PSP? Since they have effectively (with a few minor differences) managed to squeeze a PS2 into a handheld, they probably have a single chip that they can just drop in the PS3 maybe thats how they will manage it.
Im not sure if Im missing the point here, but what you are suggesting is a standard feature of firewire/dv camera's . I use Kino, I just plug in my camera and go to the preview screen and guess what i see what the camera is playing displayed on the computer... I really dont see how you thought this was difficult to do!
At the bottom it explains about the semi transparent mirror system for generating the numbers. The article suggests that the mirror is 50% transparent/50% not transparent. This seems to me to be the point where a bias may be introduced. Surely its physically impossible to manufacture such a mirror to guarantee it is exactly 50/50 either way. It might be a very small bias, but ill bet there is one there. You'd just need a lot of numbers to prove it.
It depends on what exactly it is you are trying to do. For example a 64bit cpu is going to be considerably faster at computing an operation on two 64bit numbers.
If you are doing any kind of calculation intensive operations having 64 bit is going to increase speed.
There are many benefits such as Music applications eg audio channel mixing applications; with 64bit you can realistically increase the mixing headroom for sound channels;
Quick synopsis to explain the point;
Basic physics tells us that if you add two identical waves together you double the amplitude. When you try to mix two 16bit sounds together on a computer you must halve the amplitude of both (and then add together) in order to keep within the 16 bit resolution. The more samples you wish to mix together the more you must reduce the overall bit depth of each channel to keep from clipping. It is common for digital mixers to increase the bit depth of mixed sounds to 24 or even 32bit in order to retain bit depth and resolution as much as possible before final mix-down to normal 16bit. 64bit is surely going to be a major bonus in this area.
Im sure there are many other applications such as Video editing / mixing or 3D/Raytracing work which benefit enormously from 64bit.
It would be nice to be able to type into my computer, to be able to interface in a more efficient manner than putting myself in a particular position, putting my fleshy extensions on a bunch of blocks on a keyboard, and then having the keyboard record how they wiggle and tell the computer.
Now theres an extremely good idea, and by god Im sure its possible with a similar technology. Consider what happens when you type stuff into the computer? Well, you basically thinking of a word and your hands automatically convert that word into keypresses (at least for someone who does a lot of typing eg, a geeky programmer or slashdot addict!).
To implement a system like this would probably be pretty simple. Although a nueral net / brainwave guru might need to fill in the gaps here. All you would really need to is wear that head attachment / brain wave detector thing, say for a couple of hours at the computer while typing into a word processor or slashdot. It wouldnt take long for a neural network (with a feedback loop to the computer keyboard and the brainwave detector) to learn what brainwaves mean what keys were pressed. Once a sufficient level of stability has occured one could just remove the keyboard and operate on mind alone, just by looking at the word processor and "seeing" the text on screen!
Far fetched and fanciful maybe, but is something like this possible?
So what happens when these kinds of things become commonplace? The human brain is a highly complex thing, its self-organising properties allow it to adapt, improve and learn new things.
What will happen if/when these things become commonplace and people are "Used" to controling everyday things with the mind? Could this change the human psyche or affect our communication in some way? Who knows what hitherto unknown behaviours will emerge from training the parts of the brain that might be used in technology like this?
Chuckle,;) I dont think i mentioned there being any major differences.
I am not an astrophysicist by any long shot, and using celestia I was able to see orion from mars, albeit in a simulated environment. I was suprised to learn that Orion looked the same from Mars , as on Earth, as i kinda expected the stars to be in different positions. As you correctly identify, they are not noticably different. Its still a cool picture though.
Yes, I'd agree somewhat with what you are saying. Although I look at the A64 from a slightly different perspective. To a certain extent the intention of the chip (as I see it), is to provide a bridge to 64bit, driving consumers forward to making the "next computing step" without removing backward compatibilty with the 32bit world.
I see your point about the majority of users running 32bit applications, really I suppose its stereotypically a windows world.It is a valid , and real world, useful benchmarking review, no doubt about that.
I just think that since linux is 64bit ready (eg SuSe) we do have tools freely available to show us exactly what performance benefits can be squeezed out of these beauties. From a linux user's point of view looking to upgrade, the A64 is a much more interesting option because we can take advantage of its 64bit goodness now, as appose to whenever Windows Shorthorn comes out.
Such a review could also be instrumental in showing that in many area's linux is ahead of the competition.
It seems a little dubious to pit a 64 bit processor (Athlon64) against a 32bit one.
The Athlon64 does surprisingly well in many of the tests, especially when you note that in the majority of benchmarks it is only executing 32bit code. I bet we would see a different story if the Athlon64 was running at its best ability eg running 64bit apps on a 64bit os.
How difficult would it be to do some benchmarks comparing two identical linux distro's running on the same processor but one compiled for 32bit and the other compiled for 64bit. That might be an interesting comparison.
I've had a hard drive in my Playstation 2 for, must be nearly 2 years now. The only question is; will this hard drive be compatible with the linux one; Also , will other games support it?...ooh and yes does this mean we'll see more unnofficial distro's for ps2 like black rhino etc?
DRM... Is supposed change this,making piracy so difficult though, but will this have the opposite effect? I doubt it, The fat cats are just going to get fatter and the skinny kittens are just going to get skinnier.
The article seems to be an anti-piracy article in some sort of disguise.
In the end the consumer will decide and with the advent the choice will be a lot clearer. Let the Fat-Cats extort your money because you wont be able to use illegal software you obtained for free; or Take up on Open Source and discover that quality software is available free, and best of all its legal.
"We are firm in our belief that the unchecked spread of open-source software, under the GPL (the General Public License covers Linux and many other open-source programs), is a much more serious threat to our capitalist system than U.S. corporations realize," McBride said.
Of course it is dumbo!
But is a capitalist system a neccessarily good thing?
Not when the world is full of assholes like McBride it aint!
It already has in the UK
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 1
Can't get them anymore we tried to get one for my father for his birthday recently. Only to be told by the store assistant that they are no longer available in the UK.
I dont seem to get this, not sure what price CD's are in the States but Im guessing they probably average out at about 10-15 dollars, per album.
So why pay 99cents per track , when if you want the whole album 12-15 tracks, you could end up paying more for a lossy format audio track that you might accidentally delete(unless you habitually burn CD's)
Me ? I'd rather buy an Actual CD , in a box with nice printed disc and inlays for about the same price. Great thing about having the actual CD is that I can rip it to as many different formats as i like, at whatever quality satisfies me. But then we all know this dont we ?
I like mp3's and the versatilty but I prefer to have a non-lossy copy around. I have a good chunk of my CD collection ripped to my hard drive and I use Juk to browse and look after them all. My CD's ? I like to look at them in their dewey-decimal organised glory on my shelf. Its good for me because i like to have a physical product, but Im hopeless at looking after CD's, I used have many scratched and cracked cases.
I do have a few hard to find MP3's I have aquired off p2p , but really only a handful. I can't see myself paying for mp3's when most of the osbcure tunes I might be looking for are not available through the "Legal" mp3 channels.
I totally agree with what you and the other poster are saying, as much as i like apple hardware and to an extent the OS (I am by no means an experienced apple user) , and as much as the they have improved over the years in my eyes as a company. Im not sure just how far my trust goes with them yet (a lot further than with M$ though thats for sure) That will probably change though , as soon as i can afford a powerbook;)
So long as Apple stays out of the DRM/take away user rights game, they have a happy future. They will be the refuge of those intelligent enough to NOT go quietly into corporate control of their hardware, media, and, indirectly, their lives.
dont tempt fate, I wouldnt place my hopes there just yet, DRM is already there with iTunes, at least not yet it hasnt made the transition into bios/openfirmware. Mac's are certainly perceived as having a larger userbase than Linux, whether thats true or not is debatable. If Apple were to lock out Linux via hardware DRM (can they do this with Darwin being opensource?), well, think about how it might affect their position in the marketplace.. For Apple it might not be such a bad move.
Slashdot Mirror
PSP?
Since they have effectively (with a few minor differences) managed to squeeze a PS2 into a handheld, they probably have a single chip that they can just drop in the PS3 maybe thats how they will manage it.
Im not sure if Im missing the point here, but what you are suggesting is a standard feature of firewire/dv camera's . I use Kino, I just plug in my camera and go to the preview screen and guess what i see what the camera is playing displayed on the computer... I really dont see how you thought this was difficult to do!
to risky, its a lot of effort to go to when there is a fairly large chance your article might get rejected by the beastly editors
Not quite right ... how about being a little more adventurous ...
I believe the ultimate goal of Linux desktops should be to make the computer even easier to use as a Mac.
why in /var of course ;)
more interensting is OSX and C# ?
Doesnt really matter since its gpl, the source code is available just port it to a different language or window manager, thats the whole point..
nick...
If you take a look at this page it explains how it works.
How they do it
At the bottom it explains about the semi transparent mirror system for generating the numbers. The article suggests that the mirror is 50% transparent/50% not transparent. This seems to me to be the point where a bias may be introduced. Surely its physically impossible to manufacture such a mirror to guarantee it is exactly 50/50 either way. It might be a very small bias, but ill bet there is one there. You'd just need a lot of numbers to prove it.
generate a few screens of random numbers, use a range of 0-255 and generate 1000 numbers.
/dev/dsp
...
...
open up a text editor and paste the results in, repeat the process several times till you have a nice big file of random numbers. Then simply
%> cat randomnumbers.txt
its an interesting noise , i think you will agree
nick
How do they really really know for certain, that these numbers are truly random?
...
And what kinds of applications might they be used for?
Why does it need to be a quantum random number generator? How come you cant use an aerial and pick up white noise?
nick
It depends on what exactly it is you are trying to do. For example a 64bit cpu is going to be considerably faster at computing an operation on two 64bit numbers.
/Raytracing work which benefit enormously from 64bit.
If you are doing any kind of calculation intensive operations having 64 bit is going to increase speed.
There are many benefits such as Music applications eg audio channel mixing applications; with 64bit you can realistically increase the mixing headroom for sound channels;
Quick synopsis to explain the point;
Basic physics tells us that if you add two identical waves together you double the amplitude. When you try to mix two 16bit sounds together on a computer you must halve the amplitude of both (and then add together) in order to keep within the 16 bit resolution. The more samples you wish to mix together the more you must reduce the overall bit depth of each channel to keep from clipping. It is common for digital mixers to increase the bit depth of mixed sounds to 24 or even 32bit in order to retain bit depth and resolution as much as possible before final mix-down to normal 16bit. 64bit is surely going to be a major bonus in this area.
Im sure there are many other applications such as Video editing / mixing or 3D
It would be nice to be able to type into my computer, to be able to interface in a more efficient manner than putting myself in a particular position, putting my fleshy extensions on a bunch of blocks on a keyboard, and then having the keyboard record how they wiggle and tell the computer.
Now theres an extremely good idea, and by god Im sure its possible with a similar technology. Consider what happens when you type stuff into the computer? Well, you basically thinking of a word and your hands automatically convert that word into keypresses (at least for someone who does a lot of typing eg, a geeky programmer or slashdot addict!).
To implement a system like this would probably be pretty simple. Although a nueral net / brainwave guru might need to fill in the gaps here. All you would really need to is wear that head attachment / brain wave detector thing, say for a couple of hours at the computer while typing into a word processor or slashdot. It wouldnt take long for a neural network (with a feedback loop to the computer keyboard and the brainwave detector) to learn what brainwaves mean what keys were pressed. Once a sufficient level of stability has occured one could just remove the keyboard and operate on mind alone, just by looking at the word processor and "seeing" the text on screen!
Far fetched and fanciful maybe, but is something like this possible?
nick
So what happens when these kinds of things become commonplace? The human brain is a highly complex thing, its self-organising properties allow it to adapt, improve and learn new things.
...
What will happen if/when these things become commonplace and people are "Used" to controling everyday things with the mind? Could this change the human psyche or affect our communication in some way? Who knows what hitherto unknown behaviours will emerge from training the parts of the brain that might be used in technology like this?
nick
Chuckle, ;) I dont think i mentioned there being any major differences.
...
I am not an astrophysicist by any long shot, and using celestia I was able to see orion from mars, albeit in a simulated environment. I was suprised to learn that Orion looked the same from Mars , as on Earth, as i kinda expected the stars to be in different positions. As you correctly identify, they are not noticably different. Its still a cool picture though.
nick
Yes, I'd agree somewhat with what you are saying. Although I look at the A64 from a slightly different perspective. To a certain extent the intention of the chip (as I see it), is to provide a bridge to 64bit, driving consumers forward to making the "next computing step" without removing backward compatibilty with the 32bit world.
I see your point about the majority of users running 32bit applications, really I suppose its stereotypically a windows world.It is a valid , and real world, useful benchmarking review, no doubt about that.
I just think that since linux is 64bit ready (eg SuSe) we do have tools freely available to show us exactly what performance benefits can be squeezed out of these beauties. From a linux user's point of view looking to upgrade, the A64 is a much more interesting option because we can take advantage of its 64bit goodness now, as appose to whenever Windows Shorthorn comes out.
Such a review could also be instrumental in showing that in many area's linux is ahead of the competition.
Thats pretty cool, but a little further down the page I found this...
...
Orions Belt Viewed From Mars
Thats pretty cool! I used celestia some while ago to find out what orion looked like from Mars and this shows just how accurate that program is.
nick
It seems a little dubious to pit a 64 bit processor (Athlon64) against a 32bit one.
The Athlon64 does surprisingly well in many of the tests, especially when you note that in the majority of benchmarks it is only executing 32bit code. I bet we would see a different story if the Athlon64 was running at its best ability eg running 64bit apps on a 64bit os.
How difficult would it be to do some benchmarks comparing two identical linux distro's running on the same processor but one compiled for 32bit and the other compiled for 64bit. That might be an interesting comparison.
Nick
I've had a hard drive in my Playstation 2 for, must be nearly 2 years now. The only question is; will this hard drive be compatible with the linux one; Also , will other games support it? ...ooh and yes does this mean we'll see more unnofficial distro's for ps2 like black rhino etc?
Maybe they want to get their search engine out there, up and running before they lock Longhorn into it.
DRM ... Is supposed change this,making piracy so difficult though, but will this have the opposite effect? I doubt it, The fat cats are just going to get fatter and the skinny kittens are just going to get skinnier.
The article seems to be an anti-piracy article in some sort of disguise.
In the end the consumer will decide and with the advent the choice will be a lot clearer. Let the Fat-Cats extort your money because you wont be able to use illegal software you obtained for free; or Take up on Open Source and discover that quality software is available free, and best of all its legal.
"We are firm in our belief that the unchecked spread of open-source software, under the GPL (the General Public License covers Linux and many other open-source programs), is a much more serious threat to our capitalist system than U.S. corporations realize," McBride said.
Of course it is dumbo!
But is a capitalist system a neccessarily good thing?
Not when the world is full of assholes like McBride it aint!
Can't get them anymore we tried to get one for my father for his birthday recently. Only to be told by the store assistant that they are no longer available in the UK.
I dont seem to get this, not sure what price CD's are in the States but Im guessing they probably average out at about 10-15 dollars, per album.
So why pay 99cents per track , when if you want the whole album 12-15 tracks, you could end up paying more for a lossy format audio track that you might accidentally delete(unless you habitually burn CD's)
Me ? I'd rather buy an Actual CD , in a box with nice printed disc and inlays for about the same price. Great thing about having the actual CD is that I can rip it to as many different formats as i like, at whatever quality satisfies me. But then we all know this dont we ?
I like mp3's and the versatilty but I prefer to have a non-lossy copy around. I have a good chunk of my CD collection ripped to my hard drive and I use Juk to browse and look after them all. My CD's ? I like to look at them in their dewey-decimal organised glory on my shelf. Its good for me because i like to have a physical product, but Im hopeless at looking after CD's, I used have many scratched and cracked cases.
I do have a few hard to find MP3's I have aquired off p2p , but really only a handful.
I can't see myself paying for mp3's when most of the osbcure tunes I might be looking for are not available through the "Legal" mp3 channels.
nick
I dont have a problem with Microsoft aquiring AOL, providing it doesnt mean i get even more cd-coasters - for the bin through my letterbox.
I'd be glad to see AOL go away anyway, its one less company to hate. It just means two shit companies become 1 shit company.
I totally agree with what you and the other poster are saying, as much as i like apple hardware and to an extent the OS (I am by no means an experienced apple user) , and as much as the they have improved over the years in my eyes as a company. Im not sure just how far my trust goes with them yet (a lot further than with M$ though thats for sure) That will probably change though , as soon as i can afford a powerbook ;)
So long as Apple stays out of the DRM/take away user rights game, they have a happy future. They will be the refuge of those intelligent enough to NOT go quietly into corporate control of their hardware, media, and, indirectly, their lives.
dont tempt fate, I wouldnt place my hopes there just yet, DRM is already there with iTunes, at least not yet it hasnt made the transition into bios/openfirmware. Mac's are certainly perceived as having a larger userbase than Linux, whether thats true or not is debatable. If Apple were to lock out Linux via hardware DRM (can they do this with Darwin being opensource?), well, think about how it might affect their position in the marketplace.. For Apple it might not be such a bad move.