Re:Audio processesing using the GPU
on
GPU Gems 2
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It will be interesting to see how people will utilize their graphics cards in the future.
My prediction: In the future, people will use their graphics cards for graphics:)
In the very near term, GPUs have so much more vector processing power, that people say "hmm, we could use the GPU for x"... But, the GPU is *not* a general purpose processor, and doing general "programming" for it isn't going to be a good use of it.
GPU's are very powerful, so if you could bring a product/app to market within the next couple of years, you would have a performance advantage. But only for a little while.
In the long term: The Cell processor has, on each CPU, 8 vector units. According to a quick google search, each one is a 32 GFLOPS vector processor... So, thats sort of like 256 GFLOPS of processing power available. A current NVidia GPU is more than 32, but a lot less than 100 GFLOPS. You don't really have "256 GFLOPS" available for any given task, because the processors are independent... You might be able to use one of the Cell vector units as a replacement for your "graphics card", but it won't be as special purpose as your graphics card is, so each GFLOP will get you less in terms of actual graphics goodness... And, they're independent, and although graphics is very parallelizable, no real world problems comes even close to being 100% parallelizable. Witness the dismal results of SLI rendering.
Cell looks awesome, but when we can hold the real thing in our hands, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't live up to its hype, (but I wouldn't be surprised if it did, either). My prediction for Cell is: the processor exists and is everything they say it is, which is just a PowerPC-based CPU with 8 attached decently powerful vector units... the whole concept of "automatic distributing computing" is probably not worth paying attention to.
OK, this long post turned into an ad for Cell I think, but I am very psyched about it.
A summary: You can use your graphics card for non-graphics processing, and you will have a performance advantage while doing it for a little while. In the long term, Cell or something like it will be the main CPU in your computer, and it will be much better for non-graphics-based vector processing than a GPU, and better for some kinds of graphics processing (raytracing, non-realtime, etc), but not for the current "standard" (raster-based graphics).
The x86 is particularly vulnerable to these attacks for two main reasons:
A) Until recently, there wasn't a no-exec flag which could be set on a page of memory.
B) On x86, the stack grows *downward*... This means that when you copy past the end of your local stack frame (like, when you do an unchecked strcpy), you will overwrite the return address. Buffer overflow attacks do this so that they can make the execution jump to an arbitrary location. If the stack grew upwards, then you would just trash your local stack frame and unused stack memory.
I'm using the 1.0.3 for windows from getfirefox.com
Two windows, each with 8 open tabs, basically I started on slashdot in one window and randomly hit links for tabs, and started on my homepage in another and did the same.
So, 2 windows, a total of 16 tabs/pages, and task manager says I'm using 43M... Doesn't seem too bad to me...
If I restart firefox, 1 window and 1 tab is 23M, so you can complain about that maybe.
The point was, there isn't some magical birthday at which people suddenly become responsible.
There is, as far as the law is concerned: When you turn 18, you're an adult. There are some exceptions and gray areas, of course:
minors being tried as an adult
people under 21 not being allowed to drink
Also, the way the notions of "insanity (sometimes temporary)", "mentally retarded", "senile", and "psychopaths" are treated in our legal system acknowledges people who are older than 18 but not responsible for their actions.
Going the other way, I believe there's a mechanism already in place for someone (who is e.g. 15 years old) to have themselves declared a legal adult. In this case, I believe that this person should be considered "capable of informed consent" and I would be surprised if a judge in a court were to find otherwise (disregarding the "you're an adult at 18 but can't drink til 21" situation).
There are lots of people older than 18 that are incapable informed consent too -- does that make it ok to take advantage of them, just because they have had that magical birthday? Doesn't it seem a little arbitrary to you that having sex with someone a day before their 18th birthday makes you a sex offender, but doing it a day after is perfectly ok?
Yes, it is arbitrary, but as I said, the line has to be drawn somewhere, at least as far as the law is worded. There are other lines drawn in other places (allowed to marry, becoming an adult, allowed to drink alcohol, etc) and any number chosen will be arbitrary by definition.
This brings up a point: Many people watch too much TV, and come to think of the law as being set in stone. If a man marries a woman and has sex with her while he is 18 and she is 17, he may be guilty of statutory rape and considered a sex offender according to the literal interpretation of the law. The reason we have judges and juries is to evaluate the circumstances involving each case. If the above-mentioned man is convicted, then yes, something is wrong, but the trial needs to be appealed and/or the judge needs to be relieved. The law in this case is not a horrible problem, because it is generally correct for the vast majority of situations.
And please don't give me any BS about 16 year olds being incapable of informed consent!
Are 8 year olds capable of informed consent? Are 12 year olds capable of informed consent? Are 14 year olds capable of informed consent?
If you say 'yes' to any of these, most people will say you are sick.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. What's in your personal agenda that makes it so important to you for 16 year olds to be able to have sex with adults?
the next step is probablly a multiple serial setup
ie more than one line but they aren't forced to run in precise lock-step
That's what PCI-Express already does. Each card can use multiple "lanes", each lane is serial, and lanes are not synched. I don't know how many lanes the bus supports.
You'll notice just about every communications standard that doesn't go long haul alternates back and forth between parallel and serial methods every few years just to sound new and exciting and better.
I don't think this is true. In fact, what communications standards have alternated back and forth at all? I'm not a hardware guy, but I think the main expansion bus on desktop PCs (ISA/EISA/PCI) have always been parallel, right?
I think that most communications mediums, if they have alternated at all, have done it just once: serial is easier to implement, so that's the way the first stuff was done. Then, parallel was faster, so new stuff was parallel. Now, computers are running so fast that serial is not only easier to implement, parallel is getting close to impossible.
Do you honestly believe corporations pay taxes? Let me give you a hint. NO. They pass the cost of taxes on to you in higher prices at the store. The individual is the only ones who pay taxes, on both income and through higher prices. Another tip. Your employer does not pay half your social security taxes in matching funds. That is just money that would be part of your salary, but they keep it back to use to pay FICA taxes. In summary you pay an extra 20-25% at the checkout line to pay the taxes for the evil corporations.
Well damn, I never thought of it that way. Thanks for enlightening me.
Seriously, this viewpoint is naive. "OMG corporations are evil!"... That's just the way the economy works.
Yeah, corporations have to match social security. They have to pay taxes. This means that you get paid less than you otherwise might if they didn't take this into account.
Now think:
Say you eventually own a corner store. Are you going to change things, make a difference, by paying your employees the "full wage" rather than "deducting out" their social security? What does that even mean?
Another tack:
Say you have a low paying job, working in someone's corner store. Say the owner of the corner store is a nice guy old guy named Charlie, whom you get along with. (He's a nice guy in this example so you can get past the whole "corporations are The Man, bringing us down" persecution complex).
You get paid a certain amount by him. It's not very much, by some standards, but it's enough to live off of.
If you didn't have to pay for rent, or food, or taxes, or entertainment, then you could afford to work for less, correct?
OMG you evil bastard! You're making nice old Charlie subsidise your rent, food, taxes, and entertainment. Where do you get off, doing this?
Yeah, that's a good quote. But, enough anecdotes from sources that you trust start to go a long way. For example, I have never personally had a problem with PayPal. But I have read enough anecdotes from people who have, that I will not be using PayPal when I set up an online purchasing system for my company next month.
To get on-topic, here is a combination of anecdote and data related to routers and gamers:
I had a Linksys 8 port router at home, attached to my cable modem. It used to disconnect sometimes, for seemingly no reason at all. After it disconnected, it would stay disconnected, until I power cycled it, or logged into it via the admin interface and clicked on "release" and "renew" for the dhcp stuff.
I used to host my email at home via IMAP (now I use gmail), and I still host CVS for my personal projects at home... So, these random disconnects were very annoying, if I wasn't at home to fix them, and I couldn't read email.
Eventually, I decided to check for a new firmware version on the Linksys website. There was one available. I downloaded and installed, and the disconnection problem went away. However, a new problem manifested: Apparently this version of the firmware mangled large UDP packets, which meant that many games could not be played online. For most games, this just meant that it would be weirdly laggy every now and then. For games based on the Half-Life engine, such as Counter-Strike, or the one I play, Natural Selection, the game would "crash" when a packet got mangled... Not really crash, but dump you to the game console with an error message.
What really sucked was that the old firmware was not available. I went through a hellish series of communications with tech support drones, who would invariably walk me through downloading and installing the latest firmware. I would explicitly say, "I have downloaded the latest firmware, I just want you to send me the older version"... There are older versions of firmware for many products available on linksys web and ftp, and they would direct me to them... I would get so frustrated after being led through the same set of hoops, that I would almost be yelling at them... "You aren't listening to me, I want the version X of the firmware for product Y, not the new version for product Y, not the old version for product Z, can I PLEASE talk to the next level of support or whatever", etc... Then, I got someone who said, "OK, I will get a copy of that firmware from our engineers and email it to you", and it took him a week to email me, and what he emailed me was the newest version again, that I could have downloaded at any time. After I told him this, a few days later came the response, "Sorry, we can';t get you this version, wait until the next firmware version".
So, after that, I bought a D-Link router, which works fine, and it will be a long time before I ever buy from linksys again.
So, how's that for an anecdote?:) The 'data' here is that anyone can verify that the firmware which ships on this particular linksys router (sorry I don't remember the model number) is not available from linksys.
the whole point is that in my editor, with my 4 space tabs, code will look fine with a mixture of hard tabs and "soft" tabs... Then, in your editor, or in the python interpreter, which think of a tab as 8 spaces, things aren't so great anymore.
Hard tabs should be a syntax error. That would fix everything nicely.
... not some small slap on the wrist that means that you can almost cost it in as an acceptable and calculable risk.
I remember a story my high school history teacher told the class: Campbell's used to run ads, where they said "Campbell's Tomato Soup tastes better than (Hunts? some competitor, I don't remember) because it has more tomatoes per can of soup."
The other company complained and/or sued, because this wasn't true. Campbell's was fined for false advertising.
However, this advertising campaign was so successful that Campbell's just continued running the ads and paying the fines.
Wow... you really are american, aren't you? Your regime can change just as much as anyone elses... stop being so arrogant and open your eyes.
No, it really can't. Neither can England, France, Canada, Japan, and a bunch of other "developed" countries.
Countries which are run by dictatorships can. Cuba's can. North Korea's can. etc...
"Regime change" literally means the government changes, and we have that every 4-8 years.
But it "really" means/implies the old government is just plain thrown out, and a new one is started, pretty much from scratch. New laws are written up, etc..
And that's just not going to happen in most countries, no matter how much some of us want it. Change is slow.
This isn't arrogance, its realism. There is a lot of things about America that I would like to be different. Some of the things (tax laws, IP laws, etc) I would like to be different enough that it's just not going to happen in my lifetime without a "regime change", without "starting over".
A few years ago, I lost one of the lenses to my glasses while canoeing. This lens was loose, and occasionally fell out, and when it fell out into a river of brown water, I was hosed.
My vision is not as horrible as some peoples'. I bet I could pass the vision test to get a license if I squinted hard enough, but it's bad enough that I need my glasses to comfortably use a computer. I can see well enough to do "active" things without my glasses, and I take them off if I'm worried they'll get broken.
Anyway, the lens that I had left was the one for my "bad" eye. I went several days wearing just the one lens, before I got a new pair.
What was weird (and unexpected at first, although it makes sense in retrospect), was that the lenses refracted incoming light a little bit vertically. So, for years, I had been fine with glasses or without, but when I switched to having just one lens, I got a little bit of double vision, but it was in the vertical direction. You see horizontal double vision all the time, just cross your eyes, but the vertical kind was a first for me. And, I can't make my eyes move vertically independent of each other (can anyone?)...
Anyway, the point: Surprisingly quickly (after a few hours), my brain adapted to this situation, and I was seeing "normally" (no double vision) again, for the several days in which I wore only one lens. If I took the one lens off, I once again got the vertical double vision for 30 minutes to an hour, which was kind of scary (I worried that using one lens might screw up my eyes)... When I got a new real pair of glasses, I had the double vision for a little bit, and the "break-in" period (I feel a little weird and headachy for the first few hours when I get a new pair of glasses) was a tad longer than normal, but that was all.
This is the perfect use for a thumb drive, so long as the computer you're using can be trusted.
Although the article talks about a different technology, one of the core features of the technology you are talking about is that the computer does not, in fact, need to be trusted.
Basically, the computer asks the hardware device to encrypt or decrypt some data. The device stores the key internally and never reveals it.
It is a core concept of devices such as this that it is impossible to retrieve the key. The chips are designed such that they never reveal the key through the "official" interface (the encode/decode thing), and they're made so that taking the chip apart destroys the key.
30 solid minutes of ads?? Sorry, I don't buy it (no pun intended). I might see a one or two movies a month, and while I've never put a stopwatch to it, there is no where near an entire sitcom's length of ads before a movie.
It really depends on which movies you see. Although it's still noteworthy (meaning I bitch to my friends) for there to be a full half hour of crap before the movie, it's not unheard of.
Conjecture: Some of the stuff is "official trailers", that's how you hear "the new Matrix trailer is playing with Harry Potter" or whatever. I think some of the ads are put there by the specific theatre/chain (Hoyts in my area).
Re:The word is 'burgle', you illiterate moron!
on
Robbers Scared by GTA
·
· Score: 1
You won't find such abuses of the English language in the OED.
The huge Apple Cinema display three feet in front of me right now does a pretty good job at rendering a close approximation of reality at 100dpi.
I read this as "the Apple Cinema display, which displays at 100 dpi, and is 3 feet from my eye, is indistinguishable from reality" (that last part from your following statement)... perhaps you meant, "is pretty good, considering the fact that it's only 100dpi".
And, whether you are an eye doctor or no, at 3 feet from my face I can easily tell the difference between 100dpi and 600dpi printer output.
I know about the contrast on LCDs isn't super hot, (so it won't be "indistinguishable" from paper, no matter the resolution), but the laptop I'm typing on right now is 96dpi, a bit less than arm's length away, and I can see the pixelation in my text.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to see how people will utilize their graphics cards in the future.
:)
My prediction: In the future, people will use their graphics cards for graphics
In the very near term, GPUs have so much more vector processing power, that people say "hmm, we could use the GPU for x"... But, the GPU is *not* a general purpose processor, and doing general "programming" for it isn't going to be a good use of it.
GPU's are very powerful, so if you could bring a product/app to market within the next couple of years, you would have a performance advantage. But only for a little while.
In the long term: The Cell processor has, on each CPU, 8 vector units. According to a quick google search, each one is a 32 GFLOPS vector processor... So, thats sort of like 256 GFLOPS of processing power available. A current NVidia GPU is more than 32, but a lot less than 100 GFLOPS. You don't really have "256 GFLOPS" available for any given task, because the processors are independent... You might be able to use one of the Cell vector units as a replacement for your "graphics card", but it won't be as special purpose as your graphics card is, so each GFLOP will get you less in terms of actual graphics goodness... And, they're independent, and although graphics is very parallelizable, no real world problems comes even close to being 100% parallelizable. Witness the dismal results of SLI rendering.
Cell looks awesome, but when we can hold the real thing in our hands, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't live up to its hype, (but I wouldn't be surprised if it did, either). My prediction for Cell is: the processor exists and is everything they say it is, which is just a PowerPC-based CPU with 8 attached decently powerful vector units... the whole concept of "automatic distributing computing" is probably not worth paying attention to.
OK, this long post turned into an ad for Cell I think, but I am very psyched about it.
A summary: You can use your graphics card for non-graphics processing, and you will have a performance advantage while doing it for a little while. In the long term, Cell or something like it will be the main CPU in your computer, and it will be much better for non-graphics-based vector processing than a GPU, and better for some kinds of graphics processing (raytracing, non-realtime, etc), but not for the current "standard" (raster-based graphics).
The x86 is particularly vulnerable to these attacks for two main reasons:
A) Until recently, there wasn't a no-exec flag which could be set on a page of memory.
B) On x86, the stack grows *downward*... This means that when you copy past the end of your local stack frame (like, when you do an unchecked strcpy), you will overwrite the return address. Buffer overflow attacks do this so that they can make the execution jump to an arbitrary location. If the stack grew upwards, then you would just trash your local stack frame and unused stack memory.
I'm using the 1.0.3 for windows from getfirefox.com
Two windows, each with 8 open tabs, basically I started on slashdot in one window and randomly hit links for tabs, and started on my homepage in another and did the same.
So, 2 windows, a total of 16 tabs/pages, and task manager says I'm using 43M... Doesn't seem too bad to me...
If I restart firefox, 1 window and 1 tab is 23M, so you can complain about that maybe.
The point was, there isn't some magical birthday at which people suddenly become responsible.
There is, as far as the law is concerned: When you turn 18, you're an adult.
There are some exceptions and gray areas, of course:
minors being tried as an adult
people under 21 not being allowed to drink
Also, the way the notions of "insanity (sometimes temporary)", "mentally retarded", "senile", and "psychopaths" are treated in our legal system acknowledges people who are older than 18 but not responsible for their actions.
Going the other way, I believe there's a mechanism already in place for someone (who is e.g. 15 years old) to have themselves declared a legal adult. In this case, I believe that this person should be considered "capable of informed consent" and I would be surprised if a judge in a court were to find otherwise (disregarding the "you're an adult at 18 but can't drink til 21" situation).
There are lots of people older than 18 that are incapable informed consent too -- does that make it ok to take advantage of them, just because they have had that magical birthday? Doesn't it seem a little arbitrary to you that having sex with someone a day before their 18th birthday makes you a sex offender, but doing it a day after is perfectly ok?
Yes, it is arbitrary, but as I said, the line has to be drawn somewhere, at least as far as the law is worded. There are other lines drawn in other places (allowed to marry, becoming an adult, allowed to drink alcohol, etc) and any number chosen will be arbitrary by definition.
This brings up a point: Many people watch too much TV, and come to think of the law as being set in stone. If a man marries a woman and has sex with her while he is 18 and she is 17, he may be guilty of statutory rape and considered a sex offender according to the literal interpretation of the law. The reason we have judges and juries is to evaluate the circumstances involving each case. If the above-mentioned man is convicted, then yes, something is wrong, but the trial needs to be appealed and/or the judge needs to be relieved. The law in this case is not a horrible problem, because it is generally correct for the vast majority of situations.
And please don't give me any BS about 16 year olds being incapable of informed consent!
Are 8 year olds capable of informed consent?
Are 12 year olds capable of informed consent?
Are 14 year olds capable of informed consent?
If you say 'yes' to any of these, most people will say you are sick.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. What's in your personal agenda that makes it so important to you for 16 year olds to be able to have sex with adults?
the next step is probablly a multiple serial setup
ie more than one line but they aren't forced to run in precise lock-step
That's what PCI-Express already does. Each card can use multiple "lanes", each lane is serial, and lanes are not synched. I don't know how many lanes the bus supports.
You'll notice just about every communications standard that doesn't go long haul alternates back and forth between parallel and serial methods every few years just to sound new and exciting and better.
I don't think this is true. In fact, what communications standards have alternated back and forth at all? I'm not a hardware guy, but I think the main expansion bus on desktop PCs (ISA/EISA/PCI) have always been parallel, right?
I think that most communications mediums, if they have alternated at all, have done it just once: serial is easier to implement, so that's the way the first stuff was done. Then, parallel was faster, so new stuff was parallel. Now, computers are running so fast that serial is not only easier to implement, parallel is getting close to impossible.
Do you honestly believe corporations pay taxes? Let me give you a hint. NO. They pass the cost of taxes on to you in higher prices at the store. The individual is the only ones who pay taxes, on both income and through higher prices. Another tip. Your employer does not pay half your social security taxes in matching funds. That is just money that would be part of your salary, but they keep it back to use to pay FICA taxes. In summary you pay an extra 20-25% at the checkout line to pay the taxes for the evil corporations.
Well damn, I never thought of it that way. Thanks for enlightening me.
Seriously, this viewpoint is naive. "OMG corporations are evil!"... That's just the way the economy works.
Yeah, corporations have to match social security. They have to pay taxes. This means that you get paid less than you otherwise might if they didn't take this into account.
Now think:
Say you eventually own a corner store. Are you going to change things, make a difference, by paying your employees the "full wage" rather than "deducting out" their social security? What does that even mean?
Another tack:
Say you have a low paying job, working in someone's corner store. Say the owner of the corner store is a nice guy old guy named Charlie, whom you get along with. (He's a nice guy in this example so you can get past the whole "corporations are The Man, bringing us down" persecution complex).
You get paid a certain amount by him. It's not very much, by some standards, but it's enough to live off of.
If you didn't have to pay for rent, or food, or taxes, or entertainment, then you could afford to work for less, correct?
OMG you evil bastard! You're making nice old Charlie subsidise your rent, food, taxes, and entertainment. Where do you get off, doing this?
The plural of 'anecdotes' is not 'data'.
:)
Yeah, that's a good quote. But, enough anecdotes from sources that you trust start to go a long way. For example, I have never personally had a problem with PayPal. But I have read enough anecdotes from people who have, that I will not be using PayPal when I set up an online purchasing system for my company next month.
To get on-topic, here is a combination of anecdote and data related to routers and gamers:
I had a Linksys 8 port router at home, attached to my cable modem. It used to disconnect sometimes, for seemingly no reason at all. After it disconnected, it would stay disconnected, until I power cycled it, or logged into it via the admin interface and clicked on "release" and "renew" for the dhcp stuff.
I used to host my email at home via IMAP (now I use gmail), and I still host CVS for my personal projects at home... So, these random disconnects were very annoying, if I wasn't at home to fix them, and I couldn't read email.
Eventually, I decided to check for a new firmware version on the Linksys website. There was one available. I downloaded and installed, and the disconnection problem went away. However, a new problem manifested: Apparently this version of the firmware mangled large UDP packets, which meant that many games could not be played online. For most games, this just meant that it would be weirdly laggy every now and then. For games based on the Half-Life engine, such as Counter-Strike, or the one I play, Natural Selection, the game would "crash" when a packet got mangled... Not really crash, but dump you to the game console with an error message.
What really sucked was that the old firmware was not available. I went through a hellish series of communications with tech support drones, who would invariably walk me through downloading and installing the latest firmware. I would explicitly say, "I have downloaded the latest firmware, I just want you to send me the older version"... There are older versions of firmware for many products available on linksys web and ftp, and they would direct me to them... I would get so frustrated after being led through the same set of hoops, that I would almost be yelling at them... "You aren't listening to me, I want the version X of the firmware for product Y, not the new version for product Y, not the old version for product Z, can I PLEASE talk to the next level of support or whatever", etc... Then, I got someone who said, "OK, I will get a copy of that firmware from our engineers and email it to you", and it took him a week to email me, and what he emailed me was the newest version again, that I could have downloaded at any time. After I told him this, a few days later came the response, "Sorry, we can';t get you this version, wait until the next firmware version".
So, after that, I bought a D-Link router, which works fine, and it will be a long time before I ever buy from linksys again.
So, how's that for an anecdote?
The 'data' here is that anyone can verify that the firmware which ships on this particular linksys router (sorry I don't remember the model number) is not available from linksys.
the whole point is that in my editor, with my 4 space tabs, code will look fine with a mixture of hard tabs and "soft" tabs... Then, in your editor, or in the python interpreter, which think of a tab as 8 spaces, things aren't so great anymore.
Hard tabs should be a syntax error. That would fix everything nicely.
Also, I live in New Hampshire... There aren't many states north of us : )
Frost heaves are a problem on crappy roads in our small cities. They are never a problem on major roads/highways.
I guess our running out of fuel in the future won't be the end of the world..
If we don't find alternative fuels, it very well COULD be the end of the world.
Wars are almost always fought over control of natural resources.
... not some small slap on the wrist that means that you can almost cost it in as an acceptable and calculable risk.
I remember a story my high school history teacher told the class: Campbell's used to run ads, where they said "Campbell's Tomato Soup tastes better than (Hunts? some competitor, I don't remember) because it has more tomatoes per can of soup."
The other company complained and/or sued, because this wasn't true. Campbell's was fined for false advertising.
However, this advertising campaign was so successful that Campbell's just continued running the ads and paying the fines.
Wow... you really are american, aren't you? Your regime can change just as much as anyone elses... stop being so arrogant and open your eyes.
No, it really can't. Neither can England, France, Canada, Japan, and a bunch of other "developed" countries.
Countries which are run by dictatorships can. Cuba's can. North Korea's can. etc...
"Regime change" literally means the government changes, and we have that every 4-8 years.
But it "really" means/implies the old government is just plain thrown out, and a new one is started, pretty much from scratch. New laws are written up, etc..
And that's just not going to happen in most countries, no matter how much some of us want it. Change is slow.
This isn't arrogance, its realism. There is a lot of things about America that I would like to be different. Some of the things (tax laws, IP laws, etc) I would like to be different enough that it's just not going to happen in my lifetime without a "regime change", without "starting over".
But it's not going to happen.
Valve explicitly stated that they did not consider making Half-Life 2 for Linux, because of Wine.
You couldn't pay me to own a bunch of typo. domain names.
Not even $164 million?
A few years ago, I lost one of the lenses to my glasses while canoeing. This lens was loose, and occasionally fell out, and when it fell out into a river of brown water, I was hosed.
My vision is not as horrible as some peoples'. I bet I could pass the vision test to get a license if I squinted hard enough, but it's bad enough that I need my glasses to comfortably use a computer. I can see well enough to do "active" things without my glasses, and I take them off if I'm worried they'll get broken.
Anyway, the lens that I had left was the one for my "bad" eye. I went several days wearing just the one lens, before I got a new pair.
What was weird (and unexpected at first, although it makes sense in retrospect), was that the lenses refracted incoming light a little bit vertically. So, for years, I had been fine with glasses or without, but when I switched to having just one lens, I got a little bit of double vision, but it was in the vertical direction. You see horizontal double vision all the time, just cross your eyes, but the vertical kind was a first for me. And, I can't make my eyes move vertically independent of each other (can anyone?)...
Anyway, the point: Surprisingly quickly (after a few hours), my brain adapted to this situation, and I was seeing "normally" (no double vision) again, for the several days in which I wore only one lens. If I took the one lens off, I once again got the vertical double vision for 30 minutes to an hour, which was kind of scary (I worried that using one lens might screw up my eyes)... When I got a new real pair of glasses, I had the double vision for a little bit, and the "break-in" period (I feel a little weird and headachy for the first few hours when I get a new pair of glasses) was a tad longer than normal, but that was all.
Why don't we all try to donate 1.5% of our assets instead of whining about the poster's flamebait.
Can I donate 1.5% of my net worth instead? It'd be a quick way to make a hundred bucks or so : )
If I manually copy the files into the directory, it still doesn't work, the program doesn't look to see if their already there.
Have you tried setting the security rights on those files specifically, such that "Everyone" is allowed to overwrite these files?
This is the perfect use for a thumb drive, so long as the computer you're using can be trusted.
Although the article talks about a different technology, one of the core features of the technology you are talking about is that the computer does not, in fact, need to be trusted.
Basically, the computer asks the hardware device to encrypt or decrypt some data. The device stores the key internally and never reveals it.
It is a core concept of devices such as this that it is impossible to retrieve the key. The chips are designed such that they never reveal the key through the "official" interface (the encode/decode thing), and they're made so that taking the chip apart destroys the key.
30 solid minutes of ads?? Sorry, I don't buy it (no pun intended). I might see a one or two movies a month, and while I've never put a stopwatch to it, there is no where near an entire sitcom's length of ads before a movie.
It really depends on which movies you see. Although it's still noteworthy (meaning I bitch to my friends) for there to be a full half hour of crap before the movie, it's not unheard of.
Conjecture: Some of the stuff is "official trailers", that's how you hear "the new Matrix trailer is playing with Harry Potter" or whatever. I think some of the ads are put there by the specific theatre/chain (Hoyts in my area).
You won't find such abuses of the English language in the OED.
You mean, you wouldn't find this page?
It does say, "North American term for burgle", but still... It *is* in the OED.
http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary& va=burglarize&x=0&y=0
z e
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=burglari
Looks like burlgarize is OK to me. In fact, for a couple of the dictionaries, the definition of "burgle" is just: "see burglarize".
Perhaps it was just a parsing error...
The huge Apple Cinema display three feet in front of me right now does a pretty good job at rendering a close approximation of reality at 100dpi.
I read this as "the Apple Cinema display, which displays at 100 dpi, and is 3 feet from my eye, is indistinguishable from reality" (that last part from your following statement)... perhaps you meant, "is pretty good, considering the fact that it's only 100dpi".
And, whether you are an eye doctor or no, at 3 feet from my face I can easily tell the difference between 100dpi and 600dpi printer output.
I know about the contrast on LCDs isn't super hot, (so it won't be "indistinguishable" from paper, no matter the resolution), but the laptop I'm typing on right now is 96dpi, a bit less than arm's length away, and I can see the pixelation in my text.
Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.
If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.