Hey, does anybody know if there are _ANY_ Vesa 2.0 compliant video cards on the market anymore? I don't recall seeing anything with ROM'd Vesa 2.0 since my old VLB Hercules card that used the W32 chipset...
The trick is that rectangular objects stack easily, fit under/beside desks, and are in many other ways practical. I'm against "beautiful" or "artistic" computer hardware if it interferes with functionality. If i can ever afford it, i'm going rackmount with my home systems.
It reminds me of obnoxious contemporary furniture, snotty yuppie housewares, tacky.COM boom era loft houses, and all those other things that symbolize snobby excess, and like many other Apple products, it's very 3 years ago.
I like having the freedom to play obnoxious video games with no redeeming social value. It's a great outlet. It also makes me happy to see all those worry-wart pissants who can't mind their own business get a good slap in the face.
Funny that we'll impose terriffs against the Ukraine at the whim of the RIAA to protect the profits of Time Warner, but we won't lift a finger against China in the trade department even when they go around torturing and shooting political dissidents.
I've seen so many companies/labs/etc... with prototype portable personal fuel cells for running electronics over the past 5 years, but none of them have made it to production. I'll believe it when i can get one off the shelf and use it for my wearable, but until such a time, it's just pie in the sky.
This is annoying because they are not necesarily clearly labeled, it is a lot of overhead in terms of time and effort (as compared to the cost of a CD it's significant) to return a CD to the store where it was bought, let alone to return something to an online retailer. I guess if all of Universal's CDs are going to be copy protected, then it's easy to avoid them, but a lot of the other labels (gee i didn't even know that universal _made_ CDs) are trying hard to keep people from knowing that they are buying a crippled CD.
It seems like the industry _is_ really pissing into the wind on this one, because explaining to a non-tech sort of person that their BRAND NEW and FRESHLY UNWRAPPED album doesn't play in their car beacause of some elaborate and technically detailed reason that essentially involves assuming that every consumer is a crook and should not be trusted... All i have to say is i'm glad i don't work for _their_ customer service department.
I've found in my limited (hobby only) game programming experience that real physics make for boring run 'n' jump games, but they make for wonderful projectile games. Think ballistics (Scorched Earth, Quake, etc...).
Another pet peeve i have is that a lot of these sort of things never really mention one killer point. When computing whatever delta t for updating a scene, it is best to use a moving average of the last n frames (i use 32, kept in a rotating ring buffer), because that keeps an unusually long or short frame from fucking up any calcultions.
All that is true. People will continue to buy Intel processors for the same reason everybody buys Coke, because it's there in front of them of the shelf and the name is stuck in their brains by advertising. It's the american way.
Now there are other factors. Until recently Windows didn't run too well on any of the available Athlon chipsets. From what i hear this has changed. On the other hand, the price/performance ratio assuming some sane OS like BSD or Linux was much in the favor of the Athlon.
This is one of those things that i have to wonder about, because technically i'm a business. Yep, just me. I go to work every day, sit at their desk, user their computer, their bandwidth, and all that, but due to the current economic situation and for their bookkeeping, i'm a consultant. I pay taxes as if i employ myself, etc...
This is the same thing that makes the SSH (assuming _anybody_ uses actuall SSH (as opposed to OpenSSH) anymore) license agreement such a pain in the ass. Most of my friends are their own businesses on one level or another... Even the guys who are waiters, cooks, bartenders, etc... They play in bands and sell their CD's and play shows and get paid for it. It is not very meaningful to draw the business/personal distinction these days, and it's downright obnoxious to limit the applications you can run based on it. IP traffic is IP traffic. If i'm within whatever bandwidth limit they've set, it's my perfect right to send packets of random noise to a friend accross town and they lump it and deal.
Total flamebait, but it's true. I'd love to kick this guy's teeth down his throat. One more loss of control of technology. This is _just like_ copy protected CD's.
I have to say that the company i work for had to spend a lot of time writing a NON-i18N version of a bunch of standard library calls because after some profiling, we discovered that 75% of the CPU time this one app was using was spent in calls like toupper and isalpha and other things like that. Our code needed to deal with stuff in STANDARD ASCII only. We replaced them with an inline lookup table style function and got an immediate and _HUGE_ performance boost.
The point of this is that people adding any sort of strange feature creep (i know call me insensitive for not giving a damn about the handicapped and non-english speakers) should be kept modular so there is still a readily available fast and simple version of all functions that are polluted by slow and cumbersome new features.
MAC addresses are carefully assigned by vendor to assure that there are no two devices on earth that respond to the same MAC address. This eliminates computers with the same MAC address on the same loop of network stomping on eachother and causing errors, dataloss, and other such confusion.
Even though there is very little chance of actually colliding with somebody else on your loop, it's still an invitation for errors and unriliability.
What i'd really like is an NTSC video out on one of these buggers, 'cause that'd make it a perfect wearable (not to mention a really cool portable on-the-spot presentation machine. Just imagine, plug into the projector and run, no hassle).
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Now that the U.S. is "at war" i wouldn't be surprised to see more censorship popping up left and right. Now admittedly, we do have a long way to go before it gets that bad, but i doubt many americans could be bothered to kill (and conversely to die) for their freedom of speech and freedom of asociation, hell many can't even be bothered vote for those freedoms, some can't even be bothered to vote at all.
During World War II we locked people up for their ethnic background, and during the cold war we persecuted people based for allegedly belonging to subversive political organizations that supported things such as a living wage and racial equality.
What i'm saying is that we shouldn't be so smug, this sort of thing isn't as far fetched as one might think.
This guy is not a troll, and he does have a point (about the dolphins)... I think that if everybody were to convert to Islam (or any other religeon for that matter) people would jsut fight between sects and over minor differences. Human beings are quarrelsome, territorial, disagreeable animals and we need a reason to feel superior and we've proven over time that if we have no real reason to fight, we will anyway. If we have paradise, we'll find a way to fuck it up (and no I don't believe in the garden of eden and all that stuff, but it is a good fable, and it does illustrate my point pretty well).
As for intelligent (and even unitelligent) animals, they will be glad to see us go. Even if we nuke everything into a radioactive smoking pile of rubble i doubt we could completely eradicate the volcanic vent bacteria, nor blue green algae, or a bunch of other little seeds of life. When people talk about saving the environment/saving the planet/ etc... what they really mean is "save ourselves" (which is a fine message i guess), but we're playing with our own destruction, the planet will go on without us, and as resilliant as we may be, we're not the most resilliant species out there. Whatever, fuck-it, i'm gonna go eat lunch.
The midwest is a wireless imlementor's dream. There's no hills, no trees, no mountains, and few cities. Any line-of-sight wireless system will thrive there because initially when the customer base is small, they can still cover a large service area with a small number of towers, and then ass they fill up decrease transmitter power and increase density of towers.
I have to say, i was given a 48gx by my family for chistmas one year in high school. I remember sitting around figuring out how to write games for it, i remember using it in calculus class, and i keep it on my computer desk and use it almost every day. I love that poor old calculator. I love the fact that it has a hierarchical filesystem. It just plain rules. Plus on top of that it's really burly and indestructible...
Goddamn.
Developers should not be treated as sheep. Even writing mundane input routines is a creative process, and requires a decent amount of both technical know-how and intelligence.
Would a company consider telling all their advertising and marketing people that they can sit at their drawing boards but not adjust the height, angle and lighting of their workspace? If you treat developers like idiots who can't manage their own workstations (i mean geez!), that will show through in the quality of their work and their morale.
I have recently been working on learning Scheme in my spare time, with the eventual goal of writing a scheme based scripting system to run the guts of a massive adventure game/graphical mud sort of system, everything from environment simulation (predator/prey cycles, etc...) to 3d models (i.e. models will be geometry glued together by scripts so you could have trees that by a random seed and a growth level variable have grown over time and are unique to provide interresting landscape features). Scheme is appealing because it's simple, powerful, and adapts well to the idea of a threaded interpreter.
To further my goal of learning Scheme inside and out, i've been reading "The Little Schemer", as well as "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Do you have any other recommendations for good Scheme programming texts?
I assume that one should be able to calculate some ratio of how much new money is put into circulation to how much the government collects in combined income taxes that same year (or some subsquent year with a well defined delay).
now statistically i'll assume that the spending habits of the bulk public are fairly predictable, and that any one "dollar" will go through some predictable and estimable (on average) number of different people in a year.
Okay, so say there is a government imposed transaction cost on each smart card transaction (something small percentage-wise), but that money just _vanishes_ because there is no centralized clearing house or anything that gets any data back from the transactions.
Now the fun part. Instead of collecting money as income taxes, the value of the dollar has been raised by this slow drain on supply, and it's even a predictable amount of drain (within statistical limits), and so the government can "print" that much new money, as revenue for itself which if all the statistics have been balanced correctly should equal what it was taking in taxes before, but with one key difference. Now, there is no flow of information back to the government, and no need for central clearing, and plus the government wins because nobody is immune to taxes, and the people win because nobody is breathing down their necks about how much they spend, where, and when.
Now, as a libertarian, i don't like giving money to the government, because chances are 9 out of 10 they are going to waste it on large and inefficient beaurocracy or use it to abuse the people, so it's hard for me to say this, but if i don't trust them with my (or anybody's) money, i _certainly_ don't trust them with my information.
The thing i worry about in a cashless society is that once you have the centralized system to deal with clearing the transaction, people are going to extract marketing data. The government is going to look at your purchasing habits and decide that some people have similar purchasing habits too far to one or the other side of the political spectrum, and are too much of a threat to middle class suburban normalcy and should be liquidated.
Also that means that if they _suspect_ you of selling/using drugs, they can freeze your finances completely. It gives _way_ too much control to somebody else, based on politics, purchasing habits, etc... It makes my skin crawl.
P.S.
I don't think many (any?) major economic powers even _pretend_ to back their currency with anything real anymore, let alone gold.
I am curious what sort of user you find showing the most interrest in AtheOS? Also, it looks like the sort of thing that could do quite well in an Information Appliance or other embedded application because it doesn't have as much baggage as UNIX or Windows.
One more thing, were you an Amiga fan?
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Hey, does anybody know if there are _ANY_ Vesa 2.0 compliant video cards on the market anymore? I don't recall seeing anything with ROM'd Vesa 2.0 since my old VLB Hercules card that used the W32 chipset...
The trick is that rectangular objects stack easily, fit under/beside desks, and are in many other ways practical. I'm against "beautiful" or "artistic" computer hardware if it interferes with functionality. If i can ever afford it, i'm going rackmount with my home systems.
It reminds me of obnoxious contemporary furniture, snotty yuppie housewares, tacky .COM boom era loft houses, and all those other things that symbolize snobby excess, and like many other Apple products, it's very 3 years ago.
I like having the freedom to play obnoxious video games with no redeeming social value. It's a great outlet. It also makes me happy to see all those worry-wart pissants who can't mind their own business get a good slap in the face.
Funny that we'll impose terriffs against the Ukraine at the whim of the RIAA to protect the profits of Time Warner, but we won't lift a finger against China in the trade department even when they go around torturing and shooting political dissidents.
I guess it shows what the U.S. is about, eh?
I've seen so many companies/labs/etc... with prototype portable personal fuel cells for running electronics over the past 5 years, but none of them have made it to production. I'll believe it when i can get one off the shelf and use it for my wearable, but until such a time, it's just pie in the sky.
This is annoying because they are not necesarily clearly labeled, it is a lot of overhead in terms of time and effort (as compared to the cost of a CD it's significant) to return a CD to the store where it was bought, let alone to return something to an online retailer. I guess if all of Universal's CDs are going to be copy protected, then it's easy to avoid them, but a lot of the other labels (gee i didn't even know that universal _made_ CDs) are trying hard to keep people from knowing that they are buying a crippled CD.
It seems like the industry _is_ really pissing into the wind on this one, because explaining to a non-tech sort of person that their BRAND NEW and FRESHLY UNWRAPPED album doesn't play in their car beacause of some elaborate and technically detailed reason that essentially involves assuming that every consumer is a crook and should not be trusted... All i have to say is i'm glad i don't work for _their_ customer service department.
I've found in my limited (hobby only) game programming experience that real physics make for boring run 'n' jump games, but they make for wonderful projectile games. Think ballistics (Scorched Earth, Quake, etc...).
Another pet peeve i have is that a lot of these sort of things never really mention one killer point. When computing whatever delta t for updating a scene, it is best to use a moving average of the last n frames (i use 32, kept in a rotating ring buffer), because that keeps an unusually long or short frame from fucking up any calcultions.
All that is true. People will continue to buy Intel processors for the same reason everybody buys Coke, because it's there in front of them of the shelf and the name is stuck in their brains by advertising. It's the american way.
Now there are other factors. Until recently Windows didn't run too well on any of the available Athlon chipsets. From what i hear this has changed. On the other hand, the price/performance ratio assuming some sane OS like BSD or Linux was much in the favor of the Athlon.
This is one of those things that i have to wonder about, because technically i'm a business. Yep, just me. I go to work every day, sit at their desk, user their computer, their bandwidth, and all that, but due to the current economic situation and for their bookkeeping, i'm a consultant. I pay taxes as if i employ myself, etc...
This is the same thing that makes the SSH (assuming _anybody_ uses actuall SSH (as opposed to OpenSSH) anymore) license agreement such a pain in the ass. Most of my friends are their own businesses on one level or another... Even the guys who are waiters, cooks, bartenders, etc... They play in bands and sell their CD's and play shows and get paid for it. It is not very meaningful to draw the business/personal distinction these days, and it's downright obnoxious to limit the applications you can run based on it. IP traffic is IP traffic. If i'm within whatever bandwidth limit they've set, it's my perfect right to send packets of random noise to a friend accross town and they lump it and deal.
It's a SPACE STATION!
I need to learn to type more slowly, it wouldn't let me post because my comment took only 14 seconds to type.
Total flamebait, but it's true. I'd love to kick this guy's teeth down his throat. One more loss of control of technology. This is _just like_ copy protected CD's.
I have to say that the company i work for had to spend a lot of time writing a NON-i18N version of a bunch of standard library calls because after some profiling, we discovered that 75% of the CPU time this one app was using was spent in calls like toupper and isalpha and other things like that. Our code needed to deal with stuff in STANDARD ASCII only. We replaced them with an inline lookup table style function and got an immediate and _HUGE_ performance boost.
The point of this is that people adding any sort of strange feature creep (i know call me insensitive for not giving a damn about the handicapped and non-english speakers) should be kept modular so there is still a readily available fast and simple version of all functions that are polluted by slow and cumbersome new features.
MAC addresses are carefully assigned by vendor to assure that there are no two devices on earth that respond to the same MAC address. This eliminates computers with the same MAC address on the same loop of network stomping on eachother and causing errors, dataloss, and other such confusion.
Even though there is very little chance of actually colliding with somebody else on your loop, it's still an invitation for errors and unriliability.
What i'd really like is an NTSC video out on one of these buggers, 'cause that'd make it a perfect wearable (not to mention a really cool portable on-the-spot presentation machine. Just imagine, plug into the projector and run, no hassle).
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Now that the U.S. is "at war" i wouldn't be surprised to see more censorship popping up left and right. Now admittedly, we do have a long way to go before it gets that bad, but i doubt many americans could be bothered to kill (and conversely to die) for their freedom of speech and freedom of asociation, hell many can't even be bothered vote for those freedoms, some can't even be bothered to vote at all.
During World War II we locked people up for their ethnic background, and during the cold war we persecuted people based for allegedly belonging to subversive political organizations that supported things such as a living wage and racial equality.
What i'm saying is that we shouldn't be so smug, this sort of thing isn't as far fetched as one might think.
This guy is not a troll, and he does have a point (about the dolphins)... I think that if everybody were to convert to Islam (or any other religeon for that matter) people would jsut fight between sects and over minor differences. Human beings are quarrelsome, territorial, disagreeable animals and we need a reason to feel superior and we've proven over time that if we have no real reason to fight, we will anyway. If we have paradise, we'll find a way to fuck it up (and no I don't believe in the garden of eden and all that stuff, but it is a good fable, and it does illustrate my point pretty well).
As for intelligent (and even unitelligent) animals, they will be glad to see us go. Even if we nuke everything into a radioactive smoking pile of rubble i doubt we could completely eradicate the volcanic vent bacteria, nor blue green algae, or a bunch of other little seeds of life. When people talk about saving the environment/saving the planet/ etc... what they really mean is "save ourselves" (which is a fine message i guess), but we're playing with our own destruction, the planet will go on without us, and as resilliant as we may be, we're not the most resilliant species out there. Whatever, fuck-it, i'm gonna go eat lunch.
The midwest is a wireless imlementor's dream. There's no hills, no trees, no mountains, and few cities. Any line-of-sight wireless system will thrive there because initially when the customer base is small, they can still cover a large service area with a small number of towers, and then ass they fill up decrease transmitter power and increase density of towers.
I have to say, i was given a 48gx by my family for chistmas one year in high school. I remember sitting around figuring out how to write games for it, i remember using it in calculus class, and i keep it on my computer desk and use it almost every day. I love that poor old calculator. I love the fact that it has a hierarchical filesystem. It just plain rules. Plus on top of that it's really burly and indestructible...
Goddamn.
Developers should not be treated as sheep. Even writing mundane input routines is a creative process, and requires a decent amount of both technical know-how and intelligence.
Would a company consider telling all their advertising and marketing people that they can sit at their drawing boards but not adjust the height, angle and lighting of their workspace? If you treat developers like idiots who can't manage their own workstations (i mean geez!), that will show through in the quality of their work and their morale.
I have recently been working on learning Scheme in my spare time, with the eventual goal of writing a scheme based scripting system to run the guts of a massive adventure game/graphical mud sort of system, everything from environment simulation (predator/prey cycles, etc...) to 3d models (i.e. models will be geometry glued together by scripts so you could have trees that by a random seed and a growth level variable have grown over time and are unique to provide interresting landscape features). Scheme is appealing because it's simple, powerful, and adapts well to the idea of a threaded interpreter.
To further my goal of learning Scheme inside and out, i've been reading "The Little Schemer", as well as "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Do you have any other recommendations for good Scheme programming texts?
Okay, here is i far out proposal.
First some assuptions:
I assume that one should be able to calculate some ratio of how much new money is put into circulation to how much the government collects in combined income taxes that same year (or some subsquent year with a well defined delay).
now statistically i'll assume that the spending habits of the bulk public are fairly predictable, and that any one "dollar" will go through some predictable and estimable (on average) number of different people in a year.
Okay, so say there is a government imposed transaction cost on each smart card transaction (something small percentage-wise), but that money just _vanishes_ because there is no centralized clearing house or anything that gets any data back from the transactions.
Now the fun part. Instead of collecting money as income taxes, the value of the dollar has been raised by this slow drain on supply, and it's even a predictable amount of drain (within statistical limits), and so the government can "print" that much new money, as revenue for itself which if all the statistics have been balanced correctly should equal what it was taking in taxes before, but with one key difference. Now, there is no flow of information back to the government, and no need for central clearing, and plus the government wins because nobody is immune to taxes, and the people win because nobody is breathing down their necks about how much they spend, where, and when.
Now, as a libertarian, i don't like giving money to the government, because chances are 9 out of 10 they are going to waste it on large and inefficient beaurocracy or use it to abuse the people, so it's hard for me to say this, but if i don't trust them with my (or anybody's) money, i _certainly_ don't trust them with my information.
The thing i worry about in a cashless society is that once you have the centralized system to deal with clearing the transaction, people are going to extract marketing data. The government is going to look at your purchasing habits and decide that some people have similar purchasing habits too far to one or the other side of the political spectrum, and are too much of a threat to middle class suburban normalcy and should be liquidated.
Also that means that if they _suspect_ you of selling/using drugs, they can freeze your finances completely. It gives _way_ too much control to somebody else, based on politics, purchasing habits, etc... It makes my skin crawl.
P.S.
I don't think many (any?) major economic powers even _pretend_ to back their currency with anything real anymore, let alone gold.
I think i speak for us all when i say:
"Thank you Master Control program..."
I am curious what sort of user you find showing the most interrest in AtheOS? Also, it looks like the sort of thing that could do quite well in an Information Appliance or other embedded application because it doesn't have as much baggage as UNIX or Windows.
One more thing, were you an Amiga fan?