The AY chip was the same as in the Amstrad CPC series of 8-bit computers. It was very limited - chip tunes ahoy!
The Atari ST only had a 512 colour palette and could only display a maximum of 16 at any one time. The Amiga (OCS) had a4096 colour palette and could display 64 at the same time (EHB mode) or 4096 (HAM, but slow), and you could use the copper to change the palette registers to get vastly more colours on screen. There were hardware sprites as well, and a blitter (you had to wait for the Atari STE 1024 for that I believe).
You appear to be talking about the Atari Falcon, which came out at the same time as the Amiga 1200, which had a 24-bit palette.
The "better sound support" equates to having some MIDI ports and the audio chip from an Amstrad CPC / Spectrum +2, rather than a quad-channel polyphonic audio chip that powered the late 80s and early 90s rave scene and eventually led to the house and trance music markets.
Let's not mention the Atari ST's 16 colours from 512 colours... in low-res mode. It did have a monochrome 640x400 mode though! Woo!
Yeah, Mac OS had come on leaps and bounds in terms of looks, and looked crisp in its initial release too. It was a rubbish OS technically, but it had the APIs, looks and usability that Windows lacked, and Amiga OS couldn't get right.
AmigaOS launched with colour, sure. But those colours (although changeable) were black, white, VIVID LUMINESCENT NUCLEAR ORANGE and pastel blue. An inspired selection indeed. The greys of Workbench 2 were a blessed relief.
I don't know how Windows 1 and 2 could look so terrible for a graphical user interface myself.
Meh. As a Brit I'll say this: America lives on hope - the American Dream. Hope is good, and keeps people cheerful when they shouldn't be. Despair and pessimism, the British normality, might actually be reality and accurate, but it certainly doesn't do much for life expectancy.
Same here - one screenshot has an A and a B in a circle. Given that the UI is no where near completed, I would expect that they probably used unicode characters 24B6 and 24B7 until the font designer had added the Playstation control images to the UI font.
I have to say that I think that if you start off with a "home and student" version first, and leave out things like scripting (although the javascript engine and plugins system provide a base already for these), you could get something like iWork quickly.
I also think that home users might want something easier to use. I think iWork does a reasonably good job here, and creates great looking documents. Designing a good interface would be the hard job here, and working out how you could diverge away from the MS Office style of document creation.
The CSS model is more than enough for paragraph and inline styling, indeed it's margins and padding options is more controllable than MS Office's mere-margins.
Page styling and layout would need some thought, but it isn't an impossible task.
Then you need templates, which in reality are some of these CSS styles (whilst hiding others).
I think a Word processor, written in XUL, using Gecko for layout, could be done quite well. But getting it full-function - ask the Abiword guys how long that takes. Same goes for a spreadsheet - Gnumeric has been around a long time.
So I look on Amazon. HP 9g, this has pixels chiselled by trolls from granite, and then put on display in the darkest troll hole they could find. HP 39GS - at least there are more pixels. HP 48G2 is massvely reduced to $50. Casio fx-9860G looks interesting. They're all pixelly clunky creations. High resolution displays and cheap-ass ARM processors have passed these dinosaurs of companies by. And the iPod is fully programmable, which seems to be the main concern for most graphing calculator geeks.
All these calculators are expensive, targetted devices. The hardware keys are important. However they're so far behind, especially considering smartphones have made small displays cheap and excellent, and all-in-one ARM SoCs cheap too. TI made the move from Z80 and 68000 to ARM finally...
It would be one step in a process that involves hundreds of steps.
So why not calculate the average at data collection time and store it alongside the other data? Rules change. Often. It's average age this week, but last week it was absolute age of drivers. Your programmer was on holiday during the change (which was told to the business rules team two days before going live date). Your rules engine needs to be able to do calculations.
So you submit facts you've gathered (from customer, credit agencies, etc) into the system, and get answers out, and all the volatile, mutable business rules, including calculations, go into the rules, workflows, etc. Hopefully the rule engine is extensible, so you can add custom steps (e.g., call a webservice, etc) into your workflows.
No it wouldn't, the problem isn't with the game, but with the difficulties of having a game with millions of polygons in a deformable, non-static, dynamically lit world.
I just think that some people are bitter than a popular game is actually written in Java, and is actively disproving all of their prejudices against the language, so they're jumping on 'performance' and saying ridiculous things like "use the Quake II engine", as if that would fix it.
It's probably handling around 10000 times more polygons than Quake, each block is 12 polygons. Java is just passing the data off to OpenGL to do the heavy lifting. Depth culling a scene 1000 blocks deep is going to be quite heavy on the renderer, and it will need algorithmic enhancements rather than programming language enhancements, such as reducing complexity in the distance (which is probably hard for this game, compared to games with 2D terrain meshes).
What about the legitimate and honest OWNER of the property?
The new owners can be refunded their costs (house sale, fees, moving, etc), and they can start looking again. They'll have their receipts, so they won't lose out, except in time and stress (which can also be compensated).
Instead the old owner gets some government assessed value of the property, probably low-balled. In a recession they could be left with negative equity.
One thing - what about all the goods in the house, did the new owners throw them away? Although it was an investment property, so potentially empty (and not rented out).
Normal SSD: SSD controller chip, cache RAM chip, PCB, flash chips, SATA interface, etc. iSSD: Integrated chip (probably a sandwich chip - the controller, then RAM, then up to 8 (or 16) flash dies.
But new technology commands a premium. It will be interesting to see how these are used initially. The fast read/writes compared to normal flash storage in low-end systems could be a real boost on tablets.
Sounds like the required functionality is something that will stop sending texts when the phone has exceeded its contract allowance.
In addition it may be possible to identify premium rate numbers (maybe via a web service at the very least) before they are texted/phoned, allowing the android sandbox to be more granular with its permissions. Or to only allow SMS/phone calls to numbers in the user's phone book. Or to only allow web access to a limited list of specified websites.
" I have personal stuff in Outlook folders that I would not want someone in IT to see if I suddenly dropped dead"
Don't use work systems for personal use. Certainly not the work Exchange server.
However if work doesn't provide web access to any external emails solutions this can be very difficult to avoid.
In the end it comes down to two things - one, work should honour personal emails when stored in a personal folder and just delete them, and two, sent emails should not be stored in a single sent email folder, but be split up into "work sent" and "personal sent", with the latter again being deleted without investigation by the business.
Now things that your don't mind being seen by co-workers, like photos and the like in screensavers (a modern version of the photo-frame people used to have at work), might be personal, but then again, they're not *that* personal that you care - you'd previously have had them pinned to the partition wall anyway. Any sensible company allows its users to personalise to that degree.
You need 1.3MW - the comment above was three orders of magnitude off, the guy, on a techie website, forgot that there's a "mega" between "kilo" and "giga"!
Anyway, your car can trickle charge overnight (although you'd still need an updated power feed), or you can go into a "gas" station to get faster charges. These places aren't going to go away, and they will update their offerings as required.
Because it's been winning the battle since the Psion 5 came out. Or the Apple Newton came out. It beat MIPS and SH3 and SH4 before Palm switched from Dragonball CPUs.
And in the past few years, it's because it's licensable, cheap, can be integrated with other components in your own SoC, works well, has a nice ISA, has the features that you need for a mobile platform, doesn't have cruft like x86, didn't need x86 compatibility anyway, etc, etc.
I did use a Geode based tablet back in 2000 or so. It was running QNX. Rubbish.
Slashdot Mirror
The AY chip was the same as in the Amstrad CPC series of 8-bit computers. It was very limited - chip tunes ahoy!
The Atari ST only had a 512 colour palette and could only display a maximum of 16 at any one time. The Amiga (OCS) had a4096 colour palette and could display 64 at the same time (EHB mode) or 4096 (HAM, but slow), and you could use the copper to change the palette registers to get vastly more colours on screen. There were hardware sprites as well, and a blitter (you had to wait for the Atari STE 1024 for that I believe).
You appear to be talking about the Atari Falcon, which came out at the same time as the Amiga 1200, which had a 24-bit palette.
The "better sound support" equates to having some MIDI ports and the audio chip from an Amstrad CPC / Spectrum +2, rather than a quad-channel polyphonic audio chip that powered the late 80s and early 90s rave scene and eventually led to the house and trance music markets.
Let's not mention the Atari ST's 16 colours from 512 colours ... in low-res mode. It did have a monochrome 640x400 mode though! Woo!
Yeah, Mac OS had come on leaps and bounds in terms of looks, and looked crisp in its initial release too. It was a rubbish OS technically, but it had the APIs, looks and usability that Windows lacked, and Amiga OS couldn't get right.
AmigaOS launched with colour, sure. But those colours (although changeable) were black, white, VIVID LUMINESCENT NUCLEAR ORANGE and pastel blue. An inspired selection indeed. The greys of Workbench 2 were a blessed relief.
I don't know how Windows 1 and 2 could look so terrible for a graphical user interface myself.
Was the window texture application Budgie?
Meh. As a Brit I'll say this: America lives on hope - the American Dream. Hope is good, and keeps people cheerful when they shouldn't be. Despair and pessimism, the British normality, might actually be reality and accurate, but it certainly doesn't do much for life expectancy.
Live Longer Through Misguided Hope
Same here - one screenshot has an A and a B in a circle. Given that the UI is no where near completed, I would expect that they probably used unicode characters 24B6 and 24B7 until the font designer had added the Playstation control images to the UI font.
I have to say that I think that if you start off with a "home and student" version first, and leave out things like scripting (although the javascript engine and plugins system provide a base already for these), you could get something like iWork quickly.
I also think that home users might want something easier to use. I think iWork does a reasonably good job here, and creates great looking documents. Designing a good interface would be the hard job here, and working out how you could diverge away from the MS Office style of document creation.
The CSS model is more than enough for paragraph and inline styling, indeed it's margins and padding options is more controllable than MS Office's mere-margins.
Page styling and layout would need some thought, but it isn't an impossible task.
Then you need templates, which in reality are some of these CSS styles (whilst hiding others).
I think a Word processor, written in XUL, using Gecko for layout, could be done quite well. But getting it full-function - ask the Abiword guys how long that takes. Same goes for a spreadsheet - Gnumeric has been around a long time.
So I look on Amazon. HP 9g, this has pixels chiselled by trolls from granite, and then put on display in the darkest troll hole they could find. HP 39GS - at least there are more pixels. HP 48G2 is massvely reduced to $50. Casio fx-9860G looks interesting. They're all pixelly clunky creations. High resolution displays and cheap-ass ARM processors have passed these dinosaurs of companies by. And the iPod is fully programmable, which seems to be the main concern for most graphing calculator geeks.
All these calculators are expensive, targetted devices. The hardware keys are important. However they're so far behind, especially considering smartphones have made small displays cheap and excellent, and all-in-one ARM SoCs cheap too. TI made the move from Z80 and 68000 to ARM finally...
C'mon. A graphing calculator with an e-ink display (480x320) and a slim form factor would be very desirable. And it should be cheap to boot (under $100). You can probably already replicate all of the functions of the graphing calculators on an iPod Touch with a few cheap downloads from iTunes... $1.99 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/graphing-calculator/id289940142?mt=8 or Free http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-graphing-calculator/id378009553?mt=8
It would be one step in a process that involves hundreds of steps.
So why not calculate the average at data collection time and store it alongside the other data? Rules change. Often. It's average age this week, but last week it was absolute age of drivers. Your programmer was on holiday during the change (which was told to the business rules team two days before going live date). Your rules engine needs to be able to do calculations.
So you submit facts you've gathered (from customer, credit agencies, etc) into the system, and get answers out, and all the volatile, mutable business rules, including calculations, go into the rules, workflows, etc. Hopefully the rule engine is extensible, so you can add custom steps (e.g., call a webservice, etc) into your workflows.
I guess Super Size Me could be represented with a gradually widening line.
No it wouldn't, the problem isn't with the game, but with the difficulties of having a game with millions of polygons in a deformable, non-static, dynamically lit world.
I just think that some people are bitter than a popular game is actually written in Java, and is actively disproving all of their prejudices against the language, so they're jumping on 'performance' and saying ridiculous things like "use the Quake II engine", as if that would fix it.
Actually this game would probably be ideal for ray tracing. Nothing too complex in terms of reflections or lighting or shading, but lots of geometry.
It's probably handling around 10000 times more polygons than Quake, each block is 12 polygons. Java is just passing the data off to OpenGL to do the heavy lifting. Depth culling a scene 1000 blocks deep is going to be quite heavy on the renderer, and it will need algorithmic enhancements rather than programming language enhancements, such as reducing complexity in the distance (which is probably hard for this game, compared to games with 2D terrain meshes).
To: *Owner of TheDirty.com*
At: *Address of TheDirt.com*
"Hmm," thinks owner of thedirt.com, "I'll throw that away, nobody by that name here."
or vice versa.
What about the legitimate and honest OWNER of the property?
The new owners can be refunded their costs (house sale, fees, moving, etc), and they can start looking again. They'll have their receipts, so they won't lose out, except in time and stress (which can also be compensated).
Instead the old owner gets some government assessed value of the property, probably low-balled. In a recession they could be left with negative equity.
One thing - what about all the goods in the house, did the new owners throw them away? Although it was an investment property, so potentially empty (and not rented out).
It will be cheaper to build in most cases.
Normal SSD: SSD controller chip, cache RAM chip, PCB, flash chips, SATA interface, etc.
iSSD: Integrated chip (probably a sandwich chip - the controller, then RAM, then up to 8 (or 16) flash dies.
But new technology commands a premium. It will be interesting to see how these are used initially. The fast read/writes compared to normal flash storage in low-end systems could be a real boost on tablets.
At least you had batteries. I got eaten by a grue. Thanks a bunch TD-Linux. :-(
Sounds like the required functionality is something that will stop sending texts when the phone has exceeded its contract allowance.
In addition it may be possible to identify premium rate numbers (maybe via a web service at the very least) before they are texted/phoned, allowing the android sandbox to be more granular with its permissions. Or to only allow SMS/phone calls to numbers in the user's phone book. Or to only allow web access to a limited list of specified websites.
" I have personal stuff in Outlook folders that I would not want someone in IT to see if I suddenly dropped dead"
Don't use work systems for personal use. Certainly not the work Exchange server.
However if work doesn't provide web access to any external emails solutions this can be very difficult to avoid.
In the end it comes down to two things - one, work should honour personal emails when stored in a personal folder and just delete them, and two, sent emails should not be stored in a single sent email folder, but be split up into "work sent" and "personal sent", with the latter again being deleted without investigation by the business.
Now things that your don't mind being seen by co-workers, like photos and the like in screensavers (a modern version of the photo-frame people used to have at work), might be personal, but then again, they're not *that* personal that you care - you'd previously have had them pinned to the partition wall anyway. Any sensible company allows its users to personalise to that degree.
You need 1.3MW - the comment above was three orders of magnitude off, the guy, on a techie website, forgot that there's a "mega" between "kilo" and "giga"!
Anyway, your car can trickle charge overnight (although you'd still need an updated power feed), or you can go into a "gas" station to get faster charges. These places aren't going to go away, and they will update their offerings as required.
The guy is a tit. He moans about having loads of work to do, but then spends ages writing long messages and making mock posters just to annoy her.
However she should learn how to use Word to do such a poster herself rather than using work resources.
Because it's been winning the battle since the Psion 5 came out. Or the Apple Newton came out. It beat MIPS and SH3 and SH4 before Palm switched from Dragonball CPUs.
And in the past few years, it's because it's licensable, cheap, can be integrated with other components in your own SoC, works well, has a nice ISA, has the features that you need for a mobile platform, doesn't have cruft like x86, didn't need x86 compatibility anyway, etc, etc.
I did use a Geode based tablet back in 2000 or so. It was running QNX. Rubbish.
Hmm, I remember that, I remember embedded Freshmeat as an embedded iframe thing into a Slashdot post at the time...
I don't think I could do that off the top of my head anymore. But my cooking skills have improved!
Pressure, meet fragile, breakable glass.
Oh god, why why did I look for that as well?
AND WHY WHY WHY!!!!!!!!!!! FFS!!!!!!!!!!!