I'm not that convinced by the testing methods here. The boot and load times page shows 20 seconds difference between the slowest and fastest drives which they barely comment on, and yet the drive with the slowest boot time is among the quickest when loading Far Cry and Doom 3? Something is not right there.
And if they're really timing level loads with a stopwatch, why on earth are they quoting 2 decimal places (and besides, the variability in reaction time is accounting for most of the supposed differences in any case). Half of their tests don't appear to tell anybody anything significant, and the most worthwhile page in there is the conclusion. Pretty graphics though.
A great reference book, but the first section (resistors, caps, etc) is more like a refresher course than anything useful for a non-expert. The explanation of a capacitor is something like a little picture, half a page of writing, and a differential equation. The authors write with charm, and if you're serious about electronics you'll probably end up with a copy anyway, but if your calculus is weak or you don't know basic resistor/caps/etc circuits backwards, there are better books.
Mostly because it's a different point in the life cycle. Many of the easy performance gains in CPU's have now been taken - it wasn't so long ago that a 100MHz clock increase was sensational, but now it's expected. It's getting tough to eke out big performance wins in each generation now, so it's easier to move sideways to multiple cores. Parallelism is the future (witness the supercomputers).
I don't know the 3dfx history all that well, but I'd *guess* that their cards were getting hard to dig more performance from, and that they went two ways - one to work on a new core, one for multiprocessor. They could at least keep some market share if they got something out quickly. Unfortunately, the new core probably took too long, and the MP wasn't enough ; there were still new things to try for single GPU's, and they ended up with an expensive, slow card.
I think CVS is the best of a pretty poor bunch at the moment - it may not be flashy, but it works. Subversion looks nice, and is mostly a better cvs, but it seemed to be a touch flaky with large (>1Gb) trees when I last tried it (getting itself into a corrupt state). It also used to let you check in files with bad filenames and then protest when you tried to check out. And lots of little things are essentially undocumented so you're forced to rely on the mailing list too much. I'm not thrilled about aspects of the design either.
I wish RCS authors would think of Windows when they're designing these things. Like it or not, a RCS without decent Windows support is never going to be taken seriously. The arrogant 'it was never intended to run on a non POSIX system, don't expect to have a full-blown arch on your Microsoft computer.' attitude that Arch displays is childish and ultimately unhelpful IMHO.
I have to agree with you. Certainly it's worth a read, and I'm sure most people will gain something from it, but it's really an art book with a few sensible tips in, rather than a deeply thought out guide to presenting information. The content comes down to 'avoid grids, reduce clutter, remove all un-necessary data' - most of the book is historical info or pictures. Definitely read before you buy it.
Many geeky types are very good listeners and do know how to ask questions that can get people to think about something in a different way.
I agree, but 99% of the time this is the last thing people want - even other introverts. If anything, it can look like you're trying to show them up as being stupid, or you're trying to attack them. It's difficult to talk when you can't help but see the world as a bunch of interesting unsolved problems. I'd urge anyone who does this to try really hard not to.
I don't know about the rest of you, but half an hour of casual conversation can be a hard mental workout. It's almost like a game of chess - testing sentences, looking ahead for the reaction, backtracking. Extroverts are almost like idiot savants on this one:)
I've had good experiences using Python + wxPython (wxWindows) for control tasks (and this was a few years ago, so the toolkits are more mature now). We were interfacing to a PCI A/D card and another card we made ourselves - the control side was hacked up as a C DLL, then exported with SWIG.
Granted, I did this more because I didn't like VB and it seemed cool rather than a free software thing, but it works well and I'll use the same combination again. This was on a Windows 98 platform, but only the control side would be platform specific.
However, using Python (which most people have never heard of) and wx can be hard to justify if people are looking over your shoulder demanding you use VB, so be careful.
From what I remember, Serious Sam had a P2P based network system, but in recent patch versions switched to a conventional client server due to sync problems.
Re:ISA slot adapter card for PCI slot?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
As far as I'm aware, no. You can get PCI devices that you can plug ISA cards into, but you have to write the device driver yourself. It probably wouldn't be economical anyway.
I've no idea how this happened, but somewhere along the line we let ourselves be talked into the idea that creativity is present in artists, musicians, and architects, but not programmers, box packers, or soccer players. Creativity is a basic human ability.
Computers can't paint. They can't write computer programs either. It's not some crude mechanistic process that we can automate ; there is a need for style and creativity. Which to me, makes it an art.
(Surely painting and music are 'explicitly constructed by man', and each of these have distinct rules that allow one to do it well too?)
We also deal with the common problem of perception; users think they are doing us the ultimate favour by posting bugs. And as such, feel that any and all means of telling us about them is apropriate, email to 5+ accounts, multiple forum posts, bugtracker, etc. This just wastes time that could have been spent fixing the bug in the first place.
That's because they *are* doing you the ultimate favour.
Really, why is Joe Public somehow obliged to help us fix bugs that we let through anyway?
Besides, how many times have you used a program with an easily fixed bug, started to compose a bug report, and thought 'oh...can't be bothered'. Getting people to submit bug reports *at all* is *really hard*, because we're fundamentally lazy creatures.
Asking (as Mozilla does) users to do a lot of work just drives people away. [I've submitted bug reports, and hopefully lucid ones, but I'd have entered an awful lot more if it wasn't so much hassle...]
They (passive RFID tags) derive their power from the RF scanner. The transmission pulse actually powers the tag (the wave induces a current in the receiving antenna). Really clever stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that this method wouldn't leave a trace and doesn't draw attention, so you could just wander in, take his stuff, and leave quietly.
I'm not that convinced by the testing methods here. The boot and load times page shows 20 seconds difference between the slowest and fastest drives which they barely comment on, and yet the drive with the slowest boot time is among the quickest when loading Far Cry and Doom 3? Something is not right there.
And if they're really timing level loads with a stopwatch, why on earth are they quoting 2 decimal places (and besides, the variability in reaction time is accounting for most of the supposed differences in any case). Half of their tests don't appear to tell anybody anything significant, and the most worthwhile page in there is the conclusion. Pretty graphics though.
A great reference book, but the first section (resistors, caps, etc) is more like a refresher course than anything useful for a non-expert. The explanation of a capacitor is something like a little picture, half a page of writing, and a differential equation. The authors write with charm, and if you're serious about electronics you'll probably end up with a copy anyway, but if your calculus is weak or you don't know basic resistor/caps/etc circuits backwards, there are better books.
Mostly because it's a different point in the life cycle. Many of the easy performance gains in CPU's have now been taken - it wasn't so long ago that a 100MHz clock increase was sensational, but now it's expected. It's getting tough to eke out big performance wins in each generation now, so it's easier to move sideways to multiple cores. Parallelism is the future (witness the supercomputers).
I don't know the 3dfx history all that well, but I'd *guess* that their cards were getting hard to dig more performance from, and that they went two ways - one to work on a new core, one for multiprocessor. They could at least keep some market share if they got something out quickly. Unfortunately, the new core probably took too long, and the MP wasn't enough ; there were still new things to try for single GPU's, and they ended up with an expensive, slow card.
Reckon we should start pushing it out next week then? ;)
I think CVS is the best of a pretty poor bunch at the moment - it may not be flashy, but it works. Subversion looks nice, and is mostly a better cvs, but it seemed to be a touch flaky with large (>1Gb) trees when I last tried it (getting itself into a corrupt state). It also used to let you check in files with bad filenames and then protest when you tried to check out. And lots of little things are essentially undocumented so you're forced to rely on the mailing list too much. I'm not thrilled about aspects of the design either.
I wish RCS authors would think of Windows when they're designing these things. Like it or not, a RCS without decent Windows support is never going to be taken seriously. The arrogant 'it was never intended to run on a non POSIX system, don't expect to have a full-blown arch on your Microsoft computer.' attitude that Arch displays is childish and ultimately unhelpful IMHO.
I have to agree with you. Certainly it's worth a read, and I'm sure most people will gain something from it, but it's really an art book with a few sensible tips in, rather than a deeply thought out guide to presenting information. The content comes down to 'avoid grids, reduce clutter, remove all un-necessary data' - most of the book is historical info or pictures. Definitely read before you buy it.
I agree, but 99% of the time this is the last thing people want - even other introverts. If anything, it can look like you're trying to show them up as being stupid, or you're trying to attack them. It's difficult to talk when you can't help but see the world as a bunch of interesting unsolved problems. I'd urge anyone who does this to try really hard not to.
I don't know about the rest of you, but half an hour of casual conversation can be a hard mental workout. It's almost like a game of chess - testing sentences, looking ahead for the reaction, backtracking. Extroverts are almost like idiot savants on this one
As somebody else said, they're releasing them one at a time.
a b. exe.torrent
You can find the lab one (far more impressive than the docks, I think) here:
http://www.filerush.com/torrents/hl2-kleiners_l
I've had good experiences using Python + wxPython (wxWindows) for control tasks (and this was a few years ago, so the toolkits are more mature now). We were interfacing to a PCI A/D card and another card we made ourselves - the control side was hacked up as a C DLL, then exported with SWIG.
Granted, I did this more because I didn't like VB and it seemed cool rather than a free software thing, but it works well and I'll use the same combination again. This was on a Windows 98 platform, but only the control side would be platform specific.
However, using Python (which most people have never heard of) and wx can be hard to justify if people are looking over your shoulder demanding you use VB, so be careful.
From what I remember, Serious Sam had a P2P based network system, but in recent patch versions switched to a conventional client server due to sync problems.
As far as I'm aware, no. You can get PCI devices that you can plug ISA cards into, but you have to write the device driver yourself. It probably wouldn't be economical anyway.
I've no idea how this happened, but somewhere along the line we let ourselves be talked into the idea that creativity is present in artists, musicians, and architects, but not programmers, box packers, or soccer players. Creativity is a basic human ability.
Computers can't paint. They can't write computer programs either. It's not some crude mechanistic process that we can automate ; there is a need for style and creativity. Which to me, makes it an art.
(Surely painting and music are 'explicitly constructed by man', and each of these have distinct rules that allow one to do it well too?)
I don't like to admit I'm using XML for just that reason. I generally get one of three reactions:
.NET parser? Why not?
1) "XM... did you just say HTML?"
2) Are you using the
3) *left hook*
Xerces XML Apache page is pretty good. Quite powerful, nice license, good examples, but (certainly with the older versions) not terribly fast.
That's because they *are* doing you the ultimate favour.
Really, why is Joe Public somehow obliged to help us fix bugs that we let through anyway?
Besides, how many times have you used a program with an easily fixed bug, started to compose a bug report, and thought 'oh...can't be bothered'. Getting people to submit bug reports *at all* is *really hard*, because we're fundamentally lazy creatures.
Asking (as Mozilla does) users to do a lot of work just drives people away. [I've submitted bug reports, and hopefully lucid ones, but I'd have entered an awful lot more if it wasn't so much hassle...]
They (passive RFID tags) derive their power from the RF scanner. The transmission pulse actually powers the tag (the wave induces a current in the receiving antenna). Really clever stuff.