Look at recent history in the past 50 years, in particular World War II identity cards During World War II the government kept a central register of everyone in Britain. Names, date of birth and address were listed in this national register. It held the information needed for issuing national identity cards and food and clothing ration books, and for identifying children eligible for evacuation and adults eligible for call-up into the armed forces. ... The police, army and Home Guard checked identity cards for security reasons. It was believed that this helped in the detection of foreign spies and Nazi paratroopers. But there was never a case of an enemy spy being discovered for lack of an identity card.
Usually astronomical events happened 24 hours before they are posted in/.
Back in the good 'old days of USENET and ISDN lines, interesting scientific and astronomical events would be posted and forwarded regularly. Unfortunately, our relay was the local university whose feed would regularly become backlogged if not choke altogether. We would only hear about the event three days after it had happened.
The main incentive to do this type of investment is that North Sea oil is running out, so the oil cartels don't really have much influence. Especially since that the UK has to import oil from the world markets. Construction of new nuclear reactors is at a standstill until somewhere can be found to store nuclear waste in the extremely long term. And the financial squabbles with Gazprom over gas prices haven't helped either.
So the only options left at the moment are wind, solar and wave power.
For ~$700.00, they will part exchange your old LCD display with a replacement. Fail to return the old LCD display, and you pay another $755. This makes the price of the display effectively $1400 (about half the price of the whole system).
The mirror will be fixed in place, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Normal interprocessor communication would require a crossbar switch or some kind of virtual network to support different grid configurations (square grid, cube mesh, torus, or hypertorus). Usually each node has a router to handle this for it. This system gets rid of the routing and just multicasts each packet of information.
Presumably receiving a data packet prevents a node from sending out another data packet at the same time. Although, this would seem to make the system act as one serial communication line. The benefits of having multiple connections is that messages can be sent between nodes in parallel. Occam had the concept of North, East, South and West connections.
Telewest (or Virgin Media) now, have a telephone bill payment systm that actually ask what you want to do (eg. make a payment, talk to someone) which works 99% of the time - although it did mistake "one hundred" for "one thousand" once.
For me, understanding what the different components did wasn't the hard part (an op-amp was simply a varying resistance resistor controlled by another current). The hard part was getting all the different wires to stay in the springs as the circuit was assembled. You would have short red wires, medium length green wires, and long yellow wires. Putting together a circuit would involve making around 20+ connections for a simple circuit, and 100+ connections for a complex circuit. Some circuits would require 5+ wires to be placed together.
The Bloc-Tronic kit seemed to solve this problem by having each component sealed in a little plastic cube. Each cube has a number and the electronics symbol. Putting together a circuit simply involved placing the cubes together in the right order. Notches/bumps made sure you could only put safe combinations of cubes together. There's a gallery of what a kit looked like
As the author of this website speculates, you could only imagine what a similar kit could do with todays components (LED displays, A/D convertors, light/temperature/pressure/humidity sensors).
Our hardware engineering course did something similar with logic gates - a number of basic circuits - flip-flop gate, and, or not, nand and LED's were combined on a single circuit board. The chips could be wired together to form circuits, and the results noted down.
The one thing that really gets to me about modern electronics, in particular LCD screens for laptops, is the fragility of the fluorescent tube, and that there is no simple way of replacing this component if it breaks.
The actual component cost is around $80, but combined with the LCD screen itself amounts to $1200 or nearly 75% of the price of the laptop.
How difficult could it be to have a fluorescent tube/holder that could be slotted sideways out of LCD screen and replaced in a similar way?
I'd like to see someone design a laptop where every component could be replaced simply by removing a single cover. Modern laptops allow this to be done with the DVD, battery, PCI cards, keyboard, mouse, speakers, RAM, LCD rectifier, disk drive, so there are just a few components to go (CPU/GPU). And maybe have a standard set of faceplates/covers (like mobile phones) so someone could customize their laptops.
You can take river cruises in the USA; an eight day cruise along the Hudson River, seven days along the Alaska passage, seven days along the Columbia river and many others...
I was interviewing for 3D visualisation positions. An R&D lab for a large multinational company was heavily in favour of using STL questions for tests, while the entertainment software companies were heavily in favour of using linked lists for the same type of tests. The latter had a distrust of using iterators for sending data down to the graphics pipeline (they believed that using iterators would require an extra function calls for each item of data sent).
I do make heavy use of templates for my C++ code, and on occasions iterators. However, as STL doesn't support trees directly, I had to write my own template classse to do this.
You should be asking: Why is this an issue for ANY computer?
Some people may be researchers worked on 3D Visualisation and want to take advantage of the latest extensions. Geometry Shaders support the use of the Marching cubes algorithm and polygon tesselation.
A high performance laptop is particularly desirable for conferences, as it can be plugged directly into an overhead projector, thus allowing for demonstrations to be presented without having to lug down a mini-desktop unit.
I'm looking to upgrade my laptop in the near future, but have no desire to pay thousands of $$$ for a machine with an out of date graphics chip that can't be upgraded.
From the interviews I've been to, employers will always fall into one of two groups when considering questions such as these. The first group will test you on your knowledge of STL (Standard Template Library) and ask about the use of iterators to implement list traversal. These are typically research departments. The second group will test you on your knowledge of pointers, linked lists, doubly linked lists, and ask such questions as how to detect if a list has a loop or how to remove an item. These are more the actual development departments.
There was story some time ago in Canada, about some tenants who managed to sell the house they were renting to a third party. This sale was achieved through a dodgy notary (apparently he was responsible for authenticating ownership, which he didn't bother to do). The consequence was that two mortgage payers (the landlord and the people who 'bought' the property) ended up having to go to court in order to decide ownership of the house. I didn't keep up with this case, but who have liked to know who won.
For most game programmers, working with rendering is the interesting and fun stuff - the rewards are instantaneous, as you can immediately see the effect of the changes that you have added to the game. And most graphics techniques are documented publicly (research papers, books, course notes...) Management can instantly see that you have made progress - Select a material, and render some polygons. Also, for systems like the PS2, the rendering component of the game usually ends up taking up most of the vector processors.
As AI is considered more of a bolt-on, this means the AI programmer gets constrained by what clock cycles remain between rendering each scene frame and the vertical blank, the data representation of the game and what memory space remains. It always been like this - writing Chess playing games in BASIC was the big challenge back in the late 1970's - Atari came out with a version of Chess that used only 4K of memory. Such strategy games may require a thread running in the background to do MiniMax tree searches. And the AI for each game is unique - rendering a Tennis game will be identical to rendering a Snooker game, but the AI will be completely different. Failing to get the AI working properly could force the development of a title to be cancelled. So the pressure is fairly intense for an AI programmer.
There's a few Penrose Tiling applets out on the web which allow you to create such patterns manually. This applet demonstrates how easy it is to end up in a dead-end situation.
Thats the way I used to develop and write software - identify and solve the hardest problems first, then go to town on the rest of the project. For game programming this would mean getting the AI to work first with placeholder graphics, then work on improving the visual effects and gameplay.
Unfortunately, this philosophy has the risk of being abused by management who try and pigeonhole you into solving hard problems all the time ('we thought you were happy') and giving the interesting work to their mates. Since everyone is also thinking about what they are going to be doing on the next project, this usually means the visual effects get done first and the gameplay/AI is left to the last minute.
Let's not get too nostalgic here. The early 80s was before digital, before cheap PCs, let alone those with multimedia capability. Doing stuff with film and the like would have been *expensive*, and then you were relying on getting your short film shown briefly on TV.
The BBC should bring back "Screen-Test", a show aired back in the mid-70's/early 80's. It was a school quiz-show based on the film and animation industries. It also had segments where people could send in their own home-made movies, how the video sequences of a movie were linked together to convey a plot line, and how anyone could build model spaceships out of odd bits of household plastic plastic and airfix kits that would be normally be thrown out - the airfix frames for all the parts became spaceship piping, and bottle/toothpaste tube caps became rocket engines. Observation/memory games were based on the viewing of a short segment of video, and the participants had to look for the deliberate mistakes (objects and actors jumping out of place between shots and clothing that changed colour/pattern), or remember what each actor said or did after a particular event.
If they brought it up to date, they could have students from the animation colleges, and viewers sending it their own animation work.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. 15 what?
Slashdot article discussions?
Look at recent history in the past 50 years, in particular World War II identity cards
...
During World War II the government kept a central register of everyone in Britain. Names, date of birth and address were listed in this national register. It held the information needed for issuing national identity cards and food and clothing ration books, and for identifying children eligible for evacuation and adults eligible for call-up into the armed forces.
The police, army and Home Guard checked identity cards for security reasons. It was believed that this helped in the detection of foreign spies and Nazi paratroopers. But there was never a case of an enemy spy being discovered for lack of an identity card.
Usually astronomical events happened 24 hours before they are posted in /.
Back in the good 'old days of USENET and ISDN lines, interesting scientific and astronomical events would be posted and
forwarded regularly. Unfortunately, our relay was the local university whose feed would regularly become backlogged if not
choke altogether. We would only hear about the event three days after it had happened.
The main incentive to do this type of investment is that North Sea oil is running out, so
the oil cartels don't really have much influence. Especially since that the UK has to import
oil from the world markets. Construction of new nuclear reactors is at a standstill until
somewhere can be found to store nuclear waste in the extremely long term. And the financial squabbles with Gazprom over gas prices haven't helped either.
So the only options left at the moment are wind, solar and wave power.
Considering that you can buy brand new laptops for ~$600 today I doubt the LCD screen costs that much anymore.
Replacement LCD unit (16TFT-UXGA-HIXS) for a Sony laptop from NextTronics (Sony's component supplier)
Product listing
Price $699.95
Core Charge: $755
For ~$700.00, they will part exchange your old LCD display with a replacement. Fail to return the
old LCD display, and you pay another $755. This makes the price of the display effectively $1400 (about half the price of the whole system).
The mirror will be fixed in place, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Normal interprocessor communication would require a crossbar switch or some kind of virtual network to support different grid configurations (square grid, cube mesh, torus, or hypertorus). Usually each node has a router to handle this for it. This system gets rid of the routing and just multicasts each packet of information.
Presumably receiving a data packet prevents a node from sending out another data packet at the same time. Although, this would seem to make the system act as one serial communication line. The benefits of having multiple connections is that messages can be sent between nodes in parallel. Occam had the concept of North, East, South and West connections.
Telewest (or Virgin Media) now, have a telephone bill payment systm that actually ask what you want to do (eg. make a payment, talk to someone) which works 99% of the time - although it did mistake "one hundred" for "one thousand" once.
For me, understanding what the different components did wasn't the hard part (an op-amp was simply a varying resistance resistor controlled by another current). The hard part was getting all the different wires to stay in the springs as the circuit was assembled. You would have short red wires, medium length green wires, and long yellow wires. Putting together a circuit would involve making around 20+ connections for a simple circuit, and 100+ connections for a complex circuit. Some circuits would require 5+ wires to be placed together.
The Bloc-Tronic kit seemed to solve this problem by having each component sealed in a little plastic cube. Each cube has a number and the electronics symbol. Putting together a circuit simply involved placing the cubes together in the right order. Notches/bumps made sure you could only put safe combinations of cubes together. There's a gallery of what a kit looked like
As the author of this website speculates, you could only imagine what a similar kit could do with todays components (LED displays, A/D convertors, light/temperature/pressure/humidity sensors).
Our hardware engineering course did something similar with logic gates - a number of basic circuits - flip-flop gate, and, or not, nand and LED's were combined on a single circuit board. The chips could be wired together to form circuits, and the results noted down.
The sticker will read "this side towards enemy" and all spare batteries will be resold to the army.
The one thing that really gets to me about modern electronics, in particular LCD screens for laptops, is the fragility of the fluorescent tube, and that there is no simple way of replacing this component if it breaks.
The actual component cost is around $80, but combined with the LCD screen itself amounts to $1200 or nearly 75% of the price of the laptop.
How difficult could it be to have a fluorescent tube/holder that could be slotted sideways out of LCD screen and replaced in a similar way?
I'd like to see someone design a laptop where every component could be replaced simply by removing a single cover. Modern laptops allow this to be done with the DVD, battery, PCI cards, keyboard, mouse, speakers, RAM, LCD rectifier, disk drive, so there are just a few components to go (CPU/GPU). And maybe have a standard set of faceplates/covers (like mobile phones) so someone could customize their
laptops.
A release of methane hydrate?
Pour beer?....
You can take river cruises in the USA; an eight day cruise along the Hudson River, seven days along the Alaska passage, seven days along the Columbia river and many others...
Maybe a few:
Mad Aim Bit
Dim Bat Aim
I Bit Madam
You haven't tried travelling on board the ferry during a winter storm....
I was interviewing for 3D visualisation positions. An R&D lab for a large multinational company was heavily in favour of using STL questions for tests, while the entertainment software companies were heavily in favour of using linked lists for the same type of tests. The latter had a distrust of using iterators for sending data down to the graphics pipeline (they believed that using iterators would require an extra function calls for each item of data sent).
I do make heavy use of templates for my C++ code, and on occasions iterators. However, as STL doesn't support trees directly, I had to write my own template classse to do this.
You should be asking:
Why is this an issue for ANY computer?
Some people may be researchers worked on 3D Visualisation and want to take advantage of the latest extensions. Geometry Shaders support the use of the Marching cubes algorithm and polygon tesselation.
A high performance laptop is particularly desirable for conferences, as it can be plugged directly into an overhead projector, thus allowing for demonstrations to be presented without having to lug down a mini-desktop unit.
I'm looking to upgrade my laptop in the near future, but have no desire to pay thousands of $$$ for a machine with an out of date graphics chip that can't be upgraded.
From the interviews I've been to, employers will always fall into one of two groups when considering questions such as these. The first group will test you on your knowledge of STL (Standard Template Library) and ask about the use of iterators to implement list traversal. These are typically research departments. The second group will test you on your knowledge of pointers, linked lists, doubly linked lists, and ask such questions as how to detect if a list has a loop or how to remove an item. These are more the actual development departments.
It's a good idea to know about both methods.
There was story some time ago in Canada, about some tenants who managed to sell the house they were renting to a third party. This sale was achieved through a dodgy notary (apparently he was responsible for authenticating ownership, which he didn't bother to do). The consequence was that two mortgage payers (the landlord and the people who 'bought' the property) ended up having to go to court in order to decide ownership of the house. I didn't keep up with this case, but who have liked to know who won.
For most game programmers, working with rendering is the interesting and fun stuff - the rewards are instantaneous, as you can immediately see the effect of the changes that you have added to the game. And most graphics techniques are documented publicly (research papers, books, course notes...) Management can instantly see that you have made progress - Select a material, and render some polygons. Also, for systems like the PS2, the rendering component of the game usually ends up taking up most of the vector processors.
As AI is considered more of a bolt-on, this means the AI programmer gets constrained by what clock cycles remain between rendering each scene frame and the vertical blank, the data representation of the game and what memory space remains. It always been like this - writing Chess playing games in BASIC was the big challenge back in the late 1970's - Atari came out with a version of Chess that used only 4K of memory. Such strategy games may require a thread running in the background to do MiniMax tree searches. And the AI for each game is unique - rendering a Tennis game will be identical to rendering a Snooker game, but the AI will be completely different. Failing to get the AI working properly could force the development of a title to be cancelled. So the pressure is fairly intense for an AI programmer.
There's a few Penrose Tiling applets out on the web which allow you to create such patterns manually. This applet demonstrates how easy it is to end up in a dead-end situation.
Thats the way I used to develop and write software - identify and solve the hardest problems first, then go to town on the rest of the project. For game programming this would mean getting the AI to work first with placeholder graphics, then work on improving the visual effects and gameplay.
Unfortunately, this philosophy has the risk of being abused by management who try and pigeonhole you into solving hard problems all the time ('we thought you were happy') and giving the interesting work to their mates. Since everyone is also thinking about what they are going to be doing on the next project, this usually means the visual effects get done first and the gameplay/AI is left to the last minute.
Or you could always pin a message up on the school noticeboard.
Let's not get too nostalgic here. The early 80s was before digital, before cheap PCs, let alone those with multimedia capability. Doing stuff with film and the like would have been *expensive*, and then you were relying on getting your short film shown briefly on TV.
True, but it helped Jan Pinkava get a job at Pixar.
The BBC should bring back "Screen-Test", a show aired back in the mid-70's/early 80's. It was a school quiz-show based on the film and animation industries. It also had segments where people could send in their own home-made movies, how the video sequences of a movie were linked together to convey a plot line, and how anyone could build model spaceships out of odd bits of household plastic plastic and airfix kits that would be normally be thrown out - the airfix frames for all the parts became spaceship piping, and bottle/toothpaste tube caps became rocket engines. Observation/memory games were based on the viewing of a short segment of video, and the participants had to look for the deliberate mistakes (objects and actors jumping out of place between shots and clothing that changed colour/pattern), or remember what each actor said or did after a particular event.
If they brought it up to date, they could have students from the animation colleges, and viewers sending it their own animation work.