If you are going to replace the GPU for rendering, then you are going to have to replace the Z-buffer (for depth-testing), triangle rasterisation with hardware texture mapping with fragment shaders, hardware shadow-mapping, and vertex shaders (for character animation). All of this should also work with multi-sampling at HDTV resolutions (2048 x 1500+ pixels). Someone made the observation that the average pixel would be rendered at least seven times, so that would have to taken into account. The only alternative to all those is ray-tracing, which is the direction Intel is trying to push the industry in.
A web-based operating system simply gives the BIOS enough functionality to set up the network card and download files using "simple-ftp". This allows you to get rid of the few things that aren't essential - basically the massive hard disk drive required to store every possible device driver that might be needed, system manuals with multi-language support and anti-virus definition files (the latter alone is currently running at 250 Megabytes in size).
When the system is switched on, the BIOS setups the network hardware enough to implement basic file transfers (sftp). This allows the kernel and necessary device drivers to be downloaded. Then the window manager, widget sets, and API DLL files are also downloaded off the network. It's no different from having a server for sharing executables and storing home directories.
There might be some complications - some desktops implement mouse cursors in hardware - so you can only have one cursor at a time (ever noticed how a system can crash but the mouse cursor still moves around, but not clicking anything).
Though having multiple mouse cursors might not be a bad thing. There are many times where having two or more mouse cursors might be useful - sorting out image and source code directories for example. Have one mouse cursor for the window where data is being moved from, and another cursor for the window where data is being moved to.
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
The earliest known written evidence of a camera obscura can be found in Aristotle's documentation of a device in 350 BC in Problemata" (Patti, 1993). Aristotle's apparatus contained a dark chamber that had a single small hole to allow for sunlight to enter. With this device, he made observations of the sun. He noted that no matter what shape the hole was, it would still display the sun correctly as a round object. Another observation that he made was that when the distance between the aperture (the tiny hole) and the surface with the image increased, the image would become amplified. Although no one is perfectly sure, many attribute the invention of the camera obscura to Aristotle. He rejected the vision theory of Plato of light rays emitted from the eyes.
If you look at the evolution of supercomputing, one of the fundamental components to such as a system is the scalability from multi-cores (many processors per single chip die) to multi-processor cards (many GPU's per card) to rack mounted systems (multiple cards - SLI technology) and multiple racks (ultimately needing high-performance data networks).
As the PC can support multiple GPU cards, that forces nVidia to need some motherboard real estate to support SLI. I can hardly imagine the other manufacturers agreeing to reduce the size of the motherboard so that Nvidia could have their own custom motherboard within the PC. So the only solution is for Nvidia to make their own motherboards.
I always wondered what the Bible meant by "blocking the fountains of the deep" - were they underwater hot geysers that were only recently found, or something different?
It probably isn't Sony, but Nvidia. Third party board manufacturers do get access to the Nvidia hardware specifications in order to write drivers for a fee, so I would guess that making developers pay for access to the hardware specifications helps to pay for the cost of support staff. The
Surely, nvidia could create blob drivers for the PS3, as they do for PC's?
The food pyramid - the offically recommended dietary balance recommended by the Surgeon General.
There is now a belief that people need to eat less red meat, cheese and dairy products, and eat more rice, fruit and vegetables. The food pyramid was really based on what farm workers/manual labour needed to eat, and not what office workers should eat.
One time I was at the airport, an international shooting competition was going on. One of the teams was returning home with their weapons in metal boxes - 3 inch x 3 inch x 3 foot long wooden boxes along with larger metal boxes. They were intent on carrying these with them through the departure lounges and onto the passenger cabin, while the check-in staff were insistent that they had to be put in the hold. The check-in staff won.
I have the "sensors-applet 1.8.1" (Sensors-Applet) installed on my system.
Anything graphical pushes the temperature up from an average of 56C (reading slashdot) to 89C. Even having a defunct Acroread running in the background will have the system at 91C before shutting down, even when nothing else is going running.
I did have a problem with my fan some time ago. This seemed to be caused by a thick layer of dust on all the blades (which looked more like a lint filter on a drying machine than a heatsink). After cleaning out the space and giving the fan blades a good rinsing, the system is quieter, but now sounds more like a hovercraft than a jet-engine at full throttle.
The current internet formed when Microsoft took the TCP/IP stack off BSD (FTP software?) and bolted it onto Windows 95. Microsoft really had no other choice in order to get their products to communicate with UNIX servers. At the time, many security experts rolled their eyes up at the thought of the average user having access to the 'sockets' programming API. This allowed mom'n'pop ISP's to form by offering dial-ip PPP/SLIP internet access.
TCP/IP was originally designed for internal networks with known machines and administrators (corporate LAN's, military networks and academic networks).
Nobody really anticipated that thousands of home PC's would be connected to the same network as academic, corporate and military sites, let alone mobile phones and PDA's, although there was a belief that being able to access services at home through a video terminal would be extremely useful (Singapore in the mid 1980's wanted all their government departments connected digitally in order to compete against other Asian countries).
With mobile phone networks (GPRS and 3G), identification has been built in from the start with IMEI numbers (equivalent to MAC addresses), SIM cards to store the telephone number (another ID number). Then there are the SUBSIDY passwords required to "unlock" a mobile phone from a particular network, along with the different dongles and cables required to reprogram or erase SIM card memory. I can imagine these technologies could migrate from 3G back into cabled broadband networks.
Our lab technicians were upgrading vISTA PC's to use the department's standard linux build. For whatever reason, the BIOS wouldn't allow the LINUX install DVD to BOOT. So they had to remove the hard disk drives out of the PC's with built-in TRUSTED SECURITY BIOS'S, pop them into an older untrusted XP system, and then install the linux build and put the hard disk drive pack in again. IT's a pain, but if OS vendors are going to install security measures without consulting their users, this is what is going to happen. Everyone is going to think of ways of getting around these "security measures".
There is a simpler explanation - the underclass have no respect for law, authority or anybody else. The judges and MP's can't do anything to control them - thus, the only people they can enforce their politically correct laws on, are the law-abiding middle classes. Since they are the ones with money, they are the ones with the most to lose if they get a criminal record. So that is what the authorities can do - just make up silly laws to persecute the working population.
They're pro-gun rights, but more in the "protecting yourself from grizzlies" sense than then the "self defense against unarmed burglar" sense.
When you have grizzlies prowling the streets at night in below zero temperatures is probably a better deterrent against burglars than shotgun wielding homeowners.
There was adocumentary on Alaskan towns - due to the small town size and cold temperatures, many of the shops would actually be built together as one building (Wooden shack type shopping mall). So that too would act as a disincentive to any burglar.
If you can access the card modem itself using GPRS commands, you can read the signal strength using the AT+CSQ GPRS command. According to the manuals,,
The problem is that it's not really possible to tell from just looking at the script or the storyboard, whether the movie is going to skyrocket or sink like a rock. If a leading actor turns down the offer for an average script, that creates a space for an up-and-coming star to fill.
Although, somebody in the past did say that the studios were only interested in scripts that could be understood by 12-year-olds. Maybe that is their dominant audience - parents taking their families for an evening out, or end-of-term school parties.
Just replace them with plastic pot plants - our local supermarket cafe actually has plastic pot plants that have 5 point leaves with the central point the longest and the side points the sdhortest.
I would agree with what "Magic5Ball" has said. The major contributor to the discussion hasn't critised the website owner personally or used offensive words. The guy does seem to know what he is talking about even if he/she sounds a bit egotistical. I've known people like that before, and usually they don't know that they are being a bit abrasive. If it resorts to name calling then it is bullying.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are going to replace the GPU for rendering, then you are going to have to replace the Z-buffer (for depth-testing), triangle rasterisation with hardware texture mapping with fragment shaders, hardware shadow-mapping, and vertex shaders (for character animation). All of this should also work with multi-sampling at HDTV resolutions (2048 x 1500+ pixels). Someone made the observation that the average pixel would be rendered at least seven times, so that would have to taken into account. The only alternative to all those is ray-tracing, which is the direction Intel is trying to push the industry in.
A web-based operating system simply gives the BIOS enough functionality to set up the network card and download files using "simple-ftp". This allows you to get rid of the few things that aren't essential - basically the massive hard disk drive required to store every possible device driver that might be needed, system manuals with multi-language support and anti-virus definition files (the latter alone is currently running at 250 Megabytes in size).
When the system is switched on, the BIOS setups the network hardware enough to implement basic file transfers (sftp). This allows the kernel and necessary device drivers to be downloaded. Then the window manager, widget sets, and API DLL files are also downloaded off the network. It's no different from having a server for sharing executables and storing home directories.
There might be some complications - some desktops implement mouse cursors in hardware - so you can only have one cursor at a time (ever noticed how a system can crash but the mouse cursor still moves around, but not clicking anything).
Though having multiple mouse cursors might not be a bad thing. There are many times where having two or more mouse cursors might be useful - sorting out image and source code directories for example. Have one mouse cursor for the window where data is being moved from, and another cursor for the window where data is being moved to.
I found this article recently:
The X-Windows Disaster
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
I don't understand it myself, but there are plenty of instances of the legal system being more on the side of the underclass than home owners.
Family ordered to remove security gates from driveway
Photographing vandals is assault, cameraman is told
Pensioner ordered to remove flat-cap for security reasons
Families who overfill rubbish bins fined more than shoplifters
There are many others.
Greeks and Optics
The earliest known written evidence of a camera obscura can be found in Aristotle's documentation of a device in 350 BC in Problemata" (Patti, 1993). Aristotle's apparatus contained a dark chamber that had a single small hole to allow for sunlight to enter. With this device, he made observations of the sun. He noted that no matter what shape the hole was, it would still display the sun correctly as a round object. Another observation that he made was that when the distance between the aperture (the tiny hole) and the surface with the image increased, the image would become amplified. Although no one is perfectly sure, many attribute the invention of the camera obscura to Aristotle. He rejected the vision theory of Plato of light rays emitted from the eyes.
Camera Obscura
If you look at the evolution of supercomputing, one of the fundamental components to such as a system is the scalability from multi-cores (many processors per single chip die) to multi-processor cards (many GPU's per card) to rack mounted systems (multiple cards - SLI technology) and multiple racks (ultimately needing high-performance data networks).
As the PC can support multiple GPU cards, that forces nVidia to need some motherboard real estate to support SLI. I can hardly imagine the other manufacturers agreeing to reduce the size of the motherboard so that Nvidia could have their own custom motherboard within the PC.
So the only solution is for Nvidia to make their own motherboards.
I always wondered what the Bible meant by "blocking the fountains of the deep" - were they underwater hot geysers that were only recently found, or something different?
It probably isn't Sony, but Nvidia. Third party board manufacturers do get access to the Nvidia hardware specifications in order to write drivers for a fee, so I would guess that making developers pay for access to the hardware specifications helps to pay for the cost of support staff. The
Surely, nvidia could create blob drivers for the PS3, as they do for PC's?
On a department UNIX system, just look in each users home directory for the file:
".windows_settings/My Documents/My Music"
Those Windows auto-rippers will put everything there for everyone else to download...
But how is obesity a problem of the government?
The food pyramid - the offically recommended dietary balance recommended by the Surgeon General.
There is now a belief that people need to eat less red meat, cheese and dairy products, and eat more rice, fruit and vegetables. The food pyramid was really based on what farm workers/manual labour needed to eat, and not what office workers should eat.
They would probably bury duct tubes/pipes underneath the ground and give every house its own fibre-optic cable.
For a new subdivision, the peering point would probably be at the nearest major road intersection.
One time I was at the airport, an international shooting competition was going on. One of the teams was returning home with their weapons in metal boxes - 3 inch x 3 inch x 3 foot long wooden boxes along with larger metal boxes. They were intent on carrying these with them through the departure lounges and onto the passenger cabin, while the check-in staff were insistent that they had to be put in the hold. The check-in staff won.
I have the "sensors-applet 1.8.1" (Sensors-Applet) installed on my system.
Anything graphical pushes the temperature up from an average of 56C (reading slashdot) to 89C. Even having a defunct Acroread running in the background will have the system at 91C before shutting down, even when nothing else is going running.
I did have a problem with my fan some time ago. This seemed to be caused by a thick layer of dust on all the blades (which looked more like a lint filter on a drying machine than a heatsink).
After cleaning out the space and giving the fan blades a good rinsing, the system is quieter, but now sounds more like a hovercraft than a jet-engine at full throttle.
It should be fun seeing them try to decrypt the contents of a file generated from the output of thermal noise sensors.
The current internet formed when Microsoft took the TCP/IP stack off BSD (FTP software?) and bolted it onto Windows 95. Microsoft really had no other choice in order to get their products to communicate with UNIX servers. At the time, many security experts rolled their eyes up at the thought of the average user having access to the 'sockets' programming API. This allowed mom'n'pop ISP's to form by offering dial-ip PPP/SLIP internet access.
TCP/IP was originally designed for internal networks with known machines and administrators (corporate LAN's, military networks and academic networks).
Nobody really anticipated that thousands of home PC's would be connected to the same network as academic, corporate and military sites, let alone mobile phones and PDA's, although there was a belief that being able to access services at home through a video terminal would be extremely useful (Singapore in the mid 1980's wanted all their government departments connected digitally in order to compete against other Asian countries).
With mobile phone networks (GPRS and 3G), identification has been built in from the start with IMEI numbers (equivalent to MAC addresses), SIM cards to store the telephone number (another ID number). Then there are the SUBSIDY passwords required to "unlock" a mobile phone from a particular network, along with the different dongles and cables required to reprogram or erase SIM card memory. I can imagine these technologies could migrate from 3G back into cabled broadband networks.
Our lab technicians were upgrading vISTA PC's to use the department's standard linux build. For whatever reason, the BIOS wouldn't allow the LINUX install DVD to BOOT. So they had to remove the hard disk drives out of the PC's with built-in TRUSTED SECURITY BIOS'S, pop them into an older untrusted XP system, and then install the linux build and put the hard disk drive pack in again. IT's a pain, but if OS vendors are going to install security measures without consulting their users, this is what is going to happen. Everyone is going to think of ways of getting around these "security measures".
There is a simpler explanation - the underclass have no respect for law, authority or anybody else. The judges and MP's can't do anything to control them - thus, the only people they can enforce their politically correct laws on, are the law-abiding middle classes. Since they are the ones with money, they are the ones with the most to lose if they get a criminal record. So that is what the authorities can do - just make up silly laws to persecute the working population.
They're pro-gun rights, but more in the "protecting yourself from grizzlies" sense than then the "self defense against unarmed burglar" sense.
When you have grizzlies prowling the streets at night in below zero temperatures is probably a better deterrent against burglars than shotgun wielding homeowners.
There was adocumentary on Alaskan towns - due to the small town size and cold temperatures, many of the shops would actually be built together as one building (Wooden shack type shopping mall). So that too would act as a disincentive to any burglar.
If you can access the card modem itself using GPRS commands, you can read the signal strength using the AT+CSQ GPRS command. According to the manuals,,
AT Command reference
0 = -113 dBm or less
1 = -111 dbm
2-30 = -109 dBm to -53 dBm
31 = -51 dBm or greater.
The problem is that it's not really possible to tell from just looking at the script or the storyboard, whether the movie is going to skyrocket or sink like a rock. If a leading actor turns down the offer for an average script, that creates a space for an up-and-coming star to fill.
Although, somebody in the past did say that the studios were only interested in scripts that could be understood by 12-year-olds. Maybe that is their dominant audience - parents taking their families for an evening out, or end-of-term school parties.
If the price of solar power gets even lower and panels bceome even thinner, they might just start putting solar panels on the blades of wind turbines.
Good job satellites don't have satellite dishes mounted to face the earth...
Couldn'tthe surface of a satellite (cylindrical or spherical) reflect radio waves ....
Just replace them with plastic pot plants - our local supermarket cafe actually has plastic pot plants that have 5 point leaves with the central point the longest and the side points the sdhortest.
I would agree with what "Magic5Ball" has said. The major contributor to the discussion hasn't critised the website owner personally or used offensive words. The guy does seem to know what he is talking about even if he/she sounds a bit egotistical. I've known people like that before, and usually they don't know that they are being a bit abrasive. If it resorts to name calling then it is bullying.
From Dr Who (the latest series where the Doctor and the team meat the leader of the Sontarans):
Jack: "He looks like an small angry potato"
Dr Who: "Hoy, hoy. No name calling, you look like a tall pink weasel to him."