFAIK Firefox uses the new plug-in engine and will replace Mozilla in the future. Because of this many extention makers do only a Firefox version since that is what "power users" have anyways.
I'm not sure in what version the Mozilla browser will be completely replaced with Firefox.
I believe that was Jakob Nielsen who presented that. Furthermore he has presented new data that show that people now know how to use the scroll bar on his site.
So those designing WWW pages should know they can't use that excuse any longer.;-)
You can get gestures in Mozilla/Firefox with some extentions. My favourite is is Radial Menues which really is a circular menu system and not "gestures" per se. The functionality is the same though, but you get visual feedback as well as text hints. From a useability perspective I guess it's a lot better than plain gestures. (Doesn't look as magical though.)
Increasing/decreasing font size can be done with ctrl-(+ or -).
Besides that I personally can't live without tabbed browsing which exist in both Opera and Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want to you could hook it up to a laptop in your backpack connected to a GPS. With some clever scripts / programming you could have the same functionality. Not in one comfortable package though.
Reality OTOH shows that this is not the case. So far I have read a lot of tests which show that digital cameras with full-scale sensors are a lot better than film in
There are several tests linked in this story alone, go and read them. And these are done by professional photographers who (many of them at least) were very surprised with the results.
In some cases a 1Ds can even rival medium format (many with slighly poor indoor lighting). In the general case, medium format still provide the best images though.
Actually the tests I've seen when D1s is compared with medium format (a Pentax system IIRC) the digital was on the same level as a professionally scanned (ie $1000-3000 /per photo/) medium format. It surpassed the medium format for the standard scanned formats. (The medium format was higher resolution, but the noise was a lot higher which made the higher resolution moot.)
And this new camera has even higher resolution. Although film is still better for the really low ISO values and some other cases. For most cases it seems digital has already surpassed analog. (The test was linked from discussions over at ArsTechnica, I bet links can be found on DPReview as well.)
Well if you did feel that the first time you read the book then I believe you are in a small minority. I don't think I've ever met anyone before that actually enjoyed the parts with Tom Bombadil in the beginning. Same really goes for the parts at the Shire in the beginning. Most people I've talked to feel it's just 200 pages of nothing before things happen. (I disagree with them, but it's been so long since the first time I read it I really can't recall what I though then. Since I as pretty young I imagine I just wanted them to get on with it, I stuck to it though.)
In order to see what is special about Bombadil you first have to understand the power of the one ring. At your first read through this it quite impossible since it's powers have barely been shown at that time. Furthermore you need to understand that even all the other powerful and old creatures are influenced by it. It wasn't until I re-read the books after watching the first movie that I noticed that Tom Bombadil is completely uninfluenced by it. You probably should read some of the additional material too in order to see what a peculiar thing that Tom Bombadil is.
Personally I much prefered the parts in the Shire (particularly on subsequent reads), Rivendell, Lothlorien and even Mordor (it wasn't nice, but that's interesting too) to Tom Bombadil on my first times through.
The biggest problem is naturally time and money. If they could add another 30 minutes or an hour to the movie I'm sure they could add Tom Bombadil. OTOH I'm still not sure that is the best place to put those resources.
The fact remains that a movie and a book are two different things. You can't make them identical and expect both results to be good. Personally I'm content with reading the books and having that a slightly different experience from the movies.
In many ways that makes them both more precious.
First off, what stops you from taking a XBox2 games and playing on a G5 is the same which stops you from playing normal Xbox games on a PC. Different architectures. While it may be a pretty standard processor, graphics chip and sound chip they are put together in quite a non-standard way. Sooner or later you will be able to run the programs (barring encryption) on standard PCs but by then it will no longer look as hot. (Typically you need "next generation" stuff to emulate a console.)
If anything I imagine XBox2 will be harder to hack than current generation.
And furthermore, since current gen Xbox is basically a P3 I'd say that having it G5 compatible will make it relatively harder for homebrew people. Virtually everyone has Wintel compatible (and including X86 Linux and you have even more people) computers. The number of G5 developers is quite small in comparison.
But in case you haven't noticed there is quite a large XBox homebrew market. You still need a modded XBox to use it, and that is not likely to change with XBox2. It will probably take a while before you can run unlicensed code on it.
Well they have repeatedly said that Scourging of the Shire wasn't filmed; both in interviews and eg in the commentary track to FOTR (during the scene with Galadriels mirror which is a homage to the last chapter). There is also a lot of talk about why they did this and all that.
Personally I think it's a big conspiracy though. In 20 years time we will get a new release of LOTR the way "it was ment to be". Complete with 10 extra hours of songs in elvish noone understands, and in the new version Gandalf screams as he falls with the Balrog.
Seriously though, if you don't see the movies because of the lack of a specific scene then you're just stupid. Particularly the first movie is very beautiful and even the one with least digressions from the original story. Get the extended editions though.
Very few appreciate Tom Bombadil on the first read through. In order to understand his character you first need to know quite a bit about the world of middle-earth, and at that point on your first read through you still don't have that knowledge. (Just like the hobbits.) Considering that severe cutting had to be done it's no surprise that the 30+ minutes part which actually doesn't have any meaning in the rest of the movie was cut.
Scouring was cut for similar reasons. It is just yet an example of how the media differ. There are other changes I don't agree with in the movies, but these two I understand and agree with.
In todays world 30k is "ass-slow".
It would be interesting to know if the low speed means that the load on the network is significantly lower. A complaint with campus network people here is often that P2P sucks bandwidth like crazy.
I believe the client chatter on eD2k is higher than other systems though. Not sure just how much higer.
What I can't understand about eDonkey is how it can be so slow. DirectConnect is one of the most horrid pieces of mass accepted code ever (the protocol is a joke) but still runs circles around eDonkey.
;-)
You could say that "eDonkey values community", personally I think eDonkey is a piece of inefficient crap. If you want to build a comminity do it on a web site or using chats (like DC does). Don't do it by making the users wait 3 weeks to download a movie.
The only reason it's so big is that noone has finished their downloads yet.
No, not really.
Compare a P2P system with a telephone network. From the network you can get the IP (telephone number) of a person who has a file you want. How you get that number is irrelevant and can be done in millions of ways (this is where eg Napster is centralised as compared to other systems). To actually get the file you still have to dial that person, this is where RIAA/MPAA write down the phone number and report it to authorities.
However, what you can do is that the phone number you get doesn't necessarily go to the correct person. Instead the person you dial will forward the call (unknown to you) to a new phone number this forwarding can go on for quite some time.
This is the method most current systems use to hide IP AFAIK. It is typically called proxies or bouncers.
It doesn't really provide anynomity though. By sending edited requests into the network you can start to trick the callers to provide information. The most trivial being to use that systems like this has a "Time to live" which is "maximum number of forwards" to ensure that the call isn't continually routed around the network. If you call a person and say that "maximum number of forwards" is zero and you still get the file, then you know that person has the file. You can try to get around it by forwarding even on zero half the time, but some simple statistical attacks make that trivial to break.
The best way to get around all this is to use a system where you don't share files on your disk but instead dedicate an area on your HDD for the P2P system. This can still make you vunerable as you search for files though. (Downloading is becoming illegal as well, and hiding who the person searching is has the same basic problems as the original problem.)
In short, the reason there are no big anon networks is because it runs against how the internet works and it is a very hard problem to solve correctly. Basically if you have a true anon system it will be prohibitively slow.
Ok, then I see where you're coming from a bit better. And I agree with you too. And for the record I think that too much money tend to be bad for stuff like this.
I just saw the commentary on Starship Troopers for the first time and that movie could probably have been a lot better with a smaller budget. What annoyed me was always that it disguised itself as a big flashy "Beverly Hills in Space" standard SciFi movie with big colourful explosions. (And the fact that it had nothing to do with the book, naturally.)
Being forced to be inventive and not having squadrons of people probably make a better end product. It seems to be a recurring theme with big budget productions. (Things like LOTR being an exception IMHO.)
Big movies tend to have a lot of crap stuff in them "just because they could".
I have to say that I'm not well versed in the specifics of how a normal window manager works. From what I've understood of Avalon the idea there is to put as much as possible in the OS, and let the OS delegate stuff to the GPU as it sees fit. So your app would write stuff to a buffer but the OS handles double buffering and all things like that.
Putting all of X on a GPU would probably not be a good idea however. (For reasons to be mentioned later.) And while you can free up your CPU from the specifics of GUI handling even on my old 233MHz Pentium X and Fluxbox only use a percent or so of CPU power. We're not talking a significant amount of saving here. The main benefits would be lots more flash (some even useful) and perhaps things like really nicely rendered text.
Running general code on a GPU is not something you want to do though. The entire idea of having a processor optimized for parallel processing is to NOT run sequential code on it. Furthermore a standard GPU has very long pipelines (on the order of several hundred stages, compared to 20'ies for a CPU with long pipelines) this means that branching is expensive. Currently you can't even do real branching on GPUs, that stuff is still handled by the CPU.
Furthermore a GPU is only fast if you can use parallelism. Most common programs have very little parallelism, and even the most advanced compiler algorithms are hard pressed to extract what little parallelism there exist. To make things even worse GPUs want to execute in SIMD structure, so it uses the same general instruction but on many sets of data. Typical example is doing the same calculation on every pixel in an image, that is very parallel even if all the individual pixels may be different. Doing a histogram (where you sum all individual instances of each pixel value) is something which a CPU will be better at doing.
You could naturally spend a lot of time to make a GPU general enough to execute code like a CPU but then you'd only end up with another CPU. That's pretty stupid since it's much cheaper and efficient to just add one in SMP or SMT (or even hyper threading) manner.
And FYI all modern GPUs can run ARB shaders, which are general. (Well, in reality the drivers translate it to internal shaders, but the programmer doesn't have to care.) So you don't have to compile separately for each GPU. Much like how the internal micro-code on CPUs differ but the exposed assembly is x86 style.
Currently the biggest problem with General-GPU applications is that the AGP is pretty slow at reading data back from the card. Future standards will hopefully help us there though.
All that said, I recommend you and others to play around some with shaders on modern GPUs. It's quite fantastic what you can pull off with little effort.
You can use it for some things, like anti-aliasing for text and such. That is pretty much what all 3d accelerated window managers are doing. (Though I'm not aware of one for Linux, upcoming Avalon in Windows Longhorn is an example, possibly something like it in OSX too.)
;-)
Using GPU for searching in text and stuff like that is not useful though. The point with a GPU is that it is massively parallel and has very deep pipelines. As such it is perfect for doing the same computation on a large image but pretty useless for implementing a standard sequential search. Interestingly the chapter on parallel algorithms was removed from my edition of "An introduction to algorithms" and we got a copied ex of it. At the time I took the course (a few years ago) my though was "Why learn about algorithms which use multiple processors per element, that's never going to be useful." Naturally something like that is pretty trivial to implement with shaders.
In conclusion, with a normal GUI what you could do is to put the entire window manager and display stuff in shaders. Well not all, but a lot of it. Seems like a language like this (Sh) would be perfect for that job. It wouldn't be very useful though, but the amount of useless flashy stuff you could add is immense.
Are you dense? Let me spell it out for you J-A-R-J-A-R-B-I-N-K-S (although there are a lot better examples in the first and second movies which demonstrate that he has no functioning movie skills anylonger).
IMNSH both Lucas and Spielberg have gotten too big for their heads. They have no concept of what is good any longer, and apparently no close enough friends to tell them the truth.
As I mentioned before the main benefit of Matlab is that it is designed for this type of work. Numerical analysis is /easy/ in Matab. It typically turns out to be a major pain in any language for non-trivial programs.
In the end you end up prototyping and testing in Matlab and then redoing (using the Matlab system to compare results against) in another language.
The question is however if not Matlab is "fast enough", particularly if you spend some time optimising by compiling libraries and even some parts of your system.
And even if I like Java I have to say that math code in Java (or any other language for that matter) tend to be absolutely horrid. Both a debugging and maintanence nightmare.
Matlab m-files can be transformed into both Fortran or C and compiled if you need more speed. Naturally it is also possible to use compiled libraries directly from Matlab.
That said Matlabs main strength is the near infinite libraries (generally all numerical mathematical and engineering research is done in Matlab, so basically anything you can ever want is available) and prototyping speed. The m-files are interpreted at runtime and you can also "code" in interactive mode much like with Python (but Matlab is more complete in this area than the Python interactive stuff).
Matlab isn't for realtime stuff though (which I assume is what you mean, because if you are just simulating ms intervals aren't that bad). Typically you'd use Matlab to prototype and then either translate to C/Fortran or just redo based on the Matlab files. Since Matlab is a numerical system it's easy to make statistical checks on your data in order to ensure correctness. And that should be a major part of the development phase, I have tried to "just do the code first" a number of times and it seldom saves you time.
I've only used Matlab and Maple, well a smattering playing in Mathematica, but not much. Anyways, of Matlab and Maple, Matlab is the champ when it comes so numerical stuff. It is just a lot better at anything that has to do with numbers, it seems like all image processing and computer vision research is done in Matlab from my experience. Needless to say there is a ton of premade stuff.
Maple is the king when it comes to algebraic stuff though. I have sometimes worked out the problem in Maple and then calculated it in Matlab. (Nowadays Maple has a competent numerical library, but it's still not as advanced or complete as Matlab.)
I think that there are some other big programs for statistical stuff (though Matlab is competent in this area). Though I believe a lot of those other programs are mainly used by people who come from a non-engineering background.
Personally I prefer radial menues to plain mouse gestures. They accomplish the same thing but you don't need to memorize the gestures before you start using them. (My fave for Firefox is RadialMenues, it's a bit of a bother to find though.)
I might be helpful to add here that you do use apostrophe when making possessive forms of nouns but NOT possesive forms of pronouns.
So cat's, boy's etc are all correct but it's and his's are wrong.
The Angry Flower doesn't talk about this unfortunately.
So I guess it's not really relevant here.
Besides, I'd much rather have some baseballbat wielding maniacs than gun toting maniacs. The best defense against close combat weapons is to run away from them. Shooting people who are on drugs may not prove all that efficient either as they "just don't care". And those people are probably those that are most likely to break and enter when you're at home, as well as most likely to harm you.
Seriously, it's things like this that make me happy I don't live in the US. (Yeah, that comment was on the flame-bait side, I know...)
When I was in the service here in Sweden we were taught NEVER to have a bullet in the chamber unless you intend to shoot someone. Cocking the gun was actually the step after pointing it at someone, usually the first would be sufficient as a deterrent in a bad situation.
We were only allowed to have live rounds in special situations, mainly to ensure that stupid mistakes don't happen. (We actually had one guy fired off a blank round by mistake.) Stupid mistakes and assult rifles tend to kill people.
Having a mag/speedloader ready for your gun could be good. But I think you should contemplate that the risk is higher of an unaurthorized person (such as your kid, or neighbours kid) using the gun than that you need to use it to protect yourself.
And seriously I don't think having kids shoot is too good of an idea all the time. I know that I got used to being around guns and had a lot less respect for them by the time I had hauled around one for a year than in the beginning. Personally I think that if more people were scared shitless by guns there would be less people injured or killed by guns.
And as alternatives you give Penny-Arcade and User Friendly. Are you a troll? Given that you also compare buying products from Japan instead of American Alternatives as bad as out-sourcing working to India seems to suggest that is the case.
In case you're not getting it let me draw you a map. Now PA is a lot of fun, but it's a webcomic and extremely episodical. Even American comics at their most interesting is still in a bit of a rut. Although they have left the superhero phase; which is extremely boring and uninventive. Stuff like Preacher is new, but it's still in the situation that comics in the US has to be dystopian and violent in order to be serious.
American (or western for that matter) comics are hardly on the same level as asian. The best stuff like Shrek or Monsters Inc still suffer from the problem that it has to be cute and funny to be acceptable. What makes me interested in manga and anime is that there are a lot of good ideas explored there. It's really one of the few places you can find good SF and fantasy in a visual media.
Now that the basic premise that buying another countries products would be the same as out-sourcing is too trollish to even make me bother with a proper retort.
As has been mentioned before the extention is only used to give the user a hint on what link it is. Mozilla/Firefox will naturally do a proper determination if the link is hit.
It would be possible to do a real MIME lookup but that would cause unnecessary load on the receiving WWW server. I guess HTTP1.1 allows multiple requests so coupled with only headers it wouldn't be that bad. Still since it's not exactly critical I don't see the point in doing that.
AFAIK Firefox uses the new plug-in engine and will replace Mozilla in the future. Because of this many extention makers do only a Firefox version since that is what "power users" have anyways.
I'm not sure in what version the Mozilla browser will be completely replaced with Firefox.
I believe that was Jakob Nielsen who presented that. Furthermore he has presented new data that show that people now know how to use the scroll bar on his site.
;-)
So those designing WWW pages should know they can't use that excuse any longer.
You can get gestures in Mozilla/Firefox with some extentions. My favourite is is Radial Menues which really is a circular menu system and not "gestures" per se. The functionality is the same though, but you get visual feedback as well as text hints. From a useability perspective I guess it's a lot better than plain gestures. (Doesn't look as magical though.)
Increasing/decreasing font size can be done with ctrl-(+ or -).
Besides that I personally can't live without tabbed browsing which exist in both Opera and Mozilla.