Some research has shown that the "Golden Fleece"
stems from Bronze Age practices on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
It turns out that fleece is a natural excellent "gold filter". Bronze Age prospectors would let gold-laden streams run through the fleece, and the gold dust in the water would cling to the wool fibers.
Hang to dry, then brush it out and "You've got Gold!"
Stories of this practice probably reached the Greeks and begat the story of "Jason and the Golden Fleece"
720 x 486 on a TV is the same as 640 x 486 on a computer screen.
a TV screen has a "pixel aspect ratio" that is rectangular. when you do the math, you find that video lines that are 640 pixels wide on a computer screen (square P.A.R.) are stretched to 20 pixels and then displayed on a TV screen at a non-square P.A.R.
so yes, this is EXACTLY what the professionals use.
micromanagement my ass. i used to work for a DVD production company and there is a LOT of things that can (and DO) go wrong in the DVD production process.
I went out to eat at a greasy spoon in Orlando, when I was attending SIGGRAPH in 1994.
In some ways it was a typical ma & pop family diner. Our waitress looked like Flo's grandmother, chubby, big white hair, greasy apron.
The place was accented in orange and brown, and had awful yellow lighting to make everything feel just right. Sticky vinyl seats, and textured vinyl table cloths. There was a cigarette machine in the lobby and slow moving ceiling fans up above, but it was still stifling hot even though it was raining outside.
The strangest dichotomy was that this old woman who was serving us took our order using a wireless handheld keypad that communicated directly to the kitchen.
It was the highest tech in an extra low tech restaurant. It was cool, and this old woman showed us the handheld unit without interest. To her it was just this THING.
All the wait staff had been using them for years, and to her it was no different than a check pad and a pen, but to our gang of technical gear heads eating at the restaurant, it was definitely the coolest thing since sliced cheese.
All that, and the food tasted no better, and the service was no faster than any other greasy spoon.
reading the "DETAILED DESCRIPTION" reveals lots more: (basically, it looks like they have got a hardware implementation of DEC's "FX32":
optimize/translate code FRAGMENT to new architecture
run and test for errors, i/o conflicts
cache the resulting optimized code in temp memory
store the resulting optimized code (presumably to disk)
next time this code fragment is run, run the optimized version immediately!
the whole point of the thing is that they are able to reduce the instruction set on their chip to a VERY primitive set, and therefore reduce the number of gates on the chip. fewer gates = less heat, so you can crank up the frequency of the chip to probably several gigahertz!
so what you have is a cool (as in chilly) CPU running FEWER instructions at a HIGHER frequency!
cool thing to note: they have a working x86->TMCPU box, AND IT IS FAST!
... As a comparison, one embodiment of the present invention designed to run all available X86 applications is implemented by a morph host including approximately one-quarter of the number of gates of the Pentium Pro microprocessor yet runs X86 applications substantially faster than does the Pentium Pro microprocessor or any other known microprocessor capable of processing these applications.
... The use of a translation buffer to hold translated instructions allows instructions to be recalled without rerunning the lengthy process of determining which primitive instructions are required to implement each target instruction, addressing each primitive instruction, fetching each primitive instruction, optimizing the sequence of primitive instructions, allocating assets to each primitive instruction, reordering the primitive instructions, and executing each step of each sequence of primitive instructions involved each time each target instruction is executed. Once a target instruction has been translated, it may be recalled from the translation buffer and executed without the need for any of these myriad of steps.
... Some of the additional registers allow the use of register renaming to lessen the problem of instructions needing the same hardware resources
... The target (or shadow) registers are connected to their working register equivalents through a dedicated interface that allows an operation called "commit" to quickly transfer the content of all working registers to official target registers and allows an operation called "rollback" to quickly transfer the content of all official target registers back to their working register equivalents. The gated store buffer stores working memory state changes on an "uncommitted" side of a hardware "gate" and official memory state changes on a "committed" side of the hardware gate where these committed stores "drain" to main memory. A commit operation transfers stores from the uncommitted side of the gate to the committed side of the gate. The additional official registers and the gated store buffer allow the state of memory and the state of the target registers to be updated together once one or a group of target instructions have been translated and run without error.
... a typical operation of the code morphing software of the microprocessor when furnished the address of a target instruction by the application program is to first determine whether the target instruction at the target address has been translated. If the target instruction has not been translated, it and subsequent target instructions are fetched, decoded, translated, and then (possibly) optimized, reordered, and rescheduled into a new host translation, and stored in the translation buffer by the translator.
... When the particular target instruction sequence is next encountered in running the application, the host translation will then be found in the translation buffer and immediately executed without the necessity of translating, optimizing, reordering, or rescheduling.
... If a set of translated host instructions is executed without generating an exception, then the new working register values determined at the end of the set of instructions are transferred together to the official target registers
... However, one embodiment of the invention designed to run X86 programs utilizes a translation buffer of two megabytes of random access memory.
... If the comparison with the A/N bit in the TLB shows that the operation, however, affects an I/O device, then execution causes an exception to be taken; and the translator produces a new translation one target instruction at a time without optimizing, reordering, or rescheduling of any sort.
use the "QMS PS 810" driver which gets installed with every win9x/NT base system.
this is a completely generic Postscript driver that samba/lp/lpr understands, and you don't need to install any extra software on the PC, and you shouldn't even need the windows CDROMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Some research has shown that the "Golden Fleece"
stems from Bronze Age practices on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
It turns out that fleece is a natural excellent "gold filter". Bronze Age prospectors would let gold-laden streams run through the fleece, and the gold dust in the water would cling to the wool fibers.
Hang to dry, then brush it out and "You've got Gold!"
Stories of this practice probably reached the Greeks and begat the story of "Jason and the Golden Fleece"
and it looks like this is the original press release
this is an interesting one too
720 x 486 on a TV is the same as 640 x 486 on a computer screen.
a TV screen has a "pixel aspect ratio" that is rectangular. when you do the math, you find that video lines that are 640 pixels wide on a computer screen (square P.A.R.) are stretched to 20 pixels and then displayed on a TV screen at a non-square P.A.R.
so yes, this is EXACTLY what the professionals use.
micromanagement my ass. i used to work for a DVD production company and there is a LOT of things that can (and DO) go wrong in the DVD production process.
I went out to eat at a greasy spoon in Orlando, when I was attending SIGGRAPH in 1994.
In some ways it was a typical ma & pop family diner. Our waitress looked like Flo's grandmother, chubby, big white hair, greasy apron.
The place was accented in orange and brown, and had awful yellow lighting to make everything feel just right. Sticky vinyl seats, and textured vinyl table cloths. There was a cigarette machine in the lobby and slow moving ceiling fans up above, but it was still stifling hot even though it was raining outside.
The strangest dichotomy was that this old woman who was serving us took our order using a wireless handheld keypad that communicated directly to the kitchen.
It was the highest tech in an extra low tech restaurant. It was cool, and this old woman showed us the handheld unit without interest. To her it was just this THING.
All the wait staff had been using them for years, and to her it was no different than a check pad and a pen, but to our gang of technical gear heads eating at the restaurant, it was definitely the coolest thing since sliced cheese.
All that, and the food tasted no better, and the service was no faster than any other greasy spoon.
the whole point of the thing is that they are able to reduce the instruction set on their chip to a VERY primitive set, and therefore reduce the number of gates on the chip. fewer gates = less heat, so you can crank up the frequency of the chip to probably several gigahertz!
so what you have is a cool (as in chilly) CPU running FEWER instructions at a HIGHER frequency!
cool thing to note: they have a working x86->TMCPU box, AND IT IS FAST!
A while ago we threw a party at my place. Abe got trashed and puked on my couch.
:)
Whenever he has come over since then he is required to carry around a bucket
Yes.
/lp/lpr understands, and you don't need to install any extra software on the PC, and you shouldn't even need the windows CDROMs.
use the "QMS PS 810" driver which gets installed with every win9x/NT base system.
this is a completely generic Postscript driver that samba
wha?
how can you say that it's a monopoly given the existence of FedEx and UPS?
The US Postal Service is the only profitable (i.e. self-supporting without any taxes) arm of the government.
And EXPENSIVE?!?! Just exactly HOW is $0.33 EXPENSIVE? Keep in mind that this will send a letter ANYWHERE in the states in just a few days.
i know for a fact that the open-source version of this technology will have a button that says "don't use P3P in any way."
if it's NOT there, i'll write it myself. THAT'S THE POINT.
if the technology is owned by these patent mongers, i won't have that choice.