Okay, the commercial house project seems neat and all (though good luck getting one). However, there are some definite problems with it.
First, you wouldn't want it in an area where the wind tends to change direction rapidly. They specifically mount it on a column which allows it to rotate (if I understand the page correctly) so that the wind always blows through the house in the same direction (using the tail to direct the plane). If this is the case, then your house is basically a weathervane. (Also, good luck getting in and out of it.) Of course, I could be misunderstanding it and maybe the tail is sufficiently-large to redirect all wind around the plane, but that doesn't seem aerodynamically possible.
Second problem: the wings are high off the ground. No sweat, they put railings on them - but that won't stop kids from jumping/falling off the wings, either accidentally or on-purpose. And I don't know about other people, but it's not height that gives me vertigo so much as the threat of falling. Also, the wings give you 1200 square feet of balcony (which is quite a lot) but it doesn't seem to be in any sort of usable shape. And don't forget that you're standing on top of an airfoil - even with the deflector you're still likely to get some major windspeeds going over the wing, thanks to the principle discovered by Bernoulli which keeps planes in-flight to begin with. Though at least the wings can each withstand a good-sized party (but can the railings?:)
Hm. Lots of windows to be broken by the neighborhood baseball games. And they can't be cheap to replace...
In the meantime, 727s are relatively huge, especially as airplanes go. I'm sure the cargo holds would be useful as an 'attic,' and of course there's the electrical and engineering bay which makes a convenient basement.
I'd hate to try cooking in one of the galleys. My apartment's kitchen is too small for my likings, and it's HUGE in comparison.
I like the way they deal with the hallway problem, though... use the cargo hold as a corridor. I imagine there's stairs or ladders or something.
Two neighborhoodly problems: first, I don't like the thought of my home getting hijacked by terrorists.:) Also, I bet ignorant neighbors/visitors to the neighborhood keep calling the police with reports of an airplane having mysteriously landed (that'd be especially common in water-mounted houses as they show). Also, for the waterbound houses, I imagine you need a boat. It'd be far too easy to get stranded inside or outside your house in that case... and stairs from the shore would get blown over... it just seems so risky... maybe that's why this is for adventuresome homeowners.:)
I seriously doubt it's up to fire codes. The emergency exits are easily-accessed when everyone's upstairs and there's a nice aisle going through the whole plane, but with these modifications, one fire and you're stuck. I certainly wouldn't be able to squeeze myself through a window.
Ah, reading further I see that you can lock the column in place and rotate it slowly using motors or have it act as a weathervane. Okay, so hopefully the gears don't get stripped, or you lose power during a nasty storm, or else you could be in puke city, though it claims to limit the free rotation to be very gradual. So how does one get in or out? A rolling ladder?
At least this house would be VERY easy to move (they even say so:)
Man, this IS very intriguing though. And it's a lot cheaper than building a normal house, and a lot cooler... I'd be concerned about the things I mentioned above, but all in all, man, I hope they can ramp up production by the time I can afford a house of my own.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, that's the problem with windowing systems in general. The idea behind the window is to take in the 2-digit year and store it as the proper 4-digit one, not to keep it 2-digit. Though this is Micros~1 we're talking about. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:Heisenburg vs. possibility of nanotech
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Nanosystems
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· Score: 2
I know I was oversimplifying. I know I left out all the fun stuff about how enzymes are a sloppy part of evolution. I know that nanites would be implicitly more accurate and controlled than enzymes. I was just stating that heisenberg shouldn't ever have been seen as an issue, since if enzymes can do it, so can anything else operating on that scale with nearly zero relative velocity, and that nanorobots would be functionally similar to enzymes. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, I'm well aware of the sam9407 stuff. I'm on the dev list, but haven't gotten around to unsubscribing myself. It just isn't worth the effort, loss of functionality in Windows, and CPU drain. (I thought I'd mentioned all of that in my previous post in one way or another:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It might warm your heart to know that IT started out as a clone of ST3, and hence has the same wonderful interface. But given the choice between S3M and XM (format-wise, anyway) I'd take XM, given identical interfaces. S3M is just so *limited*. Of course, I'd happily choose IT over XM.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Uhh, what's wrong with the 'hardware' category? It's not like there's going to be a constant flux of non-movie DVD articles or USB articles period... (And it's a category, not an icon. Categories just happen to have icons.)
Reminds me of this one conversation I overheard in a library. A bunch of posers trying to look intellectual were talking about how they "got on the information superhighway by running Netscape. What's it that Netscape is... oh yeah, it's an icon." --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, Win'98 has an option to select its Y2K window in the date control panel. And we all know that if Micros~1 can do it, anyone can.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Heisenburg vs. possibility of nanotech
on
Nanosystems
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· Score: 2
Although I haven't read the book, I feel that I need to comment on something the reviewer said. As the reviewer pointed out, Heisenburg isn't nearly as problematic for nanotech as people love to point out. In fact, we already have nanotech assemblers and their ilk, and have had them for well over two billion years; they're called enzymes. We have enzymes all over the place, unzipping our DNA apart and reassembling it into two copies by finding matching proteins and bonding them to the other half of the stepladder. Basically, a nanomachine can be thought of as an artificial enzyme.
Heisenburg uncertainty only really becomes an issue when something is moving at a high relative velocity or is at very high temperature, and when that's the case, you definitely don't want to be twiddling the atoms anyway (not that you'd be able to, since you (the enzyme/nanobot) wouldn't even be close enough to the atoms to manipulate them anyway and/or would have its own atoms knocked out of place due to the sheer kinetic energy). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Properly-written C/C++ code requires absolutely no changes to recompile on another system. I developed the Hobbes engine on an x86 Linux box, and it took literally no time to port it to the RS6k AIX box it runs on.
As far as realtime changes to a system: do you really want code which wouldn't compile to be executed at arbitrary times on a public system? On-the-fly trial-by-fire testing is no way to do a production system, and properly-done C++ systems don't take a lot of time to recompile (that's what having separate source files is for, after all). Also, with live scripts, then you have to worry about remembering to back up the realtime-tweaked versions.
C/C++ string handling isn't non-existent, it just requires some thought behind it. There's plenty of regexp libraries; aside from that, strstr(), and strchr(), what do you need? (That said, on Hobbes, I rewrote my own version of strstr which was optimized to run a little bit faster at the expense of getting the last match instead of the first match, since probably 99% of the CPU time during a search is spent in strstr().) And, if you want to get fancier, that's what vector is for.:)
Scripts run in their own enclosed shell and binaries don't, but binaries don't need to either. The binary is the shell.
And um, generally if you're the webmaster of a large website, you can install gcc yourself. I did on Hobbes without a problem... and binaries are no more necessarily directory-specific than a script. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I used to run the Hobbes Archive. For those who aren't in the know, it's an OS/2 shareware archive. It contains about 3.5 gigs of software in several thousand files with an incredibly-deep directory structure. For it, I wrote my own custom database engine for keeping track of the files and generating the HTML. The average search takes 5-6 seconds depending on system load (it used to only take 3, but the archive has grown signifigantly since I wrote the engine).
This archive runs on an ancient RS/6000, about the processor equivalent of a 486/66. And it doesn't have much memory, either.
I wrote the entire engine and interface in highly-tuned C++. Because of the requirements of the search, it must go through every single file's entry in the archive (or at least under the topmost directory specified). I made extensive use of the nature of UNIX filesystems for the actual database (each directory has a file index called.file.idx, and builds a recursive search index called.search.idx which contains the current directory and all search indices of lower directories). If I had done things a bit more intelligently I could have probably kept a single.search.idx cached in memory instead of having to reload it on every search (which is painful, since the toplevel directory's.search.idx is something like 2 megs now), but the fact remains that it still goes relatively quickly, particularly considering the nature of the search and the antiquity of the machine it's running on.
I had briefly considered PERL, but I quickly shot that idea down for several ideas:
1. I had initially prototyped an earlier version of the search engine in csh using grep. (This was before I wrote the new database engine; the old, flaky, always-dying-and-losing-whole-file-databases one made it so one basically had to just parse the 00index.txt files anyway.) The average search took well over 3 minutes. Completely unacceptable. Granted, csh isn't the fastest thing around, but the script wasn't using anything which PERL could have done better (it was just iterating through a bunch of files and running grep on them).
Mind you, the C++ I used was incredibly low-level. I used it basically as C with objects; no STL, no inheritance, etc., because I didn't need them, and didn't want the overhead (though in hindsight, if I had used an STL vector instead of rolling my own dynamic arrays it would have been the same speed and involve a lot less bugfixes).
But basically, what I learned from the example of the csh search engine: Parsing text databases slow. Parsing binary databases fast.
Which reminds me, I still need to ask Dave Rocks (my boss at NMSU) if I can GPL the engine source. I'm sure it'll do someone else some good; not everyone out there wanting to run a file archive engine can afford the overhead of SQL. Hobbes had plenty of bandwidth for its purposes (10Mbit) but 32 megs of RAM and an ancient RS/6000 just aren't enough for anything SQL-based... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Maybe instead of trying as hard as you can to get a first post (unannounced or not), you could learn something on the subject first. Verilog and its ilk are circuit-design languages, where you create functional blocks of circuitry and connect them together, and then you can simulate them accounting for latency and the like. Very good for circuit design, expecially on the IC scale, including CPUs. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
This isn't the beginning of a domino effect - it's an indication of a very welcome one that's been gaining momentum for quite some time. What nVidia did for video cards (actually *writing* an XFree86 server for it) on the tails of Matrox (releasing low-level specs to the G200, admittedly nothing new for video cards but very new for 3D cards) is what Aureal and Creative are now doing for soundcards. Also, several Ethernet cards have had vendor-supported drivers for some time now (such as tulip-based cards), and Intel just released some opensource drivers, though Intel's license very subtly violates the GPL, but I'm sure that'll be worked out eventually.
This is still a very Good Thing(tm), though, since it takes more dominoes to fall to keep a domino effect going. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I refuse to deal with Hoontech. I got burned by getting a SoundTrack 128 Ruby. Great specs, lousy card. Their Windows drivers didn't work at all (I got it mostly for Impulse Tracker), and it wasn't helped by the fact that it had no DMA - all sound was piped to it via PIO, so when playing MP3s under Linux (which, admittedly, sounded *wonderful*), it'd take 6% of the CPU to decode and 25% of the CPU to actually play the sound buffer. This was the best I got after trying to hold a conversation with their tech support department. Didn't help that shortly after I bought the card, they decided to start churning out what seemed like a new card every month, rather than supporting their old cards. Basically I spent $200 on a card with great specs but absolutely no support for the things I got it for.
Oh, and their tech support, such as it was, consisted of one person who barely understood English, who, no matter how much I explained the problem, could only offer the advice of reinstalling the drivers.
The fact they're still around indicates that they must have gotten better in some regards, but I'm still unwilling to trust any of their hardware. With all the time I spent trying to get the ST128 Ruby working (and failing), I could have spent that time working for $7/hour at my university admin job and afforded a professional studio soundcard - and a real one, not one that claimed to be one. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I couldn't agree with you more. The best soundcard I've ever had is the PAS16 by Media Vision; this is relevant because Media Vision's engineering department parted company to form Aureal. The PAS16 is a rather mediocre card now, but considering it was the first consumer 16-bit soundcard out there and, until very recently, still had better sound quality than anything put out by Creative Labs says a lot. I've been waiting and hoping for Aureal to realize that there is little to no good in not opensourcing their drivers, especially for their A3D 2.0 chipset seeing as how most of the processing happens in the chip anyway (I can understand, though not necessarily agree with, them not wanting to opensource drivers for the A3D 1.0 chipset since most of the actual work is done in software).
As far as BeOS goes, there's some very nice positional 3D audio that it does in software (somewhat akin to DirectSound3D which, for all its problems, does put out some convincing positional audio) and I believe they have the infrastructure for hardware support. They just need drivers.
In any case, I'll be glad to finally have a modern soundcard with good sound quality which is supported by Linux. That and a port of Impulse Tracker would make me a very happy porcupine. (Yes, I know there's other Linux trackers, but they only implement part of XM at best. I need at least the ability to import ITs in a way that accounts for NNAs and I would much prefer having resonant filtering and MIDI available.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
On a related note, I've noticed that there has been a LOT of progress in internationalization in Linux, particularly for Oriental languages (Japanese in particular). Over the last few days, Debian has suddenly gained several dozen packages specifically for Japanese language support, and many other programs have been retrofit for various internationalized functionalization. Definitely a Good Thing(tm). No reason to exclude most of the civilized world just because they don't use 8-bit Roman characters. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
What I'd like to see is AMD's Athlon technology (micro-ops, along with all its weird Funky massive parallelism and the like) applied to a decent architecture such as PowerPC. Sure, the clock speed would only be a 'measly' 700MHz, but it would be able to do so much *more* at that frequency... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah, the original Hercules had pageflipping. Very few things used it though, except for a few cheesy demos which came with the card. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, WD no longer making graphics chips is no major loss by any stretch of the imagination.:) As for Cirrus, they're still around, making mostly OEM integration chips (mostly for notebooks and the like), and I seem to recall they had a promising low-end 3D chip which would have been fun for, say, palmtops, if it had actually been used in something.
Hercules was one of the few nVidia-using companies which actually designed their own cards rather than using a stock reference design, the others being Elsa and Canopus. Considering the Canopus Spectra 2500 was nearly twice as fast as reference-design TNT cards, I'd love to have seen them do a TNT2 or geForce 256, but alas, they decided to duck out of the market before they became victims of their own success. Ethically admirable, but stupid businesswise and just left consumers without a TNT card which actually pushed its performance to the limits... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quite a bit more than just shutter glasses. The nVidia chips themselves support TV in and out, but require external logic to actually modulate between digital and analog; hence, most of the TNT cards with TV out had a crappy output chip, but the Asus and Leadtek cards used a much better one which could actually do 800x600 SVHS and the like (and my Leadtek S320 looks sweet on my 35" TV). Also, most cards don't use the TV in, with the Asus ones being the sole exceptions.
That's not all though. Some companies, such as Canopus and Elsa, modified the card designs to change performance. The Canopus Spectra 2500 was nearly twice as fast as all other TNT cards, except the Elsa Erazor 2 which it was about 3x as fast as (Elsa's modifications made sense but ended up being detrimental to performance for some reason). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The geForce might not have a much higher fillrate than the v3, but that's such an asininely ignorant comparison for the following reasons:
Vertex processing - that's the whole point of the geForce, remove more of the CPU bottleneck
32bpp rendering - the Voodoo3 *still* doesn't do it, not even slowly (I don't count a lowpass filter on the RAMDAC to hide the dithering as 22bit, either)
Textures larger than 256x256 - Quake2 already uses textures larger than this and it's been out for *years*
Architecture - the V3 is still based on a really crappy, ancient architecture without a concept of unified memory. The V3 is basically multiple V1s on the same chip as a 2D core. I don't know about the V3, but in the V2 each texel processor needed its own copy of the texture working set; a 12MB Voodoo2 was basically a fast version of a 6MB Voodoo1 with a larger framebuffer (V1 had 2MB framebuffer, 2 or 4MB texture, whereas V2 had 4MB framebuffer, 2/2 or 4/4MB texture).
Glide. I can't emphasize enough how bad, scalability- and capability-wise, Glide is. It's tied so anally to one piece of hardware with a fixed set of capabilities. Even if the next Voodoo card *did* have vertex processing, older Glide games couldn't support it, because Glide is so low-level and hardware-oriented. This is opposed to OpenGL, which is low-level but abstract, and has supported hardware T&L since it was called IrisGL back in the mid-80s. (I like to use a similar argument for OpenGL vs. Direct3D, btw. Hopefully there's no D3D pundits on this primarily-Linux site though.:)
There's a lot more to the speed of a graphics chip than fillrate. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Heh, and that was supposed to be posted as AC. Slashdot is *really* quirky tonight.;) Sorry for any offense towards moderators. Was just checking the system for bugs (no, really!:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hey moderators, why's this offtopic? The post was about something similar, stupid unenforceable laws and stuff. Jeeze. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Heh, and I just got logged out randomly. But like, I coulda sworn that Halloween was October 31... why the hell is everyone celebrating it on the 30th this year? Back when I was a kid, the fact it was a school night didn't matter... *grumble* --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
First, you wouldn't want it in an area where the wind tends to change direction rapidly. They specifically mount it on a column which allows it to rotate (if I understand the page correctly) so that the wind always blows through the house in the same direction (using the tail to direct the plane). If this is the case, then your house is basically a weathervane. (Also, good luck getting in and out of it.) Of course, I could be misunderstanding it and maybe the tail is sufficiently-large to redirect all wind around the plane, but that doesn't seem aerodynamically possible.
Second problem: the wings are high off the ground. No sweat, they put railings on them - but that won't stop kids from jumping/falling off the wings, either accidentally or on-purpose. And I don't know about other people, but it's not height that gives me vertigo so much as the threat of falling. Also, the wings give you 1200 square feet of balcony (which is quite a lot) but it doesn't seem to be in any sort of usable shape. And don't forget that you're standing on top of an airfoil - even with the deflector you're still likely to get some major windspeeds going over the wing, thanks to the principle discovered by Bernoulli which keeps planes in-flight to begin with. Though at least the wings can each withstand a good-sized party (but can the railings? :)
Hm. Lots of windows to be broken by the neighborhood baseball games. And they can't be cheap to replace...
In the meantime, 727s are relatively huge, especially as airplanes go. I'm sure the cargo holds would be useful as an 'attic,' and of course there's the electrical and engineering bay which makes a convenient basement.
I'd hate to try cooking in one of the galleys. My apartment's kitchen is too small for my likings, and it's HUGE in comparison.
I like the way they deal with the hallway problem, though... use the cargo hold as a corridor. I imagine there's stairs or ladders or something.
Two neighborhoodly problems: first, I don't like the thought of my home getting hijacked by terrorists. :) Also, I bet ignorant neighbors/visitors to the neighborhood keep calling the police with reports of an airplane having mysteriously landed (that'd be especially common in water-mounted houses as they show). Also, for the waterbound houses, I imagine you need a boat. It'd be far too easy to get stranded inside or outside your house in that case... and stairs from the shore would get blown over... it just seems so risky... maybe that's why this is for adventuresome homeowners. :)
I seriously doubt it's up to fire codes. The emergency exits are easily-accessed when everyone's upstairs and there's a nice aisle going through the whole plane, but with these modifications, one fire and you're stuck. I certainly wouldn't be able to squeeze myself through a window.
Ah, reading further I see that you can lock the column in place and rotate it slowly using motors or have it act as a weathervane. Okay, so hopefully the gears don't get stripped, or you lose power during a nasty storm, or else you could be in puke city, though it claims to limit the free rotation to be very gradual. So how does one get in or out? A rolling ladder?
At least this house would be VERY easy to move (they even say so :)
Man, this IS very intriguing though. And it's a lot cheaper than building a normal house, and a lot cooler... I'd be concerned about the things I mentioned above, but all in all, man, I hope they can ramp up production by the time I can afford a house of my own. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, that's the problem with windowing systems in general. The idea behind the window is to take in the 2-digit year and store it as the proper 4-digit one, not to keep it 2-digit. Though this is Micros~1 we're talking about.
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I know I was oversimplifying. I know I left out all the fun stuff about how enzymes are a sloppy part of evolution. I know that nanites would be implicitly more accurate and controlled than enzymes. I was just stating that heisenberg shouldn't ever have been seen as an issue, since if enzymes can do it, so can anything else operating on that scale with nearly zero relative velocity, and that nanorobots would be functionally similar to enzymes.
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grep (blahblahblah) `find (topdir) -name 00index.txt`
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Oh, I'm well aware of the sam9407 stuff. I'm on the dev list, but haven't gotten around to unsubscribing myself. It just isn't worth the effort, loss of functionality in Windows, and CPU drain. (I thought I'd mentioned all of that in my previous post in one way or another :)
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It might warm your heart to know that IT started out as a clone of ST3, and hence has the same wonderful interface. But given the choice between S3M and XM (format-wise, anyway) I'd take XM, given identical interfaces. S3M is just so *limited*. Of course, I'd happily choose IT over XM. :)
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Reminds me of this one conversation I overheard in a library. A bunch of posers trying to look intellectual were talking about how they "got on the information superhighway by running Netscape. What's it that Netscape is... oh yeah, it's an icon."
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Well, Win'98 has an option to select its Y2K window in the date control panel. And we all know that if Micros~1 can do it, anyone can. :)
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Heisenburg uncertainty only really becomes an issue when something is moving at a high relative velocity or is at very high temperature, and when that's the case, you definitely don't want to be twiddling the atoms anyway (not that you'd be able to, since you (the enzyme/nanobot) wouldn't even be close enough to the atoms to manipulate them anyway and/or would have its own atoms knocked out of place due to the sheer kinetic energy).
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As far as realtime changes to a system: do you really want code which wouldn't compile to be executed at arbitrary times on a public system? On-the-fly trial-by-fire testing is no way to do a production system, and properly-done C++ systems don't take a lot of time to recompile (that's what having separate source files is for, after all). Also, with live scripts, then you have to worry about remembering to back up the realtime-tweaked versions.
C/C++ string handling isn't non-existent, it just requires some thought behind it. There's plenty of regexp libraries; aside from that, strstr(), and strchr(), what do you need? (That said, on Hobbes, I rewrote my own version of strstr which was optimized to run a little bit faster at the expense of getting the last match instead of the first match, since probably 99% of the CPU time during a search is spent in strstr().) And, if you want to get fancier, that's what vector is for. :)
Scripts run in their own enclosed shell and binaries don't, but binaries don't need to either. The binary is the shell.
And um, generally if you're the webmaster of a large website, you can install gcc yourself. I did on Hobbes without a problem... and binaries are no more necessarily directory-specific than a script.
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This archive runs on an ancient RS/6000, about the processor equivalent of a 486/66. And it doesn't have much memory, either.
I wrote the entire engine and interface in highly-tuned C++. Because of the requirements of the search, it must go through every single file's entry in the archive (or at least under the topmost directory specified). I made extensive use of the nature of UNIX filesystems for the actual database (each directory has a file index called .file.idx, and builds a recursive search index called .search.idx which contains the current directory and all search indices of lower directories). If I had done things a bit more intelligently I could have probably kept a single .search.idx cached in memory instead of having to reload it on every search (which is painful, since the toplevel directory's .search.idx is something like 2 megs now), but the fact remains that it still goes relatively quickly, particularly considering the nature of the search and the antiquity of the machine it's running on.
I had briefly considered PERL, but I quickly shot that idea down for several ideas:
1. I had initially prototyped an earlier version of the search engine in csh using grep. (This was before I wrote the new database engine; the old, flaky, always-dying-and-losing-whole-file-databases one made it so one basically had to just parse the 00index.txt files anyway.) The average search took well over 3 minutes. Completely unacceptable. Granted, csh isn't the fastest thing around, but the script wasn't using anything which PERL could have done better (it was just iterating through a bunch of files and running grep on them).
Mind you, the C++ I used was incredibly low-level. I used it basically as C with objects; no STL, no inheritance, etc., because I didn't need them, and didn't want the overhead (though in hindsight, if I had used an STL vector instead of rolling my own dynamic arrays it would have been the same speed and involve a lot less bugfixes).
But basically, what I learned from the example of the csh search engine: Parsing text databases slow. Parsing binary databases fast.
Which reminds me, I still need to ask Dave Rocks (my boss at NMSU) if I can GPL the engine source. I'm sure it'll do someone else some good; not everyone out there wanting to run a file archive engine can afford the overhead of SQL. Hobbes had plenty of bandwidth for its purposes (10Mbit) but 32 megs of RAM and an ancient RS/6000 just aren't enough for anything SQL-based...
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Maybe instead of trying as hard as you can to get a first post (unannounced or not), you could learn something on the subject first. Verilog and its ilk are circuit-design languages, where you create functional blocks of circuitry and connect them together, and then you can simulate them accounting for latency and the like. Very good for circuit design, expecially on the IC scale, including CPUs.
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This is still a very Good Thing(tm), though, since it takes more dominoes to fall to keep a domino effect going.
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Oh, and their tech support, such as it was, consisted of one person who barely understood English, who, no matter how much I explained the problem, could only offer the advice of reinstalling the drivers.
The fact they're still around indicates that they must have gotten better in some regards, but I'm still unwilling to trust any of their hardware. With all the time I spent trying to get the ST128 Ruby working (and failing), I could have spent that time working for $7/hour at my university admin job and afforded a professional studio soundcard - and a real one, not one that claimed to be one.
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As far as BeOS goes, there's some very nice positional 3D audio that it does in software (somewhat akin to DirectSound3D which, for all its problems, does put out some convincing positional audio) and I believe they have the infrastructure for hardware support. They just need drivers.
In any case, I'll be glad to finally have a modern soundcard with good sound quality which is supported by Linux. That and a port of Impulse Tracker would make me a very happy porcupine. (Yes, I know there's other Linux trackers, but they only implement part of XM at best. I need at least the ability to import ITs in a way that accounts for NNAs and I would much prefer having resonant filtering and MIDI available.)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
On a related note, I've noticed that there has been a LOT of progress in internationalization in Linux, particularly for Oriental languages (Japanese in particular). Over the last few days, Debian has suddenly gained several dozen packages specifically for Japanese language support, and many other programs have been retrofit for various internationalized functionalization. Definitely a Good Thing(tm). No reason to exclude most of the civilized world just because they don't use 8-bit Roman characters.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
What I'd like to see is AMD's Athlon technology (micro-ops, along with all its weird Funky massive parallelism and the like) applied to a decent architecture such as PowerPC. Sure, the clock speed would only be a 'measly' 700MHz, but it would be able to do so much *more* at that frequency...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah, the original Hercules had pageflipping. Very few things used it though, except for a few cheesy demos which came with the card.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hercules was one of the few nVidia-using companies which actually designed their own cards rather than using a stock reference design, the others being Elsa and Canopus. Considering the Canopus Spectra 2500 was nearly twice as fast as reference-design TNT cards, I'd love to have seen them do a TNT2 or geForce 256, but alas, they decided to duck out of the market before they became victims of their own success. Ethically admirable, but stupid businesswise and just left consumers without a TNT card which actually pushed its performance to the limits...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
That's not all though. Some companies, such as Canopus and Elsa, modified the card designs to change performance. The Canopus Spectra 2500 was nearly twice as fast as all other TNT cards, except the Elsa Erazor 2 which it was about 3x as fast as (Elsa's modifications made sense but ended up being detrimental to performance for some reason).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
- Vertex processing - that's the whole point of the geForce, remove more of the CPU bottleneck
- 32bpp rendering - the Voodoo3 *still* doesn't do it, not even slowly (I don't count a lowpass filter on the RAMDAC to hide the dithering as 22bit, either)
- Textures larger than 256x256 - Quake2 already uses textures larger than this and it's been out for *years*
- Architecture - the V3 is still based on a really crappy, ancient architecture without a concept of unified memory. The V3 is basically multiple V1s on the same chip as a 2D core. I don't know about the V3, but in the V2 each texel processor needed its own copy of the texture working set; a 12MB Voodoo2 was basically a fast version of a 6MB Voodoo1 with a larger framebuffer (V1 had 2MB framebuffer, 2 or 4MB texture, whereas V2 had 4MB framebuffer, 2/2 or 4/4MB texture).
- Glide. I can't emphasize enough how bad, scalability- and capability-wise, Glide is. It's tied so anally to one piece of hardware with a fixed set of capabilities. Even if the next Voodoo card *did* have vertex processing, older Glide games couldn't support it, because Glide is so low-level and hardware-oriented. This is opposed to OpenGL, which is low-level but abstract, and has supported hardware T&L since it was called IrisGL back in the mid-80s. (I like to use a similar argument for OpenGL vs. Direct3D, btw. Hopefully there's no D3D pundits on this primarily-Linux site though.
:)
There's a lot more to the speed of a graphics chip than fillrate.---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yes, I am! Thanks for reminding me. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Heh, and that was supposed to be posted as AC. Slashdot is *really* quirky tonight. ;) Sorry for any offense towards moderators. Was just checking the system for bugs (no, really! :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hey moderators, why's this offtopic? The post was about something similar, stupid unenforceable laws and stuff. Jeeze.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Heh, and I just got logged out randomly. But like, I coulda sworn that Halloween was October 31... why the hell is everyone celebrating it on the 30th this year? Back when I was a kid, the fact it was a school night didn't matter... *grumble*
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.