I know how to generate my own PDFs from LaTeX source files (IIRC I used dvipdf in the MikTeX distribution to typeset my senior thesis...pdflatex didn't handle my thesis template and/or graphics very well), but most LaTeXed documents are posted on the web in Postscript format which, as is well-documented in this thread, often does not convert very well to PDF. Your comment did remind me that Ghostscript does a pretty good job of converting Postscript to PDF, but it pales in comparison with the anti-aliased output when the author typesets the document directly to PDF using pdf(la)tex or converts DVI straight to PDF.
I know it's/its is a pet peeve of yours, but it's a relatively minor usage error.
Compared to Slashdot, the spelling and grammar of the LinuxWatch article isn't that bad. And to think that search engines like Google treat Slashdot as a reliable news service. *shudder*
Since metal is only used for interconnects, and silicon (which does not superconduct) is used for everything else (resistors, capacitors, transistors), I can't see superconductivity being a problem. Usually when you design circuits, you want your interconnects to be perfectly conducting, so superconductivity would be an unexpected benefit.
Just as a fine point, the substrate of most chips is just undoped silicon, and the electrical characteristics of silicon only improve at low temperatures.
I'm pretty sure that real LN2 cooling systems (i.e. not a cardboard tube:-p) use a recirculating arrangement, so a single resevoir of LN2 is used to cool the chip. You can use a compressor to rechill it, or there are other methods. Personally, my favorite method of cooling is the Peltier effect. Basically, a voltage applied across a loop of two dissimilar materials will create a temperature gradient, i.e. one junction will get hot and the other will get cold. The result is a solid-state cooler with no moving parts that you could probably build on chip. The drawbacks are that Peltier coolers aren't super powerful, but to someone who is interested in unusual physical phenomena, that doesn't diminish their coolness factor. (no pun intended)
When properly coated, I'm sure the parts are safe from the damaging effecets [sic] of melting, but everyone needs to remember one thing, heat is the enemy, it's obvious that it would take quite a bit to get too cold.
Melting is not the danger here. At high temperatures, the dopants used to make regions of silicon p-doped and n-doped (which make the transistors on your CPU which do the computing) start diffusing out of the regions they're supposed to be into the regions they shouldn't be. Enough of that happens, and your many-transistor CPU becomes one large, expensive resistor. Incidentally, I think a similar problem delayed the use of copper interconnects--the copper would diffuse into the silicon and poison the transistors, so copper couldn't be used until IBM found a way to prevent that from happening.
As far as being too cold--as long as no thermal shocks are involved, I don't think there's such thing as too cold. I look forward to/. stories about liquid helium cooling and the like...;-)
I liked the demo where you could render movies onto different geometric objects by dragging and dropping them. I'd have 6 movies playing simultaneously on a spinning cube, with another couple MP3's playing, some forwards, some backwards...;-)
The correct question is would you rather host the Olympics or get boycotted into oblivion. Invasion is a big no-no in international relations, and would probably would result in a lot of countries would probably suspend trade relations with China, negating any benefit of owning Taiwan's manufacturing capability.
There is a good reason for there to be some posthumous copyright -- it enables authors to enjoy some of the future value their work will generate within their lifetime.
Seeing as you have to be dead to qualify for posthumous copyright, posthumous royalties by definition are not generated within the creator's lifetime, and it's kinda hard for the creator to enjoy them...:-p
Seriously, though, some posthumous copyright to benefit one's heirs and estate is reasonable, but 50-70 years is a little excessive. I agree that 10-20 years would be about the right duration, after which society would be better served by releasing those works into the public domain. Then maybe publishers would realize that selling content in a convenient format is a service, not property.
And motherboards...and chipsets...and I think a lot of systems, especially laptops, are OEMed in Taiwan. It's kinda hard for Intel or AMD to sell processors if there are no boards to put them in, and also for Dell and Gateway to sell systems if no one actually builds them...
In truth, I don't think Taiwan needs to worry too much about either China or the U.S. China has to be on its best behavior until the Olympics in Beijing, and you can bet that beating up on a smaller democratic and practically sovereign state would be frowned upon by the international community and probably get the Olympics yanked. And the U.S. is extremely dependent on Taiwan's high-tech manufacturing industries. This fact was made obvious a few years back, when a major earthquake damaged Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. RAM prices skyrocketed for about a year, until Taiwan got their semiconductor production back up to speed. So if for no reason other than cheap motherboards and RAM, pray for the safety of Taiwan.
Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?
on
FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE
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· Score: 1
Most of the userland stuff is pretty small, so it doesn't take up much disk space and it doesn't take that long to compile. And it's nice to keep that stuff up-to-date automatically in case there's a security hole lurking in one of them.
I'm studing in Athens and decide to move to London to study then I'll be using the same material as long as I go to a university that is part of the group and I would have to worry about having used diff. text books and such
When universities first got started in Europe in the Middle Ages, they worked a lot like this. They were standardized on the same language (Latin), and basically used the same books (Greek and Latin texts). The lecture format for instruction also dates back to medieval European universities: because books were rare (since they were all scribed by hand), teachers would read them out loud to students. Despite the fact that books are widely available (thank you, Mr. Gutenberg!), the lecture format lives on today, and some professors still read from the textbooks verbatim...
If you're interested in the history of higher education, as I am, you can read about it in greater detail in Samuel Eliot Morison's The Founding of Harvard College.
If you have a priori information about your scene, I agree that it may be possible to automate some exotic pixel-dependent filtering operation. However, writing that code might not be a trivial task--in the depth-of-focus example I gave, it would probably require some code to identify the subject and label those pixels (probably very difficult), after which you run a Gaussian blur on the unlabeled pixels (which is trivial). My point was that it might be easier to do some things at exposure time than to try to accomplish them by digital postprocessing.
This has nothing to do with film vs. digital, I agree, but person to whom I was responding seemed to believe that Photoshop or a computer program can automate everything, and at this point in time, I disagree with that statement.
The sequence probably compresses very well, too. My understanding is that human DNA sequences are relatively low entropy--significant portions of human DNA are repetitive sequences that don't encode a protein (i.e. they don't belong to a gene), and the fact that they're repetitive lends themselves well to lossless compression schemes like Huffman coding.
Right, but say you want to do a depth of focus effect...oh wait, there's no way for the computer to automatically determine whether or not a given pixel is in focus...that means you're gonna have to determine on a pixel-by-pixel basis whether or not to apply a Gaussian blur. In the context of film vs. digital, this isn't the best example, but it is relevant to optical effects vs. computer/Photoshop. This effect is easily achieved optically by using a smaller F/# when you take the picture, but there is no easy way to automatically compute this effect for an arbitrary scene.
Computers are great at doing image processing effects that operate on every pixel, but if you need to operate on pixels selectively and without a priori knowledge of which pixels need manipulation, it might be advantageous to use a different approach to image processing.
Well, there is definitely film that can resolve at least 200 lines/mm, because holography regularly demands that much spatial resolution, and many holograms are recorded on film.
Actually, there are regions where film's nonlinear response would probably make it more precise than a solid-state detector. For example, in low-light conditions, solid-state detectors are extremely susceptible to shot and thermal noise. The relatively flat response of film in low-light conditions would suppress this noise.
If you read those links, they explain that depth of field is a direct consequence of the focal length and aperture setting, as I outlined in this post. Those links also clarified my question about the effects of sensor size on lens selection. For larger sensors, a faster lens is needed to fill the field of view, so the depth of field is smaller. Conversely, smaller sensors use slower lens so as not to overfill the field of view, and that results in larger depth of field.
Slashdot Mirror
I know how to generate my own PDFs from LaTeX source files (IIRC I used dvipdf in the MikTeX distribution to typeset my senior thesis...pdflatex didn't handle my thesis template and/or graphics very well), but most LaTeXed documents are posted on the web in Postscript format which, as is well-documented in this thread, often does not convert very well to PDF. Your comment did remind me that Ghostscript does a pretty good job of converting Postscript to PDF, but it pales in comparison with the anti-aliased output when the author typesets the document directly to PDF using pdf(la)tex or converts DVI straight to PDF.
I've always found that an annoying aspect of (La)TeX documents on the web...a lot of them look really crappy when converted to PDF...
1337 h4x0rs read Postscript in plain text...just not in Notepad... ;-)
Since metal is only used for interconnects, and silicon (which does not superconduct) is used for everything else (resistors, capacitors, transistors), I can't see superconductivity being a problem. Usually when you design circuits, you want your interconnects to be perfectly conducting, so superconductivity would be an unexpected benefit.
Just as a fine point, the substrate of most chips is just undoped silicon, and the electrical characteristics of silicon only improve at low temperatures.
On other news, U.S. nuclear scientists discovered that ASCI White simulates nuclear explosions much faster than a guy wielding a slide rule...
I'm pretty sure that real LN2 cooling systems (i.e. not a cardboard tube :-p) use a recirculating arrangement, so a single resevoir of LN2 is used to cool the chip. You can use a compressor to rechill it, or there are other methods. Personally, my favorite method of cooling is the Peltier effect. Basically, a voltage applied across a loop of two dissimilar materials will create a temperature gradient, i.e. one junction will get hot and the other will get cold. The result is a solid-state cooler with no moving parts that you could probably build on chip. The drawbacks are that Peltier coolers aren't super powerful, but to someone who is interested in unusual physical phenomena, that doesn't diminish their coolness factor. (no pun intended)
As far as being too cold--as long as no thermal shocks are involved, I don't think there's such thing as too cold. I look forward to
I liked the demo where you could render movies onto different geometric objects by dragging and dropping them. I'd have 6 movies playing simultaneously on a spinning cube, with another couple MP3's playing, some forwards, some backwards... ;-)
...it's not dead. Obsolete computer systems don't die--they just get severely marginalized...
The correct question is would you rather host the Olympics or get boycotted into oblivion. Invasion is a big no-no in international relations, and would probably would result in a lot of countries would probably suspend trade relations with China, negating any benefit of owning Taiwan's manufacturing capability.
Seriously, though, some posthumous copyright to benefit one's heirs and estate is reasonable, but 50-70 years is a little excessive. I agree that 10-20 years would be about the right duration, after which society would be better served by releasing those works into the public domain. Then maybe publishers would realize that selling content in a convenient format is a service, not property.
And motherboards...and chipsets...and I think a lot of systems, especially laptops, are OEMed in Taiwan. It's kinda hard for Intel or AMD to sell processors if there are no boards to put them in, and also for Dell and Gateway to sell systems if no one actually builds them...
In truth, I don't think Taiwan needs to worry too much about either China or the U.S. China has to be on its best behavior until the Olympics in Beijing, and you can bet that beating up on a smaller democratic and practically sovereign state would be frowned upon by the international community and probably get the Olympics yanked. And the U.S. is extremely dependent on Taiwan's high-tech manufacturing industries. This fact was made obvious a few years back, when a major earthquake damaged Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. RAM prices skyrocketed for about a year, until Taiwan got their semiconductor production back up to speed. So if for no reason other than cheap motherboards and RAM, pray for the safety of Taiwan.
Most of the userland stuff is pretty small, so it doesn't take up much disk space and it doesn't take that long to compile. And it's nice to keep that stuff up-to-date automatically in case there's a security hole lurking in one of them.
If you're interested in the history of higher education, as I am, you can read about it in greater detail in Samuel Eliot Morison's The Founding of Harvard College.
Yeah, don't want to die from a ruptured bladder like Tycho Brahe did... :-p
P.S. I know that the ruptured bladder theory is now considered an urban legend, as is explained here
If you have a priori information about your scene, I agree that it may be possible to automate some exotic pixel-dependent filtering operation. However, writing that code might not be a trivial task--in the depth-of-focus example I gave, it would probably require some code to identify the subject and label those pixels (probably very difficult), after which you run a Gaussian blur on the unlabeled pixels (which is trivial). My point was that it might be easier to do some things at exposure time than to try to accomplish them by digital postprocessing.
This has nothing to do with film vs. digital, I agree, but person to whom I was responding seemed to believe that Photoshop or a computer program can automate everything, and at this point in time, I disagree with that statement.
The sequence probably compresses very well, too. My understanding is that human DNA sequences are relatively low entropy--significant portions of human DNA are repetitive sequences that don't encode a protein (i.e. they don't belong to a gene), and the fact that they're repetitive lends themselves well to lossless compression schemes like Huffman coding.
Right, but say you want to do a depth of focus effect...oh wait, there's no way for the computer to automatically determine whether or not a given pixel is in focus...that means you're gonna have to determine on a pixel-by-pixel basis whether or not to apply a Gaussian blur. In the context of film vs. digital, this isn't the best example, but it is relevant to optical effects vs. computer/Photoshop. This effect is easily achieved optically by using a smaller F/# when you take the picture, but there is no easy way to automatically compute this effect for an arbitrary scene.
Computers are great at doing image processing effects that operate on every pixel, but if you need to operate on pixels selectively and without a priori knowledge of which pixels need manipulation, it might be advantageous to use a different approach to image processing.
Well, there is definitely film that can resolve at least 200 lines/mm, because holography regularly demands that much spatial resolution, and many holograms are recorded on film.
:-)
The Foveon sensor sounds extra cool...
Maybe they're willing to trade off noise for low-light sensitivity in astronomy...that doesn't necessarily refute my point.
That kinda defeats the point if you have to operate on each pixel manually, doesn't it?
Actually, there are regions where film's nonlinear response would probably make it more precise than a solid-state detector. For example, in low-light conditions, solid-state detectors are extremely susceptible to shot and thermal noise. The relatively flat response of film in low-light conditions would suppress this noise.
If you read those links, they explain that depth of field is a direct consequence of the focal length and aperture setting, as I outlined in this post. Those links also clarified my question about the effects of sensor size on lens selection. For larger sensors, a faster lens is needed to fill the field of view, so the depth of field is smaller. Conversely, smaller sensors use slower lens so as not to overfill the field of view, and that results in larger depth of field.