Well, consider the road network. There are cameras all over the major roads, and they check for speeding cars. That is why, when you drive around in Britian, everybody slows down at certain areas on the road... because people know that there is a speed camera there. After the camera they speed up again...
When a speeding car is found, a picture is taken, the numberplate is OCR'd and the details on the owner of that car are looked up from some database. A fine is printed, (I don't know if they include the picture), and you pay the fine, because it has been proved already.
It is illegal to own a car number plate in Britain that is illegible. You can get fined for having a dirty numberplace! If you put a reflective coating on the numberplate to disable the flash on the camera you are assumed to have done it for a purpose - how would you explain yourself in court? "I thought the invisible reflective coating looked nice."... Currently it is very hard to catch the people with reflective numberplates though...!
On topic now, I think that the EU will dither and blather, then nothing will happen, and Intel will open another fab in the EU sometime in the future, probably in Germany...
Is it just me, but the layout engine in Mozilla is pretty damned good by all accounts, it is the stuff surrounding it that cacks up all the time.
So wouldn't it make sense to use the Mozilla layout engine inside of Konqueror, and also to use that layout engine as a standard html widget for all of the different programs that display html to some extent? That way, all (bug hunting and fixing) resources will be focussed of one code base, instead of having loads and loads of different code bases around?
Or maybe it is just me being hopeful!
Just the idea of a standard libhtml widget would be great for Linux and other Unix variants. Why reinvent the wheel indeed!
Oh well... there will always be two or three competing things in the Linux world it seems (gtk vs. qt, KDE vs. Gnome, Mozilla vs. Konqueror, etc)... it is when they are merged that the trouble occurs... look at gcc.
IE *is* better at this point and has been for a year. It caches pages MUCH faster, gives me an actual print setup and preview, etc
I have yet to find the print preview feature in IE5, which I am using at the moment because it doesn't crash and is otherwise quite good compared to Netscape (which I also run, but it isn't as good as IE5, in my opinion). Of course, when it comes to printing out a web-page I go straight to Netscape, ehich has a wonderful print preview feature (even if I sometimes click on the close window button and Netscape quits, not the print preview feature - poor interface design).
Another thing with IE5 is that when it comes across a data-type it can't view, it automagically downloads it and installs it all without quitting and restarting the program. Now if only M$ applied this logic to their OS and other software then things might not be so bad in the dark, evil, M$ world!
I have tried Mozilla intermittently during its creation, and I can use the latest version easily, and I like the layout engine a lot more than the IE5 layout engine, and I think that when it arrives (it will be equivalent to IE6 I think) then we will see a lot more people using it - AOL will use it as their default browser, for example. Of course, most people never bother to upgrade what came on their PC, so they will still be using IE3/4/5 or whatever...
No, you are wrong, the article (if you had read it) states that it was initially thought to be a mis-translation, but it was later confirmed to be true.
Anyway, the Dreamcast Zip drive is pretty chunky isn't it! It might include a couple of USB ports as well, but even so. And it only supports 100Mb media, not the 250Mb media! Obviously this means it should be possible to connect other USB devices though, but it would seem hard to install the drivers for it... USB hard drive anyone? (eek)
The Ethernet looks useful, and if Sega go into the software business you can expect their games to come out on both Dreamcast and PC, and then you can play the same game on both in a networked environment. Maybe Sonic Deathmatch could happen, although I would prefer a simpler game: SHOOT SONIC A LOT:-)
The CD Mechanism may be delicate, but it is not a drive head hovering millionths of a inch over the top of a spinning magnetic coated plastic platter spinning over 5000 times a minute. A CD mechanism is optical and is only 200rpm. If the CD mechanism breaks, the CD is usually fine (the exception being when a lorry drives over your CD device). With a HD, if it corrupts itself, say bye bye to the data held on it...
Also CD mechanisms are far more robust than HDs, even the latest 2.5" ones from IBM. They cost a lot less as well, I am sure you could put an 8 speed CD-ROM into the device (um, 1600rpm?) to read data into the on-board memory supply. (It should only take 10-30 seconds for 16Mb of RAM, 15minutes of music). The battery in such a device would last ages:-).
I imagine a HD could take being jogged around with, but it won't take being dropped, and it will happen! You know it would be your luck for the device to smash onto concrete just as the HD was spinning up ready to load in the next 10 minutes of music:-)
This is not what I would call usable. Hard Drives, even the most modern, would not really be able to withstand the shock of hitting the ground when you drop the device, even when the HD is not spinning. HDs might be rated for 1000G for 0.1us, but you get that force by dropping a HD from 1 or 2 foot onto concrete. Maybe the HD could be encased in some kind of jelly bump-soothing gel?
Of course, being able to fit over 4000 minutes of music on a portable device sounds like fun, but surely a more durable, but lower capacity medium would be better, say fitting a Superdisk into such a device or something similar. Even CD mp3 players seem to be the most popular option amongst those here on Slashdot!
I am assuming that the device has some integral RAM in which to buffer the mp3s from the HD, 16Mb should be the minimum, so the HD only has to spin up every 15 minutes or so. That would increase battery life considerably.
What I am waiting for is the integrated portable digital camera, portable games machine, mp3 player and sound recorder of some kind. I know that MAME was ported to a Kodak digital camera (cool use of resources!).
Sorry I couldn't beat the Elite Hacksaws. (3l337 H4X0RZ):-)
As far as I can see, this is not a real amazing breakthrough, but it will mean mobile phones that work better across different transmissions standards (e.g., Europe vs. America), and could eventually be used in a Palm Pilot or Nokia Communicator (or even Psion 5 or 7) devices to make them more capable.
It uses a DSP56690 chip (one of this series of processors was used in the Atari Falcon I am pretty certain!) which supports all mobile phone standards, so it can be used worldwide.
So expect to see this embedded in a DragonBall processor sometime next year, maybe...
One day you will be able to buy tins of this stuff to paint over anything you like, like a younger brother, and from your local DIY store! Excellent....
More seriously, how does this compare with the LEP technology from CDT that has been recently developed? LEP is a currently working display technology, it is only 1 layer deep (compared with 3 layers for LCD displays) and thus costs a lot less to make. I think it also has the potential to be put onto flexible materials. Within the next year or so you will be able to get devices incorporating this technology (such as mobile phones, hi-res screen watches etc) and soon maybe notebook screens.
Makes me think, if a notebook screen was foldable, then instead of making the screen wider (thus making the case bigger and less notebook-like), you could make the screens higher, maybe analogous to a sheet of A3 paper, but not have to have an absolutely huge case to carry around...
Also great for animated temporary tattoos I am sure! Stick on the tattoo, it powers itself from your body heat (or static electricity or something I have forgotten what) and then you get a video of Slayer/Steps/Sinatra/Porn playing on your arm or whatever!
I had the 512K Amiga version, which kicked ass in all of its 16 colours. I have also run the CPC version, which kicks something in 4 colours at 320x200, but the colour choice was bad and it obviously was cut down to fit in 64K (of which 16K is screen and another large area is also used). Sure, it seems the BBC 32k version was even more impressive (was anything left out?).
So a game running a monochrome 160x160 screen (around 3200 bytes) on a 16MHz processor should easily be able to outperform any of the original computers Sim City was originally released on.
It is also quite nice to have a square playing area for the game (19x19 blocks from the screenshots), but some of the info screens looked a bit tatty - maybe something to enhance for a greyscale or future colour version (although a 160x160 8-bit screen uses 25600 bytes of memory - a real hardship I am sure - the original Amiga version used a 320x200 screen (32000 bytes) so that should still be very fast and nippy).
Now.... if they were to release Sim City 2000 on the Palm Pilot or Psion 7 or whatever, then I would be impressed.
I think the current Psion version looks better then the Palm version at the moment, but obviously the Palm isn't the first choice as a gaming platform:-).
Now, forgive me if I am incorrect here, but a Palm organiser is not that underspecced compared with the original computers Sim City came out on? For example, apart from the 386s that it ran on, it ran on the Amiga 500 (7.2MHz 68000), Atari ST, Amstrad CPC (64K, Z80) and probably the Sinclair Spectrum and C64. So saying that it wasn't possible on the Palm is a bit silly! They only had to overcome the low-res screen, which can't have been that brain-straining...
I wonder if they will do an updated version for the colour Palm machines coming out soon? That would be worth it.
Is there a version for the Psion, because it would really kick ass on that, as it is more powerful and has a higher resolution screen.
Sim City does kick ass though, even the original all othose years ago. A great way to waste time instead of doing something useful. I am afraid this could set a lot of projects back in many companies:-)
With Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) I believe that orthogonal means that an instruction such as add can use any register (in a general purpose register file) as its arguments, whereas with a non-orthogonal architecture, you can't, so you end up with instructions where you have to use certain registers in order to execute a certain instruction, which is hell for compilers!
I forgot to add that RISC was developed because of compilers, and that only the common compiler instructions were implemented, because compilers are too stupid to work out that you could use a certain instruction to implement a certain function. Compilers on CISC tended to only use certain instructions and not others, making those other instructions worthless! Of course, thesedays you would have hand-coded HALs which are written in assembler and can use the complex instructions (such as 3D-Now! and SSE) and these fuctions are called by programs...
Ah! The end of the working day is nigh! Time to go and assemble my new semi-computer (gutting ye olde computer for some stuff)
RISC does stand for Reduced Instruction Set Chip, but that doesn't mean less instructions, it means less Instruction Formats. Think of how many different instruction formats x86 has, with varying lengths of instructions, non-orthogonal instructions, etc, compared with the simplified instructions provided by RISC processors, which might have as few as 3 or 4 different instruction formats.
RISC really should have been SISC, for Simplified Instruction Set Chip, but that clashes with CISC, ho hum....
Remember, you don't get a RISC chip (Reduced Instruction Set Chip Chip)!:-)
The article was silly really, the author didn't look beyond the word 'Reduced' in RISC, thought it meant less instructions, then saw that most RISC chips have tonnes more instructions than most CISC chips, and arrived at the wrong conclusion. Hell, a simple ARM chip has a theoretical 4 billion instructions (all conditional etc) but there are much fewer general operations.
RISC:
Register-Register operations (e.g., add)
Load-Store operation (Mem to Reg LDR, STR)
Simplified Instructions, less Instruction Formats
Orthogonal Architecture (i.e., add can use any General Purpose Register)
Pipelined Architecture from the beginning
and many many more, read comp.arch FAQ for more details
CISC:
Variable Length Instructions (e.g., POLY in VAX)
Non-orthogonal, i.e., must use register BX for multiply instruction result
Many addressing modes... nice when there were no such things like caches and memory was as fast as the processor
Good when not many transistors
etc
CISC chips now typically have a RISC core, where instructions such as ADD (contents of memory A), (contents of memory B), (resulting memory location) are broken up into micro-ops, LD A, LD B, ADD A,B,C, ST C
I would think that it would be sensible to have the CD-image updated to include the latest KDE (which missed the CD) and other software that just missed the boat. This shouldn't warrant a major update of the software obviously, as they provide the software on their ftp site for you to download and upgrade the 2.3 installation anyway!
Just thought this would make things simpler overall. Does COL come with the latest gtk+ etc? I am glad to read that it doesn't come with the Gnome Desktop, although when Gnome becomes more stable I would hope that COL would start to include it in the distribution.
Just thinking of replacing a RH5.2 install that has broken badly.... hangs on bootup. I want something clean and new anyway.
Anyway, I must say that the FreeBSD install was one of the easiest I have ever used. Put CD in drive, boot, select a couple of parameters (this bit is the only bit that should be improved, the devices within the computer should be autodetected) and then install! No graphical install required or needed, but it could neaten up the overall system. Installing additional software is as easy as going to the relevant ports directory and make install, and with clever ftp download from multiple sites this works like a dream (except for lesstif which fails at the apply patch step, grrr, want to run mpeg2play).
Yes, sort of, except the US digital TV standard is very poor, and can't handle reflections off of buildings etc. In Europe, it is (theoretically) possible to watch digital TV in a moving vehicle, whereas the US (different) 'standard' cannot even hope to achieve this... considering the future market for portable handheld TVs/phones/organisers this is a very shortsighted system indeed.
A satellite has transponders, with analogue these equated to 1 channel, but with digital these equate to:,
1 HDTV (very high res) channel
2-3 high-quality channels
4-7+ low-quality channels
Of course, you can mix hi-quality channels with low-quality channels, etc.
Also, with Sky, if the sports broadcast was poor, there would be hell to pay.
MPEG2 allows many different streams within it, not just video and sound, there can be multiple data streams as well.
and of course.... need more channels? Put another satellite up there... There are around 8 Astra 1 satellites (Where the Sky analogue broadcasts are) providing 8*16 channels of television (some of these are digital though, for Germany and Italy). Sky uses the Astra 2 satellite, and if Sky wanted to double the amount of bandwidth they needed, they could ask for another satellite (not spare cash though!). I don't know if there are one or two Astra 2 satellites though, at the moment...
A lot of the channels are not just British, for example, the Discovery channels are worldwide, so they have a large audience anyway. With digital the cost of running a television station has dropped to very low prices compared to running an analogue station (less infrastructure required if it is digital satellite rather than analogue terrestrial).
Sky is a subscription service, you pay £32 a month to watch everything (except for the Box Office stuff), and you get a free digital receiver and satellite dish to watch them with. [If you pay for a reciever and dish, then you don't have to pay for any of the Sky channels, you can watch the 20 or so free channels, but a Digital Satellite Set Top Box costs quite a bit].
Of course, there are lower rates of subscription, e.g., you can do without the movie channels and sports channels then it drops to around £15 or less a month. Cheapest is about £8 a month for the very basic package.
A lot of the channels are a lot less popular than the few big ones anyway. Most channels hope to have one or two big shows each day where they hope to get the majority of their advertising revenue from. I haven't ever noticed an overload of adverts ever on Sky, not like Australia(?) where they apparently have non-stop adverts. Surely there are more adverts in the popular shows anyway, despite the higher cost of advertising. No-one would pay for 50% advertising television remember!
I am sure that there are laws in the UK that prevent more than a certain percentage of airtime per hour being adverts, but I cannot say this for certain. Re-runs are a problem, but when you miss a show they can be useful, and there is always another channel to watch otherwise.
I find that when there was nothing to watch on the TV 10 years ago on 4 channels, there is now nothing to watch on 100 channels today, but at least there will be something so utterly dire that it is worth watching (e.g., a film called Mosquito which was made recently, but had special effects from the '20s).
I'm trying to watch less TV. I can't help but think that suddenly having 30 channels instead of 5 won't help.
Merely 30 channels? Why, with Sky Digital there must be upwards of 200 channels now, including around 8 music television channels (MTV, M2, MTV Base, VH1, VH1 Classic, The Box, UK Play, etc but thankfully no Country Music Channel).
Sure, so there are 50 Sky Box Office channels, showing around about 10 different films at staggered intervals. Then there is the other companies box office system offering even more box office channels (Box Office channels are pay-for-movies, like having a high quality video for around the same price). There are 10+ standard movie channels, around 8 sports channels, including an interactive one where you can look up all the player details, watch the highlights and replays, change the camera angle etc, which is absolutely amazing. Then there are the 10 odd BBC crappy channels, C4, C5, but no ITV yet (next year apparently). There are too many documentary channels though, all 6(?) discovery channels alongside all the other ones, argh. Then there are the naughty channels, but not too many of them at the moment. There are 40 continuous-music digital radio channels (no adverts!), 10 of which are free, the rest cost a bit more each month (and that is where the Heavy Metal channel is, argh).
Should I mention Open? The interactive shopping system that offers games (Tetris style though, not Quake) and e-mail and home-banking, alongside traditional shopping facilities. You can get a nifty transparent purple keyboard to use with the system. How long before you can use StarOffice via the system I wonder, surely something for Sky to look into sometime!
The vast proportion of these channels are transmitting in 16:9 format now. The picture is so much easier to view, especially on a 100Hz television. DVDs look really nice as well.
The only problem I seen, and only a couple of times over the past 10 months at that, is that the picture quality can degrade on the poor channels. The Box looks like it is transmitted in 12-bit colour (what little colour survives) literally. The tennis the other day had me quivering from the aliasing on the painted white lines, they looked quite blocky (maybe the quality of the TV has something to do with this).
Argh! I hate it when them CGI scripts just bomb out on me.
Agreed about the good points of Nuclear power, so some people got irradiated in Japan a couple of weeks ago. Better than the dozens upon dozens who die because of a coal-face collapse or from an oil explosion (e.g. Piper Alpha). It also puts the power generation into a remote location, so disasters involving a fast moving vehicle loaded with tonnes of fuel don't happen.
Still, we aren't going to have mini-nuclear reactors on the back of robotic ants in the near future (I hope). Of course, we could get further into space if nuclear powered space-craft were allowed...
It may be £5 for an ISP that is registered with Nominet (which costs a lot) to register a domain name for someone else, but when you consider that if all you want is a domain name (e.g. to stop someone else getting it) then there are no ways to get it for £5.
Companies have to make a profit somewhere, and then there is VAT on top of it all, then there is the hassle of having to run a Primary and Secondary DNS for the names you register. Then those DNS's have to be connected to the internet 24/7 which costs a lot in the UK, as leased lines cost an absolute bomb compared with the US. ISPs don't offer cheap Domain Name Registration only, they want to get your business for years to come, by tieing you in with webspace or adverts and a lot of other things which are too much hassle to change for most people.
So you can't get a domain name of your own, no strings attached, in the UK for £5.
Actually, the reduction in prices has created a huge rip-off market, where most sellers are selling for a huge amount, or making you pay a lot for a service with many catches (the catches for freenetname are mentioned elsewhere on this page, but they primarily charge you a tonne if you wish to leave their service and keep your domain name - i.e. you aren't the owner of the domain name, the ISP is, and they loan it to you. When you wish to leave their services, they charge you a tonne for you to get it.)
I reckon it is a better idea in the UK to wait a few weeks for the market to calm down following the cheaper Nominet rate, and then check out some of the smaller companies that will be offering more personalised services for not much money.
I rung up one company a couple of days ago, enquiring about registering a domain, and asked them what the standard nominet fee was, and they said £80!. I think it was Virtual Internet. They were selling a no-catches service, yet they were secretly making £75 by preying on people who didn't know about domain registration prices.
The brain and associated systems use a Gabor wavelet encoding scheme to store data. These wavelets are the optimal encoding that can be achieved.
That is why you can remember things that you haven't seen before, which is where your fractal idea thing falls down. I am not saying that this kind of system is not used elsewhere in the brain, even for related tasks, but the raw encoding of an image, etc, cannot be done using fractal techniques.
Most of the encoding is done en-route from the retina to the brain, although I profess not to know much about this. Measurements have shown that an image is stored using 2D Gabor wavelets, and that billenia of evolution has managed to create a brain that uses wavelets to encode data. I imagine that sound data would be encoded using 1D Gabor wavelets...
Re: PC tuner card only for digital TV - Bullshit
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PBS Goes Digital
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· Score: 1
Europe's had what... 4+ Digital channels for about a year now?
Well, Sky has over 200 channels (off of one satellite, Astra 2), and that is just England, Ireland and that place just to the north, um, Scotland.
Germany must have around the same amount of programming available on Astra 1 (where the Sky analogue broadcasts are). France, Italy and Spain are getting into DTV as well, and must have several hundred channels between them.
The only problem is that the companies give you the equipment, in return for subscription. Sky do say that they will be updating the whole system in 2 years to a much higher spec. Probably the same system with built in HD, PSX2 and more...
There are 8 satellites at the Astra 1 position, each providing 16 analogue channels (3-7 digital channels), giving a possible 900+ channels from one little satellite dish! Astra 2 only has 1 or 2 satellites in orbit, and provides 200+ channels already, a lot of them high quality.
I might be a little wrong with the details, but I think they are correct.
Re:Don't you have IDTVs over there yet?
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PBS Goes Digital
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The digital television content in Britain is split into 2 factions: Satellite Digital TV, from Sky, and Terrestrial Digital TV, from On Digital.
Sky offers 200 channels. On Digital offers 30. Sky has 50 radio channels (10 free, 40 extra subscription, damn it that the heavy metal station os one of the extra 40), no commercials, no presenters. On Digital has none. Sky has 600,000 subscribers to their Digital service. On Digital has 100,000. The top subscription costs the same... I wonder who will win?
Sky is launching their interactive services very soon. This means e-mail, games, shopping, internet etc are supported by the system, if you subscribe. The satellite decoders themselves are pretty nifty, including flash ROMS so the OS and programs can be updated via satellite. I managed to crash the OS once by accident, so this capability is important.
Both systems provide good program guides. It seems that the UK, and Europe, are way ahead of the US in terms of television now! The Sky systems works perfectly, near video on demand capability for selected films, films shown at the same time as video release if you pay £2.99 to watch it. Have to wait to see what the interactive gudgems are like though, they are done by a company called Open.
The systems are free (nice competition for once), cost £30 per month max, with a possible one-off installation fee.
That wasn't my point. I know it will run on everything from a credit card to god knows what, because of the generic APIs in the JVM. I don't think that M$ are that wrong in adding these interfaces to COM, etc to their Java implementation, because they want people to develop fast programs quickly.
I didn't say Java needed native hooks, I said that they would be good for native programs written in Java; i.e., not for the Java platform, for a specific platform like Linux, Windows or BeOS. I am making the distinction between Java as a platform and Java as a language. I like the structure of Java as a language, I dislike the implementation of bytecode (poor implementation, low code density etc) and virtual machines, although they are great for cross-platform applications and silly Java applets on web pages.
My point was that Java as a programming language is great. It should be used in the same manner as you would use C/C++ etc to write a program. You can access the native OS calls, GUI library calls etc directly in these, so you should in a platform dependent Java implementation, thus requiring an interface between the Java language and the APIs that you wish to call. I suggested an interface between Java and GTK+, a valid option I think, as it provides the features and power of GTK+ with the simplicity of Java, and bypasses the poor AWT and slow Swing. You won't be sacrificing much platform independence either, as GTK+ is available on several.
I am not saying that Java in this case needs to be compiled to bytecode, but directly to native (read x86/PPC etc) machine code. Thus allowing fast programs, with no stack based interpreter in the middle.
For cross-platform programs, you shouldn't use those hooks, and just use the normal Java API that has to be provided to be a legitimate Java implementation.
I hope I am getting my idea across here. People think of Java as something which generates slow programs running on a virtual machine, whereas there are opportunities to show that it can really fly if treated in the same way as a programming language such as C.
You can't deny that developing software is fast in Java, you don't have to worry about pointers or memory issues. Couple this with knowledge that you can develop for a specific platform, using specific APIs to do stuff, then you will generate useful applications very quickly. Often you don't need to develop cross-platform apps!
As far as I see it, Microsoft require a clean-room Java implementation. Kaffe provide that, so M$ will buy it.
Normally refusing to get bought out by M$ will result in your company going bust within two years. It is better to sell your soul to M$, get 4x the value of your product, than it is to resist. I don't know how well this works when the people are writing GPLed software though, or are doing it just for the fun and experience.
So Microsoft want a clean room Java implementation, and they want to have hooks into every part of their OSs to give that Java implementation more power.
So who here want to start doing the same for other operating systems? Why not create hooks for GTK+ (which is slowly become cross-platform itself) to get a powerful GUI system? Hooks for Gnome and KDE? Hooks for all the Linux / MacOS / BeOS etc OS calls? It can be done, without taking out any of the functionality of Java.
In fact, creating GUI hooks to GTK+ sounds like a good idea, you wouldn't lose much cross-platform compatability there either. What platforms is GTK+ available on currently? I know of Linux, Windows, AmigaOS (soon).
I remember once that some people were doing a Java front-end to gcc, so that Java apps could be compiled natively. How is this going, or has work been abandoned? That would be a terrible shame, because I like the clean, easy to program style of Java, but I think the virtual machine implementations just slow it down too much. I know that you can natively compile with products for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, consider the road network. There are cameras all over the major roads, and they check for speeding cars. That is why, when you drive around in Britian, everybody slows down at certain areas on the road... because people know that there is a speed camera there. After the camera they speed up again...
When a speeding car is found, a picture is taken, the numberplate is OCR'd and the details on the owner of that car are looked up from some database. A fine is printed, (I don't know if they include the picture), and you pay the fine, because it has been proved already.
It is illegal to own a car number plate in Britain that is illegible. You can get fined for having a dirty numberplace! If you put a reflective coating on the numberplate to disable the flash on the camera you are assumed to have done it for a purpose - how would you explain yourself in court? "I thought the invisible reflective coating looked nice."... Currently it is very hard to catch the people with reflective numberplates though...!
On topic now, I think that the EU will dither and blather, then nothing will happen, and Intel will open another fab in the EU sometime in the future, probably in Germany...
That is it for post number 597 or so!
Is it just me, but the layout engine in Mozilla is pretty damned good by all accounts, it is the stuff surrounding it that cacks up all the time.
So wouldn't it make sense to use the Mozilla layout engine inside of Konqueror, and also to use that layout engine as a standard html widget for all of the different programs that display html to some extent? That way, all (bug hunting and fixing) resources will be focussed of one code base, instead of having loads and loads of different code bases around?
Or maybe it is just me being hopeful!
Just the idea of a standard libhtml widget would be great for Linux and other Unix variants. Why reinvent the wheel indeed!
Oh well... there will always be two or three competing things in the Linux world it seems (gtk vs. qt, KDE vs. Gnome, Mozilla vs. Konqueror, etc)... it is when they are merged that the trouble occurs... look at gcc.
IE *is* better at this point and has been for a year. It caches pages MUCH faster, gives me an actual print setup and preview, etc
I have yet to find the print preview feature in IE5, which I am using at the moment because it doesn't crash and is otherwise quite good compared to Netscape (which I also run, but it isn't as good as IE5, in my opinion). Of course, when it comes to printing out a web-page I go straight to Netscape, ehich has a wonderful print preview feature (even if I sometimes click on the close window button and Netscape quits, not the print preview feature - poor interface design).
Another thing with IE5 is that when it comes across a data-type it can't view, it automagically downloads it and installs it all without quitting and restarting the program. Now if only M$ applied this logic to their OS and other software then things might not be so bad in the dark, evil, M$ world!
I have tried Mozilla intermittently during its creation, and I can use the latest version easily, and I like the layout engine a lot more than the IE5 layout engine, and I think that when it arrives (it will be equivalent to IE6 I think) then we will see a lot more people using it - AOL will use it as their default browser, for example. Of course, most people never bother to upgrade what came on their PC, so they will still be using IE3/4/5 or whatever...
No, you are wrong, the article (if you had read it) states that it was initially thought to be a mis-translation, but it was later confirmed to be true.
Anyway, the Dreamcast Zip drive is pretty chunky isn't it! It might include a couple of USB ports as well, but even so. And it only supports 100Mb media, not the 250Mb media! Obviously this means it should be possible to connect other USB devices though, but it would seem hard to install the drivers for it... USB hard drive anyone? (eek)
The Ethernet looks useful, and if Sega go into the software business you can expect their games to come out on both Dreamcast and PC, and then you can play the same game on both in a networked environment. Maybe Sonic Deathmatch could happen, although I would prefer a simpler game: SHOOT SONIC A LOT :-)
The CD Mechanism may be delicate, but it is not a drive head hovering millionths of a inch over the top of a spinning magnetic coated plastic platter spinning over 5000 times a minute. A CD mechanism is optical and is only 200rpm. If the CD mechanism breaks, the CD is usually fine (the exception being when a lorry drives over your CD device). With a HD, if it corrupts itself, say bye bye to the data held on it...
Also CD mechanisms are far more robust than HDs, even the latest 2.5" ones from IBM. They cost a lot less as well, I am sure you could put an 8 speed CD-ROM into the device (um, 1600rpm?) to read data into the on-board memory supply. (It should only take 10-30 seconds for 16Mb of RAM, 15minutes of music). The battery in such a device would last ages :-).
I imagine a HD could take being jogged around with, but it won't take being dropped, and it will happen! You know it would be your luck for the device to smash onto concrete just as the HD was spinning up ready to load in the next 10 minutes of music :-)
This is not what I would call usable. Hard Drives, even the most modern, would not really be able to withstand the shock of hitting the ground when you drop the device, even when the HD is not spinning. HDs might be rated for 1000G for 0.1us, but you get that force by dropping a HD from 1 or 2 foot onto concrete. Maybe the HD could be encased in some kind of jelly bump-soothing gel?
Of course, being able to fit over 4000 minutes of music on a portable device sounds like fun, but surely a more durable, but lower capacity medium would be better, say fitting a Superdisk into such a device or something similar. Even CD mp3 players seem to be the most popular option amongst those here on Slashdot!
I am assuming that the device has some integral RAM in which to buffer the mp3s from the HD, 16Mb should be the minimum, so the HD only has to spin up every 15 minutes or so. That would increase battery life considerably.
What I am waiting for is the integrated portable digital camera, portable games machine, mp3 player and sound recorder of some kind. I know that MAME was ported to a Kodak digital camera (cool use of resources!).
Sorry I couldn't beat the Elite Hacksaws. (3l337 H4X0RZ) :-)
And why have all the messages disappeared?
Shurely shome bugsh or shumething? Maybe because Slashdot reckons this was posted at 6.20PM (UK) and it is only 6.10PM (UK)?
Maybe a response to all the no-news articles posted here recently.... Slashdot committed suicide out of shame...
Maybe I should post this anonymously now :-)
As far as I can see, this is not a real amazing breakthrough, but it will mean mobile phones that work better across different transmissions standards (e.g., Europe vs. America), and could eventually be used in a Palm Pilot or Nokia Communicator (or even Psion 5 or 7) devices to make them more capable.
It uses a DSP56690 chip (one of this series of processors was used in the Atari Falcon I am pretty certain!) which supports all mobile phone standards, so it can be used worldwide.
So expect to see this embedded in a DragonBall processor sometime next year, maybe...
One day you will be able to buy tins of this stuff to paint over anything you like, like a younger brother, and from your local DIY store! Excellent....
More seriously, how does this compare with the LEP technology from CDT that has been recently developed? LEP is a currently working display technology, it is only 1 layer deep (compared with 3 layers for LCD displays) and thus costs a lot less to make. I think it also has the potential to be put onto flexible materials. Within the next year or so you will be able to get devices incorporating this technology (such as mobile phones, hi-res screen watches etc) and soon maybe notebook screens.
Makes me think, if a notebook screen was foldable, then instead of making the screen wider (thus making the case bigger and less notebook-like), you could make the screens higher, maybe analogous to a sheet of A3 paper, but not have to have an absolutely huge case to carry around...
Also great for animated temporary tattoos I am sure! Stick on the tattoo, it powers itself from your body heat (or static electricity or something I have forgotten what) and then you get a video of Slayer/Steps/Sinatra/Porn playing on your arm or whatever!
My point exactly...
I had the 512K Amiga version, which kicked ass in all of its 16 colours. I have also run the CPC version, which kicks something in 4 colours at 320x200, but the colour choice was bad and it obviously was cut down to fit in 64K (of which 16K is screen and another large area is also used). Sure, it seems the BBC 32k version was even more impressive (was anything left out?).
So a game running a monochrome 160x160 screen (around 3200 bytes) on a 16MHz processor should easily be able to outperform any of the original computers Sim City was originally released on.
It is also quite nice to have a square playing area for the game (19x19 blocks from the screenshots), but some of the info screens looked a bit tatty - maybe something to enhance for a greyscale or future colour version (although a 160x160 8-bit screen uses 25600 bytes of memory - a real hardship I am sure - the original Amiga version used a 320x200 screen (32000 bytes) so that should still be very fast and nippy).
Now.... if they were to release Sim City 2000 on the Palm Pilot or Psion 7 or whatever, then I would be impressed.
I think the current Psion version looks better then the Palm version at the moment, but obviously the Palm isn't the first choice as a gaming platform :-).
Now, forgive me if I am incorrect here, but a Palm organiser is not that underspecced compared with the original computers Sim City came out on? For example, apart from the 386s that it ran on, it ran on the Amiga 500 (7.2MHz 68000), Atari ST, Amstrad CPC (64K, Z80) and probably the Sinclair Spectrum and C64. So saying that it wasn't possible on the Palm is a bit silly! They only had to overcome the low-res screen, which can't have been that brain-straining...
I wonder if they will do an updated version for the colour Palm machines coming out soon? That would be worth it.
Is there a version for the Psion, because it would really kick ass on that, as it is more powerful and has a higher resolution screen.
Sim City does kick ass though, even the original all othose years ago. A great way to waste time instead of doing something useful. I am afraid this could set a lot of projects back in many companies :-)
No.
With Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) I believe that orthogonal means that an instruction such as add can use any register (in a general purpose register file) as its arguments, whereas with a non-orthogonal architecture, you can't, so you end up with instructions where you have to use certain registers in order to execute a certain instruction, which is hell for compilers!
I forgot to add that RISC was developed because of compilers, and that only the common compiler instructions were implemented, because compilers are too stupid to work out that you could use a certain instruction to implement a certain function. Compilers on CISC tended to only use certain instructions and not others, making those other instructions worthless! Of course, thesedays you would have hand-coded HALs which are written in assembler and can use the complex instructions (such as 3D-Now! and SSE) and these fuctions are called by programs...
Ah! The end of the working day is nigh! Time to go and assemble my new semi-computer (gutting ye olde computer for some stuff)
RISC does stand for Reduced Instruction Set Chip, but that doesn't mean less instructions, it means less Instruction Formats. Think of how many different instruction formats x86 has, with varying lengths of instructions, non-orthogonal instructions, etc, compared with the simplified instructions provided by RISC processors, which might have as few as 3 or 4 different instruction formats.
RISC really should have been SISC, for Simplified Instruction Set Chip, but that clashes with CISC, ho hum....
Remember, you don't get a RISC chip (Reduced Instruction Set Chip Chip)! :-)
The article was silly really, the author didn't look beyond the word 'Reduced' in RISC, thought it meant less instructions, then saw that most RISC chips have tonnes more instructions than most CISC chips, and arrived at the wrong conclusion. Hell, a simple ARM chip has a theoretical 4 billion instructions (all conditional etc) but there are much fewer general operations.
RISC:
CISC:
CISC chips now typically have a RISC core, where instructions such as ADD (contents of memory A), (contents of memory B), (resulting memory location) are broken up into micro-ops, LD A, LD B, ADD A,B,C, ST C
Anyway, just my (small) point of view...
A question about the CD ISO image... CD image
I would think that it would be sensible to have the CD-image updated to include the latest KDE (which missed the CD) and other software that just missed the boat. This shouldn't warrant a major update of the software obviously, as they provide the software on their ftp site for you to download and upgrade the 2.3 installation anyway!
Just thought this would make things simpler overall. Does COL come with the latest gtk+ etc? I am glad to read that it doesn't come with the Gnome Desktop, although when Gnome becomes more stable I would hope that COL would start to include it in the distribution.
Just thinking of replacing a RH5.2 install that has broken badly.... hangs on bootup. I want something clean and new anyway.
Anyway, I must say that the FreeBSD install was one of the easiest I have ever used. Put CD in drive, boot, select a couple of parameters (this bit is the only bit that should be improved, the devices within the computer should be autodetected) and then install! No graphical install required or needed, but it could neaten up the overall system. Installing additional software is as easy as going to the relevant ports directory and make install, and with clever ftp download from multiple sites this works like a dream (except for lesstif which fails at the apply patch step, grrr, want to run mpeg2play).
Yes, sort of, except the US digital TV standard is very poor, and can't handle reflections off of buildings etc. In Europe, it is (theoretically) possible to watch digital TV in a moving vehicle, whereas the US (different) 'standard' cannot even hope to achieve this... considering the future market for portable handheld TVs/phones/organisers this is a very shortsighted system indeed.
A satellite has transponders, with analogue these equated to 1 channel, but with digital these equate to:,
Of course, you can mix hi-quality channels with low-quality channels, etc.
Also, with Sky, if the sports broadcast was poor, there would be hell to pay.
MPEG2 allows many different streams within it, not just video and sound, there can be multiple data streams as well.
and of course.... need more channels? Put another satellite up there... There are around 8 Astra 1 satellites (Where the Sky analogue broadcasts are) providing 8*16 channels of television (some of these are digital though, for Germany and Italy). Sky uses the Astra 2 satellite, and if Sky wanted to double the amount of bandwidth they needed, they could ask for another satellite (not spare cash though!). I don't know if there are one or two Astra 2 satellites though, at the moment...
Ah! Subscription television, with adverts...
A lot of the channels are not just British, for example, the Discovery channels are worldwide, so they have a large audience anyway. With digital the cost of running a television station has dropped to very low prices compared to running an analogue station (less infrastructure required if it is digital satellite rather than analogue terrestrial).
Sky is a subscription service, you pay £32 a month to watch everything (except for the Box Office stuff), and you get a free digital receiver and satellite dish to watch them with. [If you pay for a reciever and dish, then you don't have to pay for any of the Sky channels, you can watch the 20 or so free channels, but a Digital Satellite Set Top Box costs quite a bit].
Of course, there are lower rates of subscription, e.g., you can do without the movie channels and sports channels then it drops to around £15 or less a month. Cheapest is about £8 a month for the very basic package.
A lot of the channels are a lot less popular than the few big ones anyway. Most channels hope to have one or two big shows each day where they hope to get the majority of their advertising revenue from. I haven't ever noticed an overload of adverts ever on Sky, not like Australia(?) where they apparently have non-stop adverts. Surely there are more adverts in the popular shows anyway, despite the higher cost of advertising. No-one would pay for 50% advertising television remember!
I am sure that there are laws in the UK that prevent more than a certain percentage of airtime per hour being adverts, but I cannot say this for certain. Re-runs are a problem, but when you miss a show they can be useful, and there is always another channel to watch otherwise.
I find that when there was nothing to watch on the TV 10 years ago on 4 channels, there is now nothing to watch on 100 channels today, but at least there will be something so utterly dire that it is worth watching (e.g., a film called Mosquito which was made recently, but had special effects from the '20s).
I'm trying to watch less TV. I can't help but think that suddenly having 30 channels instead of 5 won't help.
Merely 30 channels? Why, with Sky Digital there must be upwards of 200 channels now, including around 8 music television channels (MTV, M2, MTV Base, VH1, VH1 Classic, The Box, UK Play, etc but thankfully no Country Music Channel).
Sure, so there are 50 Sky Box Office channels, showing around about 10 different films at staggered intervals. Then there is the other companies box office system offering even more box office channels (Box Office channels are pay-for-movies, like having a high quality video for around the same price). There are 10+ standard movie channels, around 8 sports channels, including an interactive one where you can look up all the player details, watch the highlights and replays, change the camera angle etc, which is absolutely amazing. Then there are the 10 odd BBC crappy channels, C4, C5, but no ITV yet (next year apparently). There are too many documentary channels though, all 6(?) discovery channels alongside all the other ones, argh. Then there are the naughty channels, but not too many of them at the moment. There are 40 continuous-music digital radio channels (no adverts!), 10 of which are free, the rest cost a bit more each month (and that is where the Heavy Metal channel is, argh).
Should I mention Open? The interactive shopping system that offers games (Tetris style though, not Quake) and e-mail and home-banking, alongside traditional shopping facilities. You can get a nifty transparent purple keyboard to use with the system. How long before you can use StarOffice via the system I wonder, surely something for Sky to look into sometime!
The vast proportion of these channels are transmitting in 16:9 format now. The picture is so much easier to view, especially on a 100Hz television. DVDs look really nice as well.
The only problem I seen, and only a couple of times over the past 10 months at that, is that the picture quality can degrade on the poor channels. The Box looks like it is transmitted in 12-bit colour (what little colour survives) literally. The tennis the other day had me quivering from the aliasing on the painted white lines, they looked quite blocky (maybe the quality of the TV has something to do with this).
That little thing called Perl Harbor?
Argh! I hate it when them CGI scripts just bomb out on me.
Agreed about the good points of Nuclear power, so some people got irradiated in Japan a couple of weeks ago. Better than the dozens upon dozens who die because of a coal-face collapse or from an oil explosion (e.g. Piper Alpha). It also puts the power generation into a remote location, so disasters involving a fast moving vehicle loaded with tonnes of fuel don't happen.
Still, we aren't going to have mini-nuclear reactors on the back of robotic ants in the near future (I hope). Of course, we could get further into space if nuclear powered space-craft were allowed...
It may be £5 for an ISP that is registered with Nominet (which costs a lot) to register a domain name for someone else, but when you consider that if all you want is a domain name (e.g. to stop someone else getting it) then there are no ways to get it for £5.
Companies have to make a profit somewhere, and then there is VAT on top of it all, then there is the hassle of having to run a Primary and Secondary DNS for the names you register. Then those DNS's have to be connected to the internet 24/7 which costs a lot in the UK, as leased lines cost an absolute bomb compared with the US. ISPs don't offer cheap Domain Name Registration only, they want to get your business for years to come, by tieing you in with webspace or adverts and a lot of other things which are too much hassle to change for most people.
So you can't get a domain name of your own, no strings attached, in the UK for £5.
Actually, the reduction in prices has created a huge rip-off market, where most sellers are selling for a huge amount, or making you pay a lot for a service with many catches (the catches for freenetname are mentioned elsewhere on this page, but they primarily charge you a tonne if you wish to leave their service and keep your domain name - i.e. you aren't the owner of the domain name, the ISP is, and they loan it to you. When you wish to leave their services, they charge you a tonne for you to get it.)
I reckon it is a better idea in the UK to wait a few weeks for the market to calm down following the cheaper Nominet rate, and then check out some of the smaller companies that will be offering more personalised services for not much money.
I rung up one company a couple of days ago, enquiring about registering a domain, and asked them what the standard nominet fee was, and they said £80!. I think it was Virtual Internet. They were selling a no-catches service, yet they were secretly making £75 by preying on people who didn't know about domain registration prices.
That is why you can remember things that you haven't seen before, which is where your fractal idea thing falls down. I am not saying that this kind of system is not used elsewhere in the brain, even for related tasks, but the raw encoding of an image, etc, cannot be done using fractal techniques.
Most of the encoding is done en-route from the retina to the brain, although I profess not to know much about this. Measurements have shown that an image is stored using 2D Gabor wavelets, and that billenia of evolution has managed to create a brain that uses wavelets to encode data. I imagine that sound data would be encoded using 1D Gabor wavelets...
Well, Sky has over 200 channels (off of one satellite, Astra 2), and that is just England, Ireland and that place just to the north, um, Scotland.
Germany must have around the same amount of programming available on Astra 1 (where the Sky analogue broadcasts are). France, Italy and Spain are getting into DTV as well, and must have several hundred channels between them.
The only problem is that the companies give you the equipment, in return for subscription. Sky do say that they will be updating the whole system in 2 years to a much higher spec. Probably the same system with built in HD, PSX2 and more...
There are 8 satellites at the Astra 1 position, each providing 16 analogue channels (3-7 digital channels), giving a possible 900+ channels from one little satellite dish! Astra 2 only has 1 or 2 satellites in orbit, and provides 200+ channels already, a lot of them high quality.
I might be a little wrong with the details, but I think they are correct.
Sky offers 200 channels. On Digital offers 30. Sky has 50 radio channels (10 free, 40 extra subscription, damn it that the heavy metal station os one of the extra 40), no commercials, no presenters. On Digital has none. Sky has 600,000 subscribers to their Digital service. On Digital has 100,000. The top subscription costs the same... I wonder who will win?
Sky is launching their interactive services very soon. This means e-mail, games, shopping, internet etc are supported by the system, if you subscribe. The satellite decoders themselves are pretty nifty, including flash ROMS so the OS and programs can be updated via satellite. I managed to crash the OS once by accident, so this capability is important.
Both systems provide good program guides. It seems that the UK, and Europe, are way ahead of the US in terms of television now! The Sky systems works perfectly, near video on demand capability for selected films, films shown at the same time as video release if you pay £2.99 to watch it. Have to wait to see what the interactive gudgems are like though, they are done by a company called Open.
The systems are free (nice competition for once), cost £30 per month max, with a possible one-off installation fee.
I didn't say Java needed native hooks, I said that they would be good for native programs written in Java; i.e., not for the Java platform, for a specific platform like Linux, Windows or BeOS. I am making the distinction between Java as a platform and Java as a language. I like the structure of Java as a language, I dislike the implementation of bytecode (poor implementation, low code density etc) and virtual machines, although they are great for cross-platform applications and silly Java applets on web pages.
My point was that Java as a programming language is great. It should be used in the same manner as you would use C/C++ etc to write a program. You can access the native OS calls, GUI library calls etc directly in these, so you should in a platform dependent Java implementation, thus requiring an interface between the Java language and the APIs that you wish to call. I suggested an interface between Java and GTK+, a valid option I think, as it provides the features and power of GTK+ with the simplicity of Java, and bypasses the poor AWT and slow Swing. You won't be sacrificing much platform independence either, as GTK+ is available on several.
I am not saying that Java in this case needs to be compiled to bytecode, but directly to native (read x86/PPC etc) machine code. Thus allowing fast programs, with no stack based interpreter in the middle.
For cross-platform programs, you shouldn't use those hooks, and just use the normal Java API that has to be provided to be a legitimate Java implementation.
I hope I am getting my idea across here. People think of Java as something which generates slow programs running on a virtual machine, whereas there are opportunities to show that it can really fly if treated in the same way as a programming language such as C.
You can't deny that developing software is fast in Java, you don't have to worry about pointers or memory issues. Couple this with knowledge that you can develop for a specific platform, using specific APIs to do stuff, then you will generate useful applications very quickly. Often you don't need to develop cross-platform apps!
Normally refusing to get bought out by M$ will result in your company going bust within two years. It is better to sell your soul to M$, get 4x the value of your product, than it is to resist. I don't know how well this works when the people are writing GPLed software though, or are doing it just for the fun and experience.
So Microsoft want a clean room Java implementation, and they want to have hooks into every part of their OSs to give that Java implementation more power.
So who here want to start doing the same for other operating systems? Why not create hooks for GTK+ (which is slowly become cross-platform itself) to get a powerful GUI system? Hooks for Gnome and KDE? Hooks for all the Linux / MacOS / BeOS etc OS calls? It can be done, without taking out any of the functionality of Java.
In fact, creating GUI hooks to GTK+ sounds like a good idea, you wouldn't lose much cross-platform compatability there either. What platforms is GTK+ available on currently? I know of Linux, Windows, AmigaOS (soon).
I remember once that some people were doing a Java front-end to gcc, so that Java apps could be compiled natively. How is this going, or has work been abandoned? That would be a terrible shame, because I like the clean, easy to program style of Java, but I think the virtual machine implementations just slow it down too much. I know that you can natively compile with products for Windows.