He mentions this at the bottom of the article, ye who cannot be bothered to read the article.
The guy wants to know how to take an image containing text, and create a pdf containing an image, with that text as real text, not a bitmap.
I.e., some software that will OCR the image, grab the text from the image, create a pdf file with that text in, preferably in the same layout as before. If the original image had images with the text, then the images should be preserved in the new document.
Why the poster didn't say so in such a clear manner is beyond me though!
Oh, and moderators, this is "Redundant", not "Informative".
Speaking about the processor, the 68000-family was much more orthogonal and clean.
Agreed, the 68000 family were gorgeous processors for their time, much better than the x86, and they did gain reasonable popularity (Amiga, Atari, Mac). That is where the problem lies - these processors couldn't effectively be sped up beyond 100MHz, because of the amount of register-memory operations, unlike the x86 load into accumulator then do operation system, which has proven itself to be much more scalable, lucky for Intel, unlucky for Motorola, but it gave us the superior PPCs anyway.
This takes a 3D image of your body, i.e., not a bitmap of what you are wearing, but the shape of your body. Hence the beergut in the pictures. You can then automatically convert them into Quake objects - real 3D objects with your clothes and images all over them.
So it isn't just your images plastered over a standard Quake 3D model, it is your images plastered over a 3D representation of your own body. Even if you could be bothered to create your own 3D model, this is a lot quicker, and probably a lot more accurate.
And I would like to see who I am shooting actually - this would make the game much more interesting. Somebody get Jon Katz into the Avatar...
Re:Sorry, but I don't see that this is very useful
on
Berlin 0.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Sort of correct - but you don't need Alpha Transparency to do Anti-aliased text - look at the Acorn Archimedes machines which had anti-aliased text years and years ago.
For antialiased fonts, the font bitmap is basically the alpha transparency. There is no real image bitmap to speak of. Normal X fonts have alpha transparency, only it is either 100% opaque or 100% transparent. A 4-bit bitmap provides more than adequate anti-aliasing.
But Berlin looks like a dog. I know that it is version 0.2.0 and very prototypical, but I would prefer them to work on the underlying stuff rather than generating their own widget sets which look really foul and basic. I approve of the other posters idea of porting GTK+ to Berlin just by rewriting the underlying libraries - that would make things look a lot nicer immediately.
Anyone who doesn't know what use Alpha transparency in windows does not have an imagination. Subtle drop shadows for active windows is one UI prettification, fading backdrop windows is another.
Does Berlin allow for affine transforms of windows at all? Does it allow for basic image processing of windows (that would be great!) such as tinting them, or greyscaling them? If you are going to do transparency and rotation, then these other things should be done as well.
How about WAP Multi-User-Dungeons then? That would be fun. You wouldn't have a chance, there would be no room for the description, and when you encountered an enemy (BERT), it would be:
55444555#555122337778 (KILL BERT in mobile phone keypad characters:-) )
Okay, so in normal use you would map directions to the keys, and the * and the # could bring up the more advanced options, but still...
The games are too slow, and the email screen could be laid out a lot better, agreed. The shopping system works as well as you could hope for for a dumb home user on a TV system though.
If noone goes and actually creates the systems, then nothing will happen. The games might be interpreted piles of junk (I assume that, or the system as a whole only has a Z80 controlling it), and I would prefer Tetris and other puzzle games (even some classic platformers) to the trash on there currently, but as a real example of a technology it is great.
When the next generation Digital Boxes come out, hopefully within the next couple of years, then there will be a lot more power available to do stuff correctly. Hopefully they will also have ADSL support, and a built in DVD drive (why not use the one set of MPEG-2 decoder chips instead of multiple sets?).
On of the rules of business it to get it out there quickly whatever the faults. Sky has done this knowling it isn't the perfect solution, but they also know that if they didn't release anything then OnDigital (Terrestrial Digital TV) would be on the case. If only the SKy boxes allowed 2 way satellite transmission for IP traffic as well...:-)
At least in Europe we have had trouble free DigitalTV for 2 years now. There is nothing wrong with it quality wise - Widescreen is excellent, the audio is excellents and the picture quality can be excellent.
Since noone has a TV capable of showing a 1920x1080 picture, or even half of that, I don't think that the lack of a high resolution DTV signal is that bad. That capability can be added on later, when there are more satellites providing more bandwidth.
Of course, HDTV looks amazing, so when it becomes affordable it could be an interesting option to purchase. Unfortuneately, there is nothing on TV to actually watch, so I don't currently have a TV and I don't intend to get one.
Last thing I want is to have to have a box with "Microsoft Media Player" logos on it. Looks like that is the way America wants to go, with MS-MPEG4, etc. A TV is meant to perform a function - show TV. In the UK, DigitalTV also has games, email, shopping etc as well, using Sky TV's Open platform. You ust can't browse the web using the box, but the next generation of DTV boxes in europe will be able to do that as well. Hopefully, Mozilla with its extreme customisability will be chosen for these boxes ahead of PocketIE or whatever.
Next: People to incorporate ReplayTV and DVD players into the DigitalTV's themselves.
50gbytes over 90 minutes is around 550Mbytes a minute, which is about 9Mb a second of imagery. If the film is being shown at 30fps, then that is 300kbytes per frame, so the film is compressed.
A 4096x3072 (I imagine this is the required resolution to make the film not look blocky on a large screen like that) slide in 24 bits takes up 36Mbytes of memory, so that compression ratio of over 100:1 is very impressive. Even if the resolution was on 2048x1536 that is a compression ratio of 25:1 for film quality imagery.
The equipment to show this stuff must cost a huge amount! And I bet you could plug a good computer in and play Quake, Unreal Tournament etc on the best computer games system in the world!
I just smiled "ear to ear" as I archived his files with an amiga archiver -- good luck gettin' that stuff back. Muhahhah!
That is what I like to see...
"Sorry, I had to terminate your account because you broke our Acceptable Use Policy. Here is your stuff, I archived it up for you for your convenience."
"Hey, thazzz n07 F41R! I Watz0Rz m3 4KK0uN7 B4KK!"
"Sorry, no can do. Get an account elsewhere, you can put your material up again."
"Use lzh - its available everywhere - it is the standard you know."
"Grunt - W4NXX0R"
"yeah, well I have given you the data, it is up to you get get at it. Oh, and I didn't put those naughty pictures of underage children in that file either - the datestamps clearly show that."
"Urk"
"911 - Police, We had this user, he had unacceptable material on his site, so we cancelled his account and put the data on a disk which he has. His address is... "
"chuckle"
-------------------------
Still, normally cancelling an account just for using up bandwidth is unacceptable, but if he had affected the other users QoS then he should have been banned, or at least warned, because that would have been in the Terms and Conditions. Teach him to get all religious on a bunch of script kiddies really.
The problem is that most software is written with Intels FPU in mind - 2 units not fully pipelined. Not 3 fully pipelined FPUs like the Athlon has. So most software won't run at full efficiency on the Athlon and it won't be getting enough instructions to keep its FPUs running full tilt. I am sure that before long games and renderers will start taking advantage though - that extra framerate could be essential!
So software that has been optimised a little for the Athlons CPU does indeed show 30% better performance!
I'm not too well versed in http, but couldn't the slashdot comment submission script be patched to check for the referrer field of the browser and reject it if it isn't coming from slashdot.org?
Yes, it could easily... if (HTTP_REFERRER ne "slashdot.org") { print "Go away naughtly little boy."; }
Or something like that...:-)
I thought this was pretty standard in Perl scripts - nobody wants their scripts to be accessed from an outside source!
On topic now: The Thunderbird looks very nice. 50W power requirement though, and according to Sharky Extreme it beats the PIII in Quake III by a fair margin except at 1600x1200 (i use that reolution all the time for playing games, honest). With a bit of driver optimisation and final design work this should be great - remember the motherboards are not really production quality yet, and they won't be for another month.
At least AMD can deliver on their promises. Intel can't! I wonder how many 1.1GHz, 1.2GHz and 1.3GHz processors they are stockpiling at the moment - like they stockpiled 1GHz Athlons for months before they released them. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few Thunderbirds capable of running at 1.5GHz at AMDs fabs - apply one of those cooling solutions to that and you could have a 2GHz machine - ideal for running Windows 2000 on!:-)
Still, I will wait a few months for the technology to stabilise, and for the prices to drop. I wonder if any of the motherboards will come with L3 cache on them - the logical extension. 1 or 2 Mb of on-board L3 cache would just bitchslap Intel into touch... drool.
Shame about the trolling though. I hope that those in power sort it out soon, and give themselves a good slapping over missing out that HTTP_REFERER thing in the Slash code.
I meant killer business applications, not killer niche applications:-)
The Amiga needed a Lotus 1-2-3 equivalent, a WordPerfect equivalent, a decent database system, and a lot more besides. They never appeared, or they were severely underpowered or didn't take advantage of the Amiga in any way. Without these basic core programs, the Amiga never had a real chance in the business market, where all the money is.
Commodore in 1985 should have paid Lotus or even some of the 8-bit software writers to write this software so that it would have been available a few months after launch.
Shame about Workbench 1.3's default Orange on Blue colour scheme as well - it wasn't pretty. Then WOrkbench 2's colour scheme was too dull and grey. A better colour scheme would have been a nice colour in the background, with grey widgets etc, but Commodore never wanted to use more than 4 colours on screen at the same time! It took a long time for VisualPrefs and Birdie to arrive.
AGA was really naff - the sort of thing that should have been released in 1988 to keep the Amiga way ahead of the competition.
AAA was meant to be the replacement for ECS, and it was pretty good specwise. Unfortunately, Commodore went all funny, and then it was cancelled at the last minute and they had to produce AGA quickly. Terrible shame, as otherwise 1992 Amigas would have had much better facilities, such as true 24-bit screenmodes, 8 or 16 channel 16bit sound, etc, and it would have been a lot faster.
It is such a shame. PC 2D hardware still isn't as featureful as the Amiga graphics hardware (although it is a lot faster and more resolution etc). Of course, these features are needed less now with 3D hardware and 1GHz processors. Brings a tear to the eye.
(of course, the fact that a good chunk of the Amiga kernel resides in the hardware Kickstart chip rarely gets factored into the equation, so I leave it to you to duke out the kernel-to-kernel faceoff silliness)
But the PC has 1.44Mb disks, and the Amiga had 880Kb disks and a 512K ROM. Together, that is 1.4Mb for the Amiga, uncompressed. Many of the single disk Linux distros are compressed to fit everything on.
Of course, the Linux kernel has more features, but you would hope so considering how much more recent it is and the amount of work that hos gone into it. But being able to boot up into a full GUI, filemanager (Workbench), CLI available, many programs available on the first disk was amazing. A full preemptive multitasking OS, with autoconfig that is better than plug and play, and everything else that you all know, in only 1.4Mb. Nothing has come close since.
The Amiga was great in its day. Strict control of the hardware helped though, there was no having to support 100 different sound and graphics cards, the computer already came with the best you could get! A computer with real charisma, great games, but no killer applications, despite the superiority of the OS. WIthout the backing of business it didn't get brilliant sales except to designers and gamers.
Commodore were to blame. The managers there had no vision or foresight.
Hopefully the new Amiga will combine the best of the old Amiga with the best of other operating systems. Tao's VP technology is very good and doesn't take much of a hit on the system. The best way I could describe it is a very rich object code, and the OS loader incorporates the last stage of a compiler (very optimised) to get the best performance possible. I would bet that it would bo better on PPC, Alpha, MIPs, ARM etc than on x86 because of the limited instructions though. Also, the VP can include instructions like malloc, qsort, etc, so processor intensive applications will not be slowed down overly but core functions, as they will already exist in optimised formats.
The GUI is interesting as well. It isn't X, but it does allow anti-aliasing of text, transparency etc like Mac OS X. I don't know much else though, but it is a lot better than X, more like Berlin in a way.
An average film can be burnt onto a CDR as that compression rate, and I think that the lower quality the image, the better the film. I know that Star Wars in MPEG format (with the wandering V) was much more enjoyable to watch than Star Wars at the cinema. South Park in Real Player was better than South Park on TV.
Better quality in these days of ultra-crisp films etc can detract from the film in my opinion. I like watching poor quality blurred, fuzzy illegal copies of films sometimes. If MP4 is better than MPEG1 in terms of quality, even if it is more compressed (they have had 8 years to improve their algorithms!) then I think it will gain a market.
But 600Mb to download an ISO image of the latest films... on a 1Mbit DSL connection say, that would take 4800seconds minimum, which is 80 minutes, just over an hour - you can watch it whilst downloading it as well! Not surprising actually, as it was developed for DSL TV applications.
Now on a modem getting 50kbit a second! 25hours, I don't see many people living with that, they will pay the £5.00 to see it at the cinema.
This will let them put so much more video footage in poor computer games though. Excellent. Wing Commander 10 anybody, with 30 hours of video footage and 1 hour of gameplay?
Excellent idea. My tape deck separate is a big box or air with circuitry at the front - I could hold a whole cluster of these servers in there all networked together, getting power from the Tape Deck power cable supply, and a small built-in UPS for those nasty moments when the NSA turn off the power to your place.
Bluetooth connection to the computer that is physically built into the wall, and plastered over and then wallpapered over, and nobody could ever find your system. Ever.
I prefer the soup can idea though, although you could fit 2 or 3 of these devices into a large baked bean can. If the connector was on the bottom, then the ethernet can run *inside* the shelf itself, and then into the computer that is built into the wall.
Great place to store all those highly illegal porn piccies, eh? (only applicable to politicians). With the RIP bill in the uk (Stand against this), this is a great way to hide all that information.
I like to program interfaces and output, although I don't mind designing data structures.
I like Perl programming in general, although I am relatively new to it. Web programming is a nice easy thing to do, and you can get great results with very little effort and a good graphics program. I used to like GUI programming, and I might still get back into it, but Java Swing really irked me with the layout stuff.
I dislike C, not that I can't program it, but because it just pisses me off. Starting from scratch in C is okay, but as soon as I hit somebody elses code I scream. Maybe it is because I like my code to be easy to follow rather than optimal...?
Well, IBM reckon that they would have 700MHz G4's next week if Motorola would let them make the damn things, so add 30% onto that and you have 910MHz G4s. Couple that with Motorolas G4+ core, which will be released in around 4 months time at 800MHz to 1GHz and you could easily have 1GHz+ G4s by the end of the year...
The G3 and G4 are the consumer PowerPC chips. IBM are pushing it - they have the POP motherboards, which are slowly starting to appear now, and with a SOI G4+ processor and AGP4x, and ATA-100 (or Serial ATA) support you would have a really good motherboard that really kicked ass. Shame the motherboards that will appear will be half-functional, but hopefully some server-level motherboards will appear for multi-G4 setups. That would be sweet, much better than a dual PIII Xeon or whatever. A G4 is around as powerful as an equivalent speed Xeon (give or take a little), and they cost a lot less than a Xeon, so people shouldn't give the processor so much stick. A PIII 700MHz Xeon with 1Mb cache can set you back $1000.
Posted with Mozilla 2000052120. Damned great now, faster than ever, looking good (the buttons are in the correct place!).
It has given a 500% performance increase over processors from 3 years ago, given Moores law.
Every 18 months, computing power doubles.
So 3 years is 2 "Moore Cycles", which is a 400% increase in performance. Add on 30% to that 400%, and you have a 520% performance increase. Not bad, only half of the predictions!
ISPs should fight for the right to not be held liable for anything that goes through their systems. You do not see telephone companies getting sued for what people say over the telephone, yet ISPs, who do essentially the same thing, can get sued for when their users do.
It is a stupid law. It stops the good people doing their thing, and the bad people will find another way around it. It restricts the freedom of the innocent, whilst doing nothing against the guilty.
Of course, music piracy is bad. But music gets played over the airwaves all the time and the radio stations don't get sued - the radio stations pay a small royalty each time a piece of music is played.
Each user of Napster could have a stache of Beenz. When they download some music, those Beenz get transferred to the relevant artist (not music publishing house). The artist can choose how many beenz they want for a download. Alternatively, the Agent (e.g., Napster) could pay the charge per tune, but put advertising into the content that is transferred to cover the cost. Unfortunately, advertising on the Internet doesn't work!
If the user likes the music, they can then order the real Album/Single via the Agent (e.g., Napster) and get a discount on the album for e.g., double the amount of beenz that they payed for the tracks they previously downloaded from that album.
Remember, piracy is piracy, but is it bad when it allows people to listen before they buy?
You have more of a problem with the software displaying the images than the number of colours on the screen. Proper software would have intelligently dithered the pictures, so they would have looked great on all of the devices (just a little smoother on the 16-bit screen).
Microsoft are crap at writing dithering routines - Windows 9x has the same problem displaying 24-bit pictures on a 15 bit desktop. After using some software to reduce the colours to 15-bit with good floyd steinberg dithering it looked great. Better then the standard MicroSoft "nearest colour" approach, definitely.
Moreover, the IA-64 architecture is not locked in to one specific processor make-up (as some other advanced architectures are). Thus, you can make an IA-64 chip with say 3 integer units, 2 floating point units, and 4 fetch / store units and it can use the exact same programs and instruction set as an IA-64 chip with 5 integer units, 4 floating point units and 20 fetch / store units (for example).
Like, say, an Alpha 21364 can run 21064 code, or a Pentium III can run 8086 code? This has been a feature of processors for years and years, and the only processors that are affected by this sort of problem are VLIW processors. EPIC (Itanium architecture) is VLIW with some hints to try and get around the problems of VLIW. I would prefer a multi-threaded processor myself, or an Alpha, or a 6502.
Also, IA-64 is designed to be enormously compatible with IA-32 (modern x86) code so that you don't have to get all new versions of every program.
But very slow, not a very effiecient compatability.
I saw 2 Itanium boxes at CeBIT. One was running Linux flawlessly. The other was running Windows. I brought up the control panel, and it crashed saying that it could find some DLL in WinNT32.
I ran it. Tried to find out how to hook to the Exchange server where I work. No option to do that, only POP3 and SMTP mail. Please tell me how to set it up to connect to an exchange server!
The program looks nice, runs under FreeBSD Linux emulation (I was impressed) after you brandelf the binary. I just wanted it so I could dump Outlook for ever and ever and ever, and get on with my work. But there was no Exchange server functionality in the software.
Using a server in another country won't help you, nor will checking your e-mail in another country.
And this is meant to be a Labour government! Can't someone organise some sort of effective demonstration against this bill? stand.org.uk don't seem to be doing much about it - I'm sure the Blair government would like to see all the techies/dotcom wizards waving placards saying "byebye Britain's e-future! we're all off to america/scandinavia! (p.s. thanks for educating us!)"
If they're not worried about the brain drain on this country (e.g. computer consultants leaving after E14, contractors etc pissed at IR35...) then maybe this would make them sit up and think!
If you encrypt your e-mail, then they (i.e. the British government) will demand the key to decrypt it. And if you don't supply it, well, its off to prison with you....
Basically, somebody can send you an encrypted e-mail, for which you have no key, they can dispose of the key, but you can go to jail for having this encrypted data. Finland here I come...
The sad thing is that this isn't going to stop the people its meant to catch. The "bad guys" will resort to other means of communication, steganography being one obvious choice, I'm sure they will find others...
Hopefully the European Court of Human Rights will stop it ever happening, but some poor guy is going to have to go through hell for them to get involved.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy wants to know how to take an image containing text, and create a pdf containing an image, with that text as real text, not a bitmap.
I.e., some software that will OCR the image, grab the text from the image, create a pdf file with that text in, preferably in the same layout as before. If the original image had images with the text, then the images should be preserved in the new document.
Why the poster didn't say so in such a clear manner is beyond me though!
Oh, and moderators, this is "Redundant", not "Informative".
This takes a 3D image of your body, i.e., not a bitmap of what you are wearing, but the shape of your body. Hence the beergut in the pictures. You can then automatically convert them into Quake objects - real 3D objects with your clothes and images all over them.
So it isn't just your images plastered over a standard Quake 3D model, it is your images plastered over a 3D representation of your own body. Even if you could be bothered to create your own 3D model, this is a lot quicker, and probably a lot more accurate.
And I would like to see who I am shooting actually - this would make the game much more interesting. Somebody get Jon Katz into the Avatar...
For antialiased fonts, the font bitmap is basically the alpha transparency. There is no real image bitmap to speak of. Normal X fonts have alpha transparency, only it is either 100% opaque or 100% transparent. A 4-bit bitmap provides more than adequate anti-aliasing.
But Berlin looks like a dog. I know that it is version 0.2.0 and very prototypical, but I would prefer them to work on the underlying stuff rather than generating their own widget sets which look really foul and basic. I approve of the other posters idea of porting GTK+ to Berlin just by rewriting the underlying libraries - that would make things look a lot nicer immediately.
Anyone who doesn't know what use Alpha transparency in windows does not have an imagination. Subtle drop shadows for active windows is one UI prettification, fading backdrop windows is another.
Does Berlin allow for affine transforms of windows at all? Does it allow for basic image processing of windows (that would be great!) such as tinting them, or greyscaling them? If you are going to do transparency and rotation, then these other things should be done as well.
55444555#555122337778 (KILL BERT in mobile phone keypad characters :-) )
Okay, so in normal use you would map directions to the keys, and the * and the # could bring up the more advanced options, but still...
Next: NetHack for Nokia 7100. Then Quake.
The games are too slow, and the email screen could be laid out a lot better, agreed. The shopping system works as well as you could hope for for a dumb home user on a TV system though.
If noone goes and actually creates the systems, then nothing will happen. The games might be interpreted piles of junk (I assume that, or the system as a whole only has a Z80 controlling it), and I would prefer Tetris and other puzzle games (even some classic platformers) to the trash on there currently, but as a real example of a technology it is great.
When the next generation Digital Boxes come out, hopefully within the next couple of years, then there will be a lot more power available to do stuff correctly. Hopefully they will also have ADSL support, and a built in DVD drive (why not use the one set of MPEG-2 decoder chips instead of multiple sets?).
On of the rules of business it to get it out there quickly whatever the faults. Sky has done this knowling it isn't the perfect solution, but they also know that if they didn't release anything then OnDigital (Terrestrial Digital TV) would be on the case. If only the SKy boxes allowed 2 way satellite transmission for IP traffic as well... :-)
Since noone has a TV capable of showing a 1920x1080 picture, or even half of that, I don't think that the lack of a high resolution DTV signal is that bad. That capability can be added on later, when there are more satellites providing more bandwidth.
Of course, HDTV looks amazing, so when it becomes affordable it could be an interesting option to purchase. Unfortuneately, there is nothing on TV to actually watch, so I don't currently have a TV and I don't intend to get one.
Last thing I want is to have to have a box with "Microsoft Media Player" logos on it. Looks like that is the way America wants to go, with MS-MPEG4, etc. A TV is meant to perform a function - show TV. In the UK, DigitalTV also has games, email, shopping etc as well, using Sky TV's Open platform. You ust can't browse the web using the box, but the next generation of DTV boxes in europe will be able to do that as well. Hopefully, Mozilla with its extreme customisability will be chosen for these boxes ahead of PocketIE or whatever.
Next: People to incorporate ReplayTV and DVD players into the DigitalTV's themselves.
A 4096x3072 (I imagine this is the required resolution to make the film not look blocky on a large screen like that) slide in 24 bits takes up 36Mbytes of memory, so that compression ratio of over 100:1 is very impressive. Even if the resolution was on 2048x1536 that is a compression ratio of 25:1 for film quality imagery.
The equipment to show this stuff must cost a huge amount! And I bet you could plug a good computer in and play Quake, Unreal Tournament etc on the best computer games system in the world!
"Sorry, I had to terminate your account because you broke our Acceptable Use Policy. Here is your stuff, I archived it up for you for your convenience."
"Hey, thazzz n07 F41R! I Watz0Rz m3 4KK0uN7 B4KK!"
"Sorry, no can do. Get an account elsewhere, you can put your material up again."
"URB17CH!"
"Hey, whatzz thiz data.lzh file? Winzip can'tz unzipz0R it!"
"Use lzh - its available everywhere - it is the standard you know."
"Grunt - W4NXX0R"
"yeah, well I have given you the data, it is up to you get get at it. Oh, and I didn't put those naughty pictures of underage children in that file either - the datestamps clearly show that."
"Urk"
"911 - Police, We had this user, he had unacceptable material on his site, so we cancelled his account and put the data on a disk which he has. His address is ... "
"chuckle"
-------------------------
Still, normally cancelling an account just for using up bandwidth is unacceptable, but if he had affected the other users QoS then he should have been banned, or at least warned, because that would have been in the Terms and Conditions. Teach him to get all religious on a bunch of script kiddies really.
So software that has been optimised a little for the Athlons CPU does indeed show 30% better performance!
Or something like that... :-)
I thought this was pretty standard in Perl scripts - nobody wants their scripts to be accessed from an outside source!
On topic now: The Thunderbird looks very nice. 50W power requirement though, and according to Sharky Extreme it beats the PIII in Quake III by a fair margin except at 1600x1200 (i use that reolution all the time for playing games, honest). With a bit of driver optimisation and final design work this should be great - remember the motherboards are not really production quality yet, and they won't be for another month.
At least AMD can deliver on their promises. Intel can't! I wonder how many 1.1GHz, 1.2GHz and 1.3GHz processors they are stockpiling at the moment - like they stockpiled 1GHz Athlons for months before they released them. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few Thunderbirds capable of running at 1.5GHz at AMDs fabs - apply one of those cooling solutions to that and you could have a 2GHz machine - ideal for running Windows 2000 on! :-)
Still, I will wait a few months for the technology to stabilise, and for the prices to drop. I wonder if any of the motherboards will come with L3 cache on them - the logical extension. 1 or 2 Mb of on-board L3 cache would just bitchslap Intel into touch... drool.
Shame about the trolling though. I hope that those in power sort it out soon, and give themselves a good slapping over missing out that HTTP_REFERER thing in the Slash code.
The Amiga needed a Lotus 1-2-3 equivalent, a WordPerfect equivalent, a decent database system, and a lot more besides. They never appeared, or they were severely underpowered or didn't take advantage of the Amiga in any way. Without these basic core programs, the Amiga never had a real chance in the business market, where all the money is.
Commodore in 1985 should have paid Lotus or even some of the 8-bit software writers to write this software so that it would have been available a few months after launch.
Shame about Workbench 1.3's default Orange on Blue colour scheme as well - it wasn't pretty. Then WOrkbench 2's colour scheme was too dull and grey. A better colour scheme would have been a nice colour in the background, with grey widgets etc, but Commodore never wanted to use more than 4 colours on screen at the same time! It took a long time for VisualPrefs and Birdie to arrive.
AAA was meant to be the replacement for ECS, and it was pretty good specwise. Unfortunately, Commodore went all funny, and then it was cancelled at the last minute and they had to produce AGA quickly. Terrible shame, as otherwise 1992 Amigas would have had much better facilities, such as true 24-bit screenmodes, 8 or 16 channel 16bit sound, etc, and it would have been a lot faster.
It is such a shame. PC 2D hardware still isn't as featureful as the Amiga graphics hardware (although it is a lot faster and more resolution etc). Of course, these features are needed less now with 3D hardware and 1GHz processors. Brings a tear to the eye.
But the PC has 1.44Mb disks, and the Amiga had 880Kb disks and a 512K ROM. Together, that is 1.4Mb for the Amiga, uncompressed. Many of the single disk Linux distros are compressed to fit everything on.
Of course, the Linux kernel has more features, but you would hope so considering how much more recent it is and the amount of work that hos gone into it. But being able to boot up into a full GUI, filemanager (Workbench), CLI available, many programs available on the first disk was amazing. A full preemptive multitasking OS, with autoconfig that is better than plug and play, and everything else that you all know, in only 1.4Mb. Nothing has come close since.
The Amiga was great in its day. Strict control of the hardware helped though, there was no having to support 100 different sound and graphics cards, the computer already came with the best you could get! A computer with real charisma, great games, but no killer applications, despite the superiority of the OS. WIthout the backing of business it didn't get brilliant sales except to designers and gamers.
Commodore were to blame. The managers there had no vision or foresight.
Hopefully the new Amiga will combine the best of the old Amiga with the best of other operating systems. Tao's VP technology is very good and doesn't take much of a hit on the system. The best way I could describe it is a very rich object code, and the OS loader incorporates the last stage of a compiler (very optimised) to get the best performance possible. I would bet that it would bo better on PPC, Alpha, MIPs, ARM etc than on x86 because of the limited instructions though. Also, the VP can include instructions like malloc, qsort, etc, so processor intensive applications will not be slowed down overly but core functions, as they will already exist in optimised formats.
The GUI is interesting as well. It isn't X, but it does allow anti-aliasing of text, transparency etc like Mac OS X. I don't know much else though, but it is a lot better than X, more like Berlin in a way.
An average film can be burnt onto a CDR as that compression rate, and I think that the lower quality the image, the better the film. I know that Star Wars in MPEG format (with the wandering V) was much more enjoyable to watch than Star Wars at the cinema. South Park in Real Player was better than South Park on TV.
Better quality in these days of ultra-crisp films etc can detract from the film in my opinion. I like watching poor quality blurred, fuzzy illegal copies of films sometimes. If MP4 is better than MPEG1 in terms of quality, even if it is more compressed (they have had 8 years to improve their algorithms!) then I think it will gain a market.
But 600Mb to download an ISO image of the latest films... on a 1Mbit DSL connection say, that would take 4800seconds minimum, which is 80 minutes, just over an hour - you can watch it whilst downloading it as well! Not surprising actually, as it was developed for DSL TV applications.
Now on a modem getting 50kbit a second! 25hours, I don't see many people living with that, they will pay the £5.00 to see it at the cinema.
This will let them put so much more video footage in poor computer games though. Excellent. Wing Commander 10 anybody, with 30 hours of video footage and 1 hour of gameplay?
Bluetooth connection to the computer that is physically built into the wall, and plastered over and then wallpapered over, and nobody could ever find your system. Ever.
I prefer the soup can idea though, although you could fit 2 or 3 of these devices into a large baked bean can. If the connector was on the bottom, then the ethernet can run *inside* the shelf itself, and then into the computer that is built into the wall.
Great place to store all those highly illegal porn piccies, eh? (only applicable to politicians). With the RIP bill in the uk (Stand against this), this is a great way to hide all that information.
I like Perl programming in general, although I am relatively new to it. Web programming is a nice easy thing to do, and you can get great results with very little effort and a good graphics program. I used to like GUI programming, and I might still get back into it, but Java Swing really irked me with the layout stuff.
I dislike C, not that I can't program it, but because it just pisses me off. Starting from scratch in C is okay, but as soon as I hit somebody elses code I scream. Maybe it is because I like my code to be easy to follow rather than optimal...?
The G3 and G4 are the consumer PowerPC chips. IBM are pushing it - they have the POP motherboards, which are slowly starting to appear now, and with a SOI G4+ processor and AGP4x, and ATA-100 (or Serial ATA) support you would have a really good motherboard that really kicked ass. Shame the motherboards that will appear will be half-functional, but hopefully some server-level motherboards will appear for multi-G4 setups. That would be sweet, much better than a dual PIII Xeon or whatever. A G4 is around as powerful as an equivalent speed Xeon (give or take a little), and they cost a lot less than a Xeon, so people shouldn't give the processor so much stick. A PIII 700MHz Xeon with 1Mb cache can set you back $1000.
Posted with Mozilla 2000052120. Damned great now, faster than ever, looking good (the buttons are in the correct place!).
Every 18 months, computing power doubles.
So 3 years is 2 "Moore Cycles", which is a 400% increase in performance. Add on 30% to that 400%, and you have a 520% performance increase. Not bad, only half of the predictions!
Must stop being pedantic and pointless
It is a stupid law. It stops the good people doing their thing, and the bad people will find another way around it. It restricts the freedom of the innocent, whilst doing nothing against the guilty.
Of course, music piracy is bad. But music gets played over the airwaves all the time and the radio stations don't get sued - the radio stations pay a small royalty each time a piece of music is played.
Each user of Napster could have a stache of Beenz. When they download some music, those Beenz get transferred to the relevant artist (not music publishing house). The artist can choose how many beenz they want for a download. Alternatively, the Agent (e.g., Napster) could pay the charge per tune, but put advertising into the content that is transferred to cover the cost. Unfortunately, advertising on the Internet doesn't work!
If the user likes the music, they can then order the real Album/Single via the Agent (e.g., Napster) and get a discount on the album for e.g., double the amount of beenz that they payed for the tracks they previously downloaded from that album.
Remember, piracy is piracy, but is it bad when it allows people to listen before they buy?
Microsoft are crap at writing dithering routines - Windows 9x has the same problem displaying 24-bit pictures on a 15 bit desktop. After using some software to reduce the colours to 15-bit with good floyd steinberg dithering it looked great. Better then the standard MicroSoft "nearest colour" approach, definitely.
I saw 2 Itanium boxes at CeBIT. One was running Linux flawlessly. The other was running Windows. I brought up the control panel, and it crashed saying that it could find some DLL in WinNT32.
I ran it. Tried to find out how to hook to the Exchange server where I work. No option to do that, only POP3 and SMTP mail. Please tell me how to set it up to connect to an exchange server!
The program looks nice, runs under FreeBSD Linux emulation (I was impressed) after you brandelf the binary. I just wanted it so I could dump Outlook for ever and ever and ever, and get on with my work. But there was no Exchange server functionality in the software.
Sob. I thought I had found a holy grail.
And this is meant to be a Labour government! Can't someone organise some sort of effective demonstration against this bill? stand.org.uk don't seem to be doing much about it - I'm sure the Blair government would like to see all the techies/dotcom wizards waving placards saying "byebye Britain's e-future! we're all off to america/scandinavia! (p.s. thanks for educating us!)"
If they're not worried about the brain drain on this country (e.g. computer consultants leaving after E14, contractors etc pissed at IR35 ...) then maybe this would make them sit up and think!
See stand.org.uk for more details.
Basically, somebody can send you an encrypted e-mail, for which you have no key, they can dispose of the key, but you can go to jail for having this encrypted data. Finland here I come...
The sad thing is that this isn't going to stop the people its meant to catch. The "bad guys" will resort to other means of communication, steganography being one obvious choice, I'm sure they will find others...
Hopefully the European Court of Human Rights will stop it ever happening, but some poor guy is going to have to go through hell for them to get involved.