In Popular Electronics or some such magazine, there was a one-page article (mostly pictures) about how scientists had rigged a live cockroach to recieve its motor commands from a microcontroller - in essence, they'd created a living robot. It could still control its movements when the chip wasn't providing any, but when the chip was, the stronger electrical signals blocked out any that the roach would naturally create. They even strapped a tiny temperature sensor to it and drove it around under stoves and things.
Maybe with this technology, they won't need the roach.
I took an online course that "required" Netscape to run. The sad thing? IE 5.5 rendered the pages more correct than Netscape itself did!
IE renders what the code tells it to, whether it is W3C correct, or if it's not. Netscape assumes everyone writes perfect code to begin with, so a lot of pages won't display properly with it.
The problem is that a lot of the POSIX-style system calls don't map well to the Win32 system layer. One main example is fork():
In Unix, it's fork and be done with it. The code's built in. Under Cygwin, fork() is emulated like in the first versions of Unix, involing some wierd scheme of memory address copying and process signaling, since Win32 has no need in itself for a function like fork.
There was another in the similar line, I forget what exactly, but the cygwin FAQ or thereabouts said that those two system calls are what causes such a massive performance hit in emulation.
Anything that has to do real-time conversions for an app is going to be slower than the native environment, even on a fast computer.
Please see the novel by Tom Clancey, I believe, that is immidiately before "The Bear and the Dragon" A disgrunteled Japanese 747 pilot, upset that the United States finally had enough of the Japanese double-dealing in trade relations, crashed his airliner into Congress, killing most of the government, and the president.
Lets not forget Black Sunday, where the blimp was used...
Try the Windows-standard "Generic/Text Only" printer driver. That is (supposedly) compatible with every single printer that exists. It will operate most printers that don't have drivers.
This is beyond the reasonable powers that our government should have to monitor our lives. I don't believe that the Government is wrong to be able to wiretap a person per the USA act, as opposed to just tapping one of their devices. I don't mind that the government can intercept plaintext emails and archive them. Echelon, well, even though it exists, what kind of storage are they keeping down there? The entire textual communication over the internet, one day is several hundred TB worth. The NSA would be spending more on EMC2 storage arrays then their budget, daily.
I do mind that now the FBI has the power to remotely install keystroke loggers to gather encryption passphrases that are emailed to a central station. This rings similar to what the RIAA wanted to do - enter into computer systems and make sure there's no illegally copied material on them.
Since when have the "shall not infringe" and "Shall make no law" of our constitution been able to be warped into "shall do whever the hell Dubya and the Criminal Institution of America, and the National Socialist Agency, want"
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be a U.S. citizen. Really.
Multidimensional arrays in Pascal are childishly easy, even in insanely large numbers of dimensions.
type xarray=packed array[0..20,0..20] of integer;
var data:xarray;
That's a multidimensional array for you, with a data type so you can pass it to a function.
If you'd wanted, but didn't feel like passing it to functions (i.e. no data type so it couldn't pass correctly) you could write
var data:packed array[0..20,0..20] of integer;
and accomplish the same thing. Either is accessible with a somple
data[x,y] structure, that can be controlled by FOR/WHILE loops, IF statements, and the like. Last year, I was working in truely 3-dimensional arrays in PASCAL to store data for an airline seating chart.
type xarray=packed array[0..20,0..20,0..20] of integer;
var data:xarray;
data[x,y,z]
And even 4+ dimensional arrays "worked" but I'll be damned if I could visualize them in any coherant way.
type xarray=packed array[0..20,0..20,0..20,0..20] of integer;
It may have been a fluke that it worked at all, but I did a relatively simple program to fill up each space with random data and writeLn() it out, just to see if it worked. For that big of a data structure, you could probably do much better using records, or seperate linked arrays if Pascal can do such a thing.
I've never done any programming work in BASIC so I can't speak for it's handlig of multidimensional arrays. I don't recall them being too hard from a program I looked at though, something to the effect of
According to The American Institute of Physics in their Physical Review Letters journal article "Resilience of the Internet to random breakdowns" (19 Oct 2000) [a copy of this article is available in.pdf from my personal web page on the left side bar for your reading pleasure.] stated that the Internet could lose 99% of its nodes, and still maintain routability. The content lost in those 99% of nodes is another matter, but the Internet would not segment until over 99% of the routing nodes were removed. That's pretty impressive.
A common house theif isn't going to have a portable voltage supply and jumper wires. I doubt if many of the people who would be robbing houses would even know if cutting the line would cause an alert.
Also, you only need LoS to two GPS satellites to get a LAT-LON reading. The third satellite gives you the third dimension (altitude) In the gulf, soldiers didn't have enough satellites to do 3 dimensions, but they were fine with the two dimensions of accuracy they had I doubt knowing how high the computer is off the desk is that big of a deal, so even if a satellite is blocked by something, two more will still give you a (slightly less accurate) reading.
C-in-C Navstar (Forgive me the murder of the title), a colonel in the Air Force at Chyanne Mountain (NORAD headquarters, fyi) told me himself that that *was* true, but after the gulf war, the civilian accuracy limitaions were removed, and it is somewhere around 5 meters now, as opposed to a football field's length.
I haven't used LimeWire since I discovered the KaZaa family of networks. LimeWire seems to have the same problem Gnutella did about two years ago - the network is *SO* huge that it fragments and you can't find anything. Most things >100MB (i.e. DivX movie trailers, etc...) are either interrupted due to dropped routing, or killed by the other host. The only thing I get in the "search monitor" is:
(this is a snippit of my LimeWire 1.07 search monitor I fired up just for this post. 5 seconds generated these queries):
xxx
kiddy f*ck
*.mp3
"Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" [vv].avi
nudist
Windows XP Professional.iso
how to hack
*.mp3
porn.jpg
l33t warez
ts.wasco*.avi
12 year old
*.mp3
GOD DAMNIT PEOPLE USE THIS AS A CHAT CLIENT
a.gif
kazaa
and it continues.
Conclusion: There's nothing good ON the Gnutella network. (!= The Gnutella Network is not good.)
IIRC, internal transfer rates (platter >> cache) are in the gigabits - a bigger cache would definately be a huge performance boost. They'd stay filled longer, and the transfer rates the new ATA standards offer might actually mean something.
It seems to be consipciously absent from most motherboards and hard drive. It sounds great in practice (a dedicated channel for each device, faster transfers, smaller footprint) but Intel has explicitly declared that their chipsets will not support it. I guess it would require a brand new chipset, but still, it would be a benefit for everyone.
I just can't see the rationale for using ATA-133 in anything. ATA as a server interface is generally a bad thing unless done VERY carefully. SCSI has transfer rates that are up there (I think differential SCSI has a 160MB/sec transfer rate, and the drives are like twice as fast seeking as ATA drives.) and the drives are generally more reliable, or failing that, eaiser to replace. The average home user has no need for anything above ATA-66 or maybe ATA-100.
Someone might walk around an art museum and scoff at a simplistic painting and say, "That's not art!" When that they really mean is that it's not GOOD art. Whether it's not good art because it could just as easily be painted by a child, or if it seems the artist didn't put enough thought into it, is irrelevant.
I think you've hit on something here. The problem is, the medium of computer games and graphics is younger than the people who are defining "art" right now. Until the fine art collectors of today are gone, and are replaced by people who are growing up right now that value a Picasso as much as a copy of Final Fantasy 6 (3 US), computer games are going to be merely entertainment. They are art, but it isn't recognized yet, much like it took a while for photography, movies, music (The classical composers did that as a paid job, and it was considered as such.) etc...
Videogames are art. I define "art" as anything that requires creativity. However, most videogames aren't fine art. This is because the medium of video game is inherently a form of entertainment, and was created as a way to make money. Yes, video games have come a long way since SpaceWar!, but most still aren't fine art.
I'd generally agree with your definition of art, but technically, pornography falls under the catagory of "art" as well. (Note the distinction between "nude art" and "porn" which does exist.)
Or, fine art videogames must be original. You can't just put an artsy spin on a cliched genre and succeed. When I think of videogames as art, several titles come to mind: Diablo I, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Super Mario 64, Zelda: OOT, Ultima IX, Baldur's Gate. All of these introduced new things to their genres, all of these were original. Sequels are rarely fine art because they're not original. Example: Resident Evil = Fine art. Its sequels, however, were mainly rehashings of the original with new puzzles and enemies.
You forgot Final Fantasy. The games technically aren't sequels because I have yet to see a single character copied from one game to the other. Sure, some stock characters exist (Cid is the only major one; Biggs and Wedge, Jesse in FF7 come to mind), but even Shakespere used "stock characters" to get the plot along without having to spend much time on it. Each FF game is origanal - Final Fantasy is more of a "series" name than a "game" name. Just because they belong to the same family doesn't mean they're the same thing.
Or, a fine art videogame can be innovative. Game developers, add something new to games! All platformers were mostly the same, then Abe's Odyssee came along. All 3rd person shooters were mostly the same, then MGS came along. All PC RPGs were mostly the same, then Baldur's Gate came along. Did anyone realize that these games actually added something new to the genre? That they weren't clones of old games? Cold that be why they were so fun? Innovate! Arguably one of the most underrated titles in the PSX's history was Ape Escape. Why? It actually used the 2nd analog stick as control for weapons! It was a work of art - it forced us to think about controlling differently.
I disagree here. Sure, anything can make you think differently. The "dada" movement (which is only art because some old stuffies declared it was) makes you think differently about things - but what is artistic in a door with a sign on it half-opened in a free standing display? It doesn't add anything to culture.
Video games are art, but defining it is very hard.
On the contrary, I don't think that Super Mario Bros. 2, or 3 (decidedly the best Mario game ever) qualify as any form of art. Take this from a person who grew up with them - a HS student. They are closer to board games than art forms. If you consider their code art (Which I believe it can be) then they might be art, for their design - not their display.
Truely artistic games are the masterpieces that Squaresoft produces. I doubt anyone will contest me on this one. Even the 8-bit NES version of Final Fantasy had a very detailed story, complete with character development, plot twists, etc...You could study an FF game in an english class and probably not have it be totally useless. Sure, its not Shakespere, but it isn't some random beach novel work either.
I've had even less luck with Windows 2000 NTFS file system encryption. Every file I "encrypt" with my account (it has administrator privlidges) is viewable by every other user of my computer no trouble at all. Open it up, copy elsewhere, delete, modify, whatever, done with 128-bit encryption over it. Aside from the fact that those users *shouldn't have access* to the files (I used NTFS resource-level permissions to deny all except myself for this resource) it "works" in that it doesn't kill things...*frustrated rant off*
For a 1U chassis, you're really restricted in your options. You may be able to fit a single PCI add-on card in somehow (IIRC, there are 90-degree adapters for PCI risers, half inch and 1 inch heights) Everything else would have to be integrated on the motherboard. The Tyan Athlon-MP motherboard offers two 100-Base-TX Ethernet ports, built-in 8MB AGP 3D video, SCSI and IDE, several GB of ram in slanted slots, 8 fan headers, and 64-bit PCI slots. You'd probably be able to use one of them with a 90-degree riser.
Other than that, you're pretty much out of luck. A 2U isn't that much bigger, and you can fit a lot more into it.
And QDOS was a free operating system! Tim Patterson was disgrunteled that the current version of CP/M wouldn't run on his hardware, and he wanted it to work NOW! So he wrote his own. Quick and Dirty Operating System, he called it. MS bought it for what is pittance now (IIRC, $4000?) remapped the letters a bit, and kept until Windows XP.
MetaBeowulf on RLXes?
on
RLX Gets Denser
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Maybe this would be a good market for the metaclustering described a few days ago. Splitting the Linux OS into a user-runable process, and having many "virtual" servers on one physical hardware. For a hosting company, the lower power requirement of the RLX, the lower space, and the lower cost of the Transmeta hardware might make this an attractive option, especially if they are inclined to do metaclustering.
Slashdot Mirror
In Popular Electronics or some such magazine, there was a one-page article (mostly pictures) about how scientists had rigged a live cockroach to recieve its motor commands from a microcontroller - in essence, they'd created a living robot. It could still control its movements when the chip wasn't providing any, but when the chip was, the stronger electrical signals blocked out any that the roach would naturally create. They even strapped a tiny temperature sensor to it and drove it around under stoves and things.
Maybe with this technology, they won't need the roach.
I took an online course that "required" Netscape to run. The sad thing? IE 5.5 rendered the pages more correct than Netscape itself did!
IE renders what the code tells it to, whether it is W3C correct, or if it's not. Netscape assumes everyone writes perfect code to begin with, so a lot of pages won't display properly with it.
The problem is that a lot of the POSIX-style system calls don't map well to the Win32 system layer. One main example is fork():
In Unix, it's fork and be done with it. The code's built in. Under Cygwin, fork() is emulated like in the first versions of Unix, involing some wierd scheme of memory address copying and process signaling, since Win32 has no need in itself for a function like fork.
There was another in the similar line, I forget what exactly, but the cygwin FAQ or thereabouts said that those two system calls are what causes such a massive performance hit in emulation.
Anything that has to do real-time conversions for an app is going to be slower than the native environment, even on a fast computer.
Please see the novel by Tom Clancey, I believe, that is immidiately before "The Bear and the Dragon" A disgrunteled Japanese 747 pilot, upset that the United States finally had enough of the Japanese double-dealing in trade relations, crashed his airliner into Congress, killing most of the government, and the president.
Lets not forget Black Sunday, where the blimp was used...
That's so racist, but that's funny. India's not a place I'd care to go to eat, that's for sure. I hate curry, too.
So does that mean that it's cheaper to ship things to India, since when they get there they weigh less?
.99 tons of a thing?
If I shipped a ton of something over there, does that mean that when it gets there, it's only
Earth is cheating UPS/Fedex/whatever shipping agency out of their fees...
Try the Windows-standard "Generic/Text Only" printer driver. That is (supposedly) compatible with every single printer that exists. It will operate most printers that don't have drivers.
This is beyond the reasonable powers that our government should have to monitor our lives. I don't believe that the Government is wrong to be able to wiretap a person per the USA act, as opposed to just tapping one of their devices. I don't mind that the government can intercept plaintext emails and archive them. Echelon, well, even though it exists, what kind of storage are they keeping down there? The entire textual communication over the internet, one day is several hundred TB worth. The NSA would be spending more on EMC2 storage arrays then their budget, daily.
I do mind that now the FBI has the power to remotely install keystroke loggers to gather encryption passphrases that are emailed to a central station. This rings similar to what the RIAA wanted to do - enter into computer systems and make sure there's no illegally copied material on them.
Since when have the "shall not infringe" and "Shall make no law" of our constitution been able to be warped into "shall do whever the hell Dubya and the Criminal Institution of America, and the National Socialist Agency, want"
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be a U.S. citizen. Really.
Multidimensional arrays in Pascal are childishly easy, even in insanely large numbers of dimensions.
type xarray=packed array[0..20,0..20] of integer;
var data:xarray;
That's a multidimensional array for you, with a data type so you can pass it to a function.
If you'd wanted, but didn't feel like passing it to functions (i.e. no data type so it couldn't pass correctly) you could write
var data:packed array[0..20,0..20] of integer;
and accomplish the same thing. Either is accessible with a somple
data[x,y] structure, that can be controlled by FOR/WHILE loops, IF statements, and the like. Last year, I was working in truely 3-dimensional arrays in PASCAL to store data for an airline seating chart.
type xarray=packed array[0..20,0..20,0..20] of integer;
var data:xarray;
data[x,y,z]
And even 4+ dimensional arrays "worked" but I'll be damned if I could visualize them in any coherant way.
type xarray=packed array[0..20,0..20,0..20,0..20] of integer;
It may have been a fluke that it worked at all, but I did a relatively simple program to fill up each space with random data and writeLn() it out, just to see if it worked. For that big of a data structure, you could probably do much better using records, or seperate linked arrays if Pascal can do such a thing.
I've never done any programming work in BASIC so I can't speak for it's handlig of multidimensional arrays. I don't recall them being too hard from a program I looked at though, something to the effect of
DIM variable%type% AS array (x,y) or something.
According to The American Institute of Physics in their Physical Review Letters journal article "Resilience of the Internet to random breakdowns" (19 Oct 2000) [a copy of this article is available in .pdf from my personal web page on the left side bar for your reading pleasure.] stated that the Internet could lose 99% of its nodes, and still maintain routability. The content lost in those 99% of nodes is another matter, but the Internet would not segment until over 99% of the routing nodes were removed. That's pretty impressive.
Better yet, you never know when a disgrunteled employee is going to show up at work after-hours and make his own severence package
A common house theif isn't going to have a portable voltage supply and jumper wires. I doubt if many of the people who would be robbing houses would even know if cutting the line would cause an alert.
Also, you only need LoS to two GPS satellites to get a LAT-LON reading. The third satellite gives you the third dimension (altitude) In the gulf, soldiers didn't have enough satellites to do 3 dimensions, but they were fine with the two dimensions of accuracy they had I doubt knowing how high the computer is off the desk is that big of a deal, so even if a satellite is blocked by something, two more will still give you a (slightly less accurate) reading.
C-in-C Navstar (Forgive me the murder of the title), a colonel in the Air Force at Chyanne Mountain (NORAD headquarters, fyi) told me himself that that *was* true, but after the gulf war, the civilian accuracy limitaions were removed, and it is somewhere around 5 meters now, as opposed to a football field's length.
No, you can't get a tour. Trust me.
I'd have modded this +1 Funny if you'd logged in. Nice job.
I haven't used LimeWire since I discovered the KaZaa family of networks. LimeWire seems to have the same problem Gnutella did about two years ago - the network is *SO* huge that it fragments and you can't find anything. Most things >100MB (i.e. DivX movie trailers, etc...) are either interrupted due to dropped routing, or killed by the other host. The only thing I get in the "search monitor" is:
(this is a snippit of my LimeWire 1.07 search monitor I fired up just for this post. 5 seconds generated these queries):
xxx
kiddy f*ck
*.mp3
"Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" [vv].avi
nudist
Windows XP Professional.iso
how to hack
*.mp3
porn.jpg
l33t warez
ts.wasco*.avi
12 year old
*.mp3
GOD DAMNIT PEOPLE USE THIS AS A CHAT CLIENT
a.gif
kazaa
and it continues.
Conclusion: There's nothing good ON the Gnutella network. (!= The Gnutella Network is not good.)
IIRC, internal transfer rates (platter >> cache) are in the gigabits - a bigger cache would definately be a huge performance boost. They'd stay filled longer, and the transfer rates the new ATA standards offer might actually mean something.
It seems to be consipciously absent from most motherboards and hard drive. It sounds great in practice (a dedicated channel for each device, faster transfers, smaller footprint) but Intel has explicitly declared that their chipsets will not support it. I guess it would require a brand new chipset, but still, it would be a benefit for everyone.
I just can't see the rationale for using ATA-133 in anything. ATA as a server interface is generally a bad thing unless done VERY carefully. SCSI has transfer rates that are up there (I think differential SCSI has a 160MB/sec transfer rate, and the drives are like twice as fast seeking as ATA drives.) and the drives are generally more reliable, or failing that, eaiser to replace. The average home user has no need for anything above ATA-66 or maybe ATA-100.
I think you've hit on something here. The problem is, the medium of computer games and graphics is younger than the people who are defining "art" right now. Until the fine art collectors of today are gone, and are replaced by people who are growing up right now that value a Picasso as much as a copy of Final Fantasy 6 (3 US), computer games are going to be merely entertainment. They are art, but it isn't recognized yet, much like it took a while for photography, movies, music (The classical composers did that as a paid job, and it was considered as such.) etc...
I'd generally agree with your definition of art, but technically, pornography falls under the catagory of "art" as well. (Note the distinction between "nude art" and "porn" which does exist.)
You forgot Final Fantasy. The games technically aren't sequels because I have yet to see a single character copied from one game to the other. Sure, some stock characters exist (Cid is the only major one; Biggs and Wedge, Jesse in FF7 come to mind), but even Shakespere used "stock characters" to get the plot along without having to spend much time on it. Each FF game is origanal - Final Fantasy is more of a "series" name than a "game" name. Just because they belong to the same family doesn't mean they're the same thing.
I disagree here. Sure, anything can make you think differently. The "dada" movement (which is only art because some old stuffies declared it was) makes you think differently about things - but what is artistic in a door with a sign on it half-opened in a free standing display? It doesn't add anything to culture.
Video games are art, but defining it is very hard.
On the contrary, I don't think that Super Mario Bros. 2, or 3 (decidedly the best Mario game ever) qualify as any form of art. Take this from a person who grew up with them - a HS student. They are closer to board games than art forms. If you consider their code art (Which I believe it can be) then they might be art, for their design - not their display.
Truely artistic games are the masterpieces that Squaresoft produces. I doubt anyone will contest me on this one. Even the 8-bit NES version of Final Fantasy had a very detailed story, complete with character development, plot twists, etc...You could study an FF game in an english class and probably not have it be totally useless. Sure, its not Shakespere, but it isn't some random beach novel work either.
I've had even less luck with Windows 2000 NTFS file system encryption. Every file I "encrypt" with my account (it has administrator privlidges) is viewable by every other user of my computer no trouble at all. Open it up, copy elsewhere, delete, modify, whatever, done with 128-bit encryption over it. Aside from the fact that those users *shouldn't have access* to the files (I used NTFS resource-level permissions to deny all except myself for this resource) it "works" in that it doesn't kill things...*frustrated rant off*
For a 1U chassis, you're really restricted in your options. You may be able to fit a single PCI add-on card in somehow (IIRC, there are 90-degree adapters for PCI risers, half inch and 1 inch heights) Everything else would have to be integrated on the motherboard. The Tyan Athlon-MP motherboard offers two 100-Base-TX Ethernet ports, built-in 8MB AGP 3D video, SCSI and IDE, several GB of ram in slanted slots, 8 fan headers, and 64-bit PCI slots. You'd probably be able to use one of them with a 90-degree riser.
Other than that, you're pretty much out of luck. A 2U isn't that much bigger, and you can fit a lot more into it.
And QDOS was a free operating system! Tim Patterson was disgrunteled that the current version of CP/M wouldn't run on his hardware, and he wanted it to work NOW! So he wrote his own. Quick and Dirty Operating System, he called it. MS bought it for what is pittance now (IIRC, $4000?) remapped the letters a bit, and kept until Windows XP.
Maybe this would be a good market for the metaclustering described a few days ago. Splitting the Linux OS into a user-runable process, and having many "virtual" servers on one physical hardware. For a hosting company, the lower power requirement of the RLX, the lower space, and the lower cost of the Transmeta hardware might make this an attractive option, especially if they are inclined to do metaclustering.