And as for the Nazis developing the first jet engine, Sir Frank Whittle might have an argument with that. (Although the Germans may have had a jet -powered aircraft in the air first.) IIRC, according to "Inventions that changed the world", Whittle patented his jet engine quite early on (I think before he'd built a working version) which meant that it became public knowledge. It's quite possible that the Nazis saw this patent and, of course, probably didn't feel the need to pay any licencing fees for their development:)
Using imperial measurements, you can accurately cut a third of a yard, half a yard etc. And I don't mean none of this 33.333333 recurring crap either. You can cut a perfect third.
Brilliant! Can I have a fifth of a yard of timber, please?
I was in england last semester and nearly everything was still refered to as stones. Nobody knew either kilograms or pounds, I always had to convert everything to stones for them.
You must have been in a strange part of the UK! The only time I've seen stones used is when measuring body weight.
I'd love to see an FFT implementation (maybe it's not so hard... will have to download and play with it.)
A paper on that very subject was presented at Graphics Hardware 2003. You should be able to find it here
Re:Corrections to your Kyro 2 "info"
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 1
Remember the Kyro II? The chip used a unique tile-based rendering system.... That bit was correct..
Flash forward a couple of years, and while NVidia and ATI are still willing to release updated drivers for their cards of that era, the Kyro lingers unsupported, This is incorrect. IIRC, there was a new driver release about 1~2 months ago. Go look on the PowerVR web site.
even though NEC (the chip designer) and Kyro was designed by PowerVR and ST. NEC were involved with the previous generations (including the Dreamcast version).
My friend wanted to play Halo, and even though the card should've been able to support the game (albeit at a lower resolution/framerate), he can't because his card is basically ignored and unsupported by the game manufacturers and the source comapnies for the card itself. Ignored by whom? Certainly not the driver writers. There are, however, a number of games which were testing for the existence of HW T&L and refusing to run even when running T&L on a modern CPU resulted in perfectly acceptable performance. New drivers have been released which coerce such games into running. Obviously, if a game insists on, say, DX8/DX9-only features then there is little chance of getting Kyro to run!
I suspect that this high performance is only attainable for the field the GPU is specialized for, i.e. graphics-related things. Or isn't it?
It is for "more specialised" tasks but it certainly isn't restricted to graphics. Computation such as FFTs and Fluid Flow is also possible.
If, like me, you couldn't get through the home page, this sort of thing (including, IIRC, Brook) was discussed at Siggraph and also this year's Graphics Hardware conference. Scroll down to the "Panel: GPUs as Stream Processors" and "Session 4: Simulation and Computation" sections for slides.
British-made spacecraft? Damn, that's gonna be impossible to find parts for. On Mars? I'd have to agree it'll be difficult but Parcel Force might still be able to deliver.:-)
Um, I believe the V1 was a ballistic missile - not a cruise missile. They're quite a bit different from each other. A ballistic missile just follows a trajectory so it falls more or less near its target,...
I believe you're thinking of the V2 - the rocket-based "Vengence weapon". The V1 a.k.a. "buzz-bomb" or "doodle-bug", was an unmanned pulse-jet aircraft and thus was not following a trajectory per se. It would have had to have some minimal in-flight navigational ability even if that was just to fly in a straight line at the right altitude until it ran out of fuel.
The British, however, had control of much of the German spy network (ref the book "Station-X") and so kept feeding back info that the V1's were over-running London. The Germans thus put less fuel into them and so they subsequently fell short of their target.
I suppose the Germans could have tried used the navigational beam system they'd originally used for bombing raids but, then, those had been discovered and jammed by the Brits.
Wow, I havn't really read in to it, but is that very big? I mean, they were talking about not too long ago that 128bit encryption is "almost impossiable" to break. If this is 576bit encryption, and they've broken it, doesn't this mean that 1024bit is looking slightly weak? Whats the 'difficulty' of breaking this key on a relative scale?
You're confusing symetric key ciphers (eg AES (Rijndael), DES, Blowfish etc) with the public/private key ciphers (RSA, Diffie-Hellman). The former can use any "random" pattern of bits as the key, whereas the latter need a much larger key size because they rely on certain numeric properties of the key or algorithm.
i read jurassic park, the fish would just spontaneously switch sex. That's a possibility I suppose. There are several species of fish (IIRC) on the Great Barrier Reef that can do this. In some the top female will become a male and in others it's the other way around.
Just to follow up, the first patent that MS list as protecting FAT (US5,579,517) has this as the abstract:
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.
Do these devices really need compatibility with "dead" operating systems?
The second patent seems to another concerning filename formats. I haven't bothered to look at the other 2.
This one isn't really submarine --- They created FAT in 1976, according to the microsoft.com page... but the earliest patent was filed in 1995.
That can't possibly be right. In the US (but nowhere else) you have a 1 year's grace period from the time of publishing an invention such that you are still allowed to patent it. Even with the USPTO's track record (!!) I honestly can't see them granting a patent based just on 1976 technology. MS must have included new ideas... or something like that.
There is little chance to see the A1 in England. So the "A1" that runs northwards from London is a complete figment of my imagination?! I wish the same could be said for the traffic jams on it!
Back on topic-ish, there's a section of the M1 in the outskirts of London that runs parallel to a major line. The cars and trains seem to travel at about the same speed in that section so I suppose there's a chance of some (very dangerous) bandwidth theft.
The card took up its own slot, and used a pass-through video cable to connect the monitor: When a Voodoo-compliant video signal was detected, it hijacked the output to the monitor and took over. Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.
I personally think (but I am biased) that the PowerVR PCX1/2 solution was nicer. It also piggy-backed off the 2D card but, instead of using cables, it squirted pixels (in packets) across the PCI bus into the 2D card's memory and so could even do 3D in a window. The scheme wouldn't work well today with ultra-high resolutions but it was fine for 1024x768 @30+ Hz.
There are two problems with the old PowerVR cards: a) no hardware T&L b) no cube map support
The implications of the first are pretty obvious. As long as a game can run on a TNT it should be ok on the PowerVR; but once it expects T&L hardware then you might as well have Intel's integrated graphics hardware...
Actually the first is really not a big problem if you have a reasonable CPU. AFAIU there is a customisable option in the driver that tells these annoying applications that the system "does" have HW T&L and then runs it on the CPU. It often makes little difference to performance because you are probably fillrate limited anyway.
Cube maps, OTOH, are more of a nuisance to work around. It's especially annoying if they're only being used normalise a few interpolated vectors for lighting. You could probably live with a few dimmer pixels.
I had a PowerVR KyroII, which was supposed to be a contender for the GeForce2. It was good, but... there is always a 'but'. The problem was once the card aged a bit. The drivers really didnt stay current, and support for the card was flakey in many games.
No! The drivers are still updated! The most recent releases for Windows AND LINUX are only about 1 week old. You can find them at the PowerVR Dev site. For some reason these are not yet on the main PowerVR downloads page but I suspect that it won't be too long before they appear.
Once you reach voting age (or are naturalised as an australian) you are eligible to "register to vote". Once you complete this process you will then be expected to vote in ALL future elections for your area. If you do not register to vote you will not be allowed to vote in any elections.
This is analogous to a "one-way" opt-in process. You can choose not to vote until you so desire, but once you register there is no way to de-register yourself (excluding death and insanity).
Not quite. I'm nit-picking but, if you are overseas for some period of time (eg. become non-resident), you won't have to vote.
OP+1 wrote: I would hardly equate downloading music with drug pushing.
OP wrote: Why not? Both "crimes" were created entirely by government, not human nature...... In the absence of government (coercion), neither drug using/selling or copying music would be considered an initiation of force.
I don't want to claim that music copyright infringement is moral but, you can hardly claim that these are similar when the effects of the two "crimes" are poles apart!
The latter might reduce the income of an otherwise quite rich bunch of people but does relatively little damage to the perpetrator.
The former, OTOH, tends to make the perpetrators quite rich at the expense of generally completely screwing up the lives of others.
Slashdot Mirror
And as for the Nazis developing the first jet engine, Sir Frank Whittle might have an argument with that. (Although the Germans may have had a jet -powered aircraft in the air first.) :)
IIRC, according to "Inventions that changed the world", Whittle patented his jet engine quite early on (I think before he'd built a working version) which meant that it became public knowledge.
It's quite possible that the Nazis saw this patent and, of course, probably didn't feel the need to pay any licencing fees for their development
Why? Because it's not base ten.
Using imperial measurements, you can accurately cut a third of a yard, half a yard etc. And I don't mean none of this 33.333333 recurring crap either. You can cut a perfect third.
Brilliant! Can I have a fifth of a yard of timber, please?
I was in england last semester and nearly everything was still refered to as stones. Nobody knew either kilograms or pounds, I always had to convert everything to stones for them.
You must have been in a strange part of the UK! The only time I've seen stones used is when measuring body weight.
Why do you call them 'English' units, when everyone else knows them as Imperial units? :-) We stopped using most of them some time ago.
Especially since, IIRC, "Imperial" does not refer to the British Empire but to the Roman one.
OT: This is just a dummy post to cancel an accidental incorrect moderation. Sorry
I'd love to see an FFT implementation (maybe it's not so hard ... will have to download and play with it.)
A paper on that very subject was presented at Graphics Hardware 2003. You should be able to find it here
Remember the Kyro II? The chip used a unique tile-based rendering system ....
That bit was correct..
Flash forward a couple of years, and while NVidia and ATI are still willing to release updated drivers for their cards of that era, the Kyro lingers unsupported,
This is incorrect. IIRC, there was a new driver release about 1~2 months ago. Go look on the PowerVR web site.
even though NEC (the chip designer) and
Kyro was designed by PowerVR and ST. NEC were involved with the previous generations (including the Dreamcast version).
My friend wanted to play Halo, and even though the card should've been able to support the game (albeit at a lower resolution/framerate), he can't because his card is basically ignored and unsupported by the game manufacturers and the source comapnies for the card itself.
Ignored by whom? Certainly not the driver writers. There are, however, a number of games which were testing for the existence of HW T&L and refusing to run even when running T&L on a modern CPU resulted in perfectly acceptable performance. New drivers have been released which coerce such games into running. Obviously, if a game insists on, say, DX8/DX9-only features then there is little chance of getting Kyro to run!
Oh, BTW apparently Halo is running on Kyro.
I suspect that this high performance is only attainable for the field the GPU is specialized for, i.e. graphics-related things. Or isn't it?
It is for "more specialised" tasks but it certainly isn't restricted to graphics. Computation such as FFTs and Fluid Flow is also possible.
If, like me, you couldn't get through the home page, this sort of thing (including, IIRC, Brook) was discussed at Siggraph and also
this year's Graphics Hardware conference.
Scroll down to the "Panel: GPUs as Stream Processors" and "Session 4: Simulation and Computation" sections for slides.
British-made spacecraft? Damn, that's gonna be impossible to find parts for. :-)
On Mars? I'd have to agree it'll be difficult but Parcel Force might still be able to deliver.
DOH... The installer is insisting on using C for something.... and that drive is full.
It says there's insufficient disk space on drive D yet there's ~5GB available. :-(
Sigh...
Um, I believe the V1 was a ballistic missile - not a cruise missile. They're quite a bit different from each other. A ballistic missile just follows a trajectory so it falls more or less near its target,...
I believe you're thinking of the V2 - the rocket-based "Vengence weapon". The V1 a.k.a. "buzz-bomb" or "doodle-bug", was an unmanned pulse-jet aircraft and thus was not following a trajectory per se. It would have had to have some minimal in-flight navigational ability even if that was just to fly in a straight line at the right altitude until it ran out of fuel.
The British, however, had control of much of the German spy network (ref the book "Station-X") and so kept feeding back info that the V1's were over-running London. The Germans thus put less fuel into them and so they subsequently fell short of their target.
I suppose the Germans could have tried used the navigational beam system they'd originally used for bombing raids but, then, those had been discovered and jammed by the Brits.
Wow, I havn't really read in to it, but is that very big? I mean, they were talking about not too long ago that 128bit encryption is "almost impossiable" to break. If this is 576bit encryption, and they've broken it, doesn't this mean that 1024bit is looking slightly weak? Whats the 'difficulty' of breaking this key on a relative scale?
You're confusing symetric key ciphers (eg AES (Rijndael), DES, Blowfish etc) with the public/private key ciphers (RSA, Diffie-Hellman). The former can use any "random" pattern of bits as the key, whereas the latter need a much larger key size because they rely on certain numeric properties of the key or algorithm.
i read jurassic park, the fish would just spontaneously switch sex.
That's a possibility I suppose. There are several species of fish (IIRC) on the Great Barrier Reef that can do this. In some the top female will become a male and in others it's the other way around.
Do these devices really need compatibility with "dead" operating systems?
The second patent seems to another concerning filename formats. I haven't bothered to look at the other 2.
This one isn't really submarine --- They created FAT in 1976, according to the microsoft.com page ... but the earliest patent was filed in 1995.
That can't possibly be right. In the US (but nowhere else) you have a 1 year's grace period from the time of publishing an invention such that you are still allowed to patent it. Even with the USPTO's track record (!!) I honestly can't see them granting a patent based just on 1976 technology. MS must have included new ideas... or something like that.
There is little chance to see the A1 in England.
So the "A1" that runs northwards from London is a complete figment of my imagination?! I wish the same could be said for the traffic jams on it!
Back on topic-ish, there's a section of the M1 in the outskirts of London that runs parallel to a major line. The cars and trains seem to travel at about the same speed in that section so I suppose there's a chance of some (very dangerous) bandwidth theft.
... That'd bring a whole new meaning to "paying an arm and a leg" for something.
Can you imagine being robbed?!!!!
" I've never read the book, only seen the movie. What happens in the last chapter?"
I'm quoting from memory here (so apologies for mistakes) but it ends with...
"Well, I'm back" said Sam.
Does that explain it for you? 8-D
The card took up its own slot, and used a pass-through video cable to connect the monitor: When a Voodoo-compliant video signal was detected, it hijacked the output to the monitor and took over.
Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.
I personally think (but I am biased) that the PowerVR PCX1/2 solution was nicer. It also piggy-backed off the 2D card but, instead of using cables, it squirted pixels (in packets) across the PCI bus into the 2D card's memory and so could even do 3D in a window. The scheme wouldn't work well today with ultra-high resolutions but it was fine for 1024x768 @30+ Hz.
There are two problems with the old PowerVR cards:
a) no hardware T&L
b) no cube map support
The implications of the first are pretty obvious. As long as a game can run on a TNT it should be ok on the PowerVR; but once it expects T&L hardware then you might as well have Intel's integrated graphics hardware...
Actually the first is really not a big problem if you have a reasonable CPU. AFAIU there is a customisable option in the driver that tells these annoying applications that the system "does" have HW T&L and then runs it on the CPU. It often makes little difference to performance because you are probably fillrate limited anyway.
Cube maps, OTOH, are more of a nuisance to work around. It's especially annoying if they're only being used normalise a few interpolated vectors for lighting. You could probably live with a few dimmer pixels.
So would all the other teenagers out there. Trust me, when you reach 30, you'll look back and think "God, I was an idiot!"
:-)
It's OK, though, from what I hear when you reach 50 you look back at your 30s and say "God, I was an idiot!"
Perhaps achieving enlightenment is coincidental with thinking "I am an idiot"
I had a PowerVR KyroII, which was supposed to be a contender for the GeForce2. It was good, but... there is always a 'but'. The problem was once the card aged a bit. The drivers really didnt stay current, and support for the card was flakey in many games.
No! The drivers are still updated! The most recent releases for Windows AND LINUX are only about 1 week old. You can find them at the PowerVR Dev site. For some reason these are not yet on the main PowerVR downloads page but I suspect that it won't be too long before they appear.
Simon
Once you reach voting age (or are naturalised as an australian) you are eligible to "register to vote". Once you complete this process you will then be expected to vote in ALL future elections for your area. If you do not register to vote you will not be allowed to vote in any elections.
This is analogous to a "one-way" opt-in process. You can choose not to vote until you so desire, but once you register there is no way to de-register yourself (excluding death and insanity).
Not quite. I'm nit-picking but, if you are overseas for some period of time (eg. become non-resident), you won't have to vote.
OP+1 wrote: I would hardly equate downloading music with drug pushing.
..... In the absence of government (coercion), neither drug using/selling or copying music would be considered an initiation of force.
OP wrote: Why not? Both "crimes" were created entirely by government, not human nature.
I don't want to claim that music copyright infringement is moral but, you can hardly claim that these are similar when the effects of the two "crimes" are poles apart!
The latter might reduce the income of an otherwise quite rich bunch of people but does relatively little damage to the perpetrator.
The former, OTOH, tends to make the perpetrators quite rich at the expense of generally completely screwing up the lives of others.
Simon