Yes, but not when every one of 10 million people in the nearest large city want to cut down a few trees so they too can live in a house next to the forest.
But my favorite was this quote in the NYTimes: "It will also be able to display images at a high-definition resolution equivalent to that of digital projectors in movie theaters."
Digital projectors make the picture look better in that there are fewer artifacts and scratches and there is no color fading. However, digital still cannot compare to film in terms of resolution. Film currently provides 4850 lines by 4850 lines per inch of resolution. Digital projection boasts 1280 X 1024 lines, which is less than HDTV's 1920 X 1080. Either way you resolve it, film is far superior.
It's a step up for a console system, but no change for a PC.
Given a bunch of cell chips, why not use AI to build worlds (or at least, extensions to worlds like side alleys,....) on the fly. That way the game would be different each time. That way art modules (tiles in 3d...) could be put together in recombinant ways,....
That's what makes 'nethack' so addictive - the chance that the next level is going to be a magic wand/spellbook hypermarket.
But for various first-person games like "Goldeneye" and "Zelda: Ocarina of Time", every part of the gmae has to be unique in order to create the story plot.
The tricky part for a console system, is going to be able to save all this level data. This can be solved by using prefabricated pieces of geometry. But for any multiplayer capture-the-flag game like 'bzflag' or 'quake' the levels have to be well balanced in order to be playable.
But if you want a game system for your kids, you don't want the worry about having to fix viruses, spamware, having your connection cut off because some spammer decided to use your PC as an E-mail server. Plus a PC needs a permanent desk or table somewheree in a bedroom or in a seperate room, while a console system can be stored beside (or underneath) the TV in the living room, where everyone can use it.
Given that this campaign is originating from the UK, I do wonder if it has anything to do with software patents and the attempts to push software patent legislation through the EU parliament.
At the moment, there is this big push to get British universities to follow the US lead, and have their graduate students become entrepeneurs and set up their own companies. The idea is that the research carried out by the students will become the intellectual property of the university, which will in turn be licensed back to the company that the students set up. Although this, and the lack of job security is leading to knowledge hoarding where people don't give everything they know away, but keep it until they leave university.
Or a geeky nerd with a six-pack of Jolt Cola, and a magic monitor that can project images of the screen onto the user, and makes a chattering noise at the same time. Passwords should always be displayed as 2-inch high *'s, but not be more that six letters in length. Printing or saving a document must not take less than 30 seconds or at least until the bad guys have entered the building. Accessing a shared directory must trigger the entire building alarm network, while encrypted documents must be easy to decode for the good guys but impossible for the bad guys.
The Register has an article about how radioactive tritium "glowring" keyrings cannot be imported into the US since the authorities have placed an embargo on the civilian use of radioactive material.
Yikes! Living in an apartment where everything folds or slides into everything else would be like living inside a Chinese puzzle or Pinhead's box or "The Cube". I'd hate having to remember the right sequence of moves to find my front door.
One final bit of information that should be included in a discussion of partitioned resources is the fact that when the Xeon is executing only one thread, all of its partitioned resources can be combined so that the single thread can use them for maximum performance. When the Xeon is operating in single-threaded mode, the dynamically partitioned queues stop enforcing any limits on the number of entries that can belong to one thread, and the statically partitioned queues stop enforcing their boundaries as well.
...
The same can be said for the register file, another crucial shared resource. The Xeon's 128 microarchitectural general purpose registers (GPRs) and 128 microarchitectural floating-point registers (FPRs) have no idea that the data they're holding belongs to more than one thread--it's all just data to them, and they, like the execution units, remain unchanged from previous iterations of the Xeon core.
For a simultaneously multithreaded processor, the cache coherency problems associated with SMP all but disappear. Both logical processors on an SMT system share the same caches as well as the data in those caches. So if a thread from logical processor 0 wants to read some data that's cached by logical processor 1, it can grab that data directly from the cache without having to snoop another cache located some distance away in order to ensure that it has the most current copy.
...
You might think since the Xeon's two logical processors share a single cache, this means that the cache size is effectively halved for each logical processor. If you thought this, though, you'd be wrong: it's both much better and much worse. Let me explain.
Each of the Xeon's caches--the trace cache, L1, L2, and L3--is SMT-unaware, and each treats all loads and stores the same regardless of which logical processor issued the request. So none of the caches know the difference between one logical processor and another, or between code from one thread or another.
Chutzpah: I read an advert in the small columns of the paper that offered to tell me the secret of making money through newspaper adverts for only $10. I sent off $10 - they sent back a reply telling me to place an advert in the paper.
In reality, the spammer hijacks PC's through spamware, sends millions of junk E-mails, and gets a commission for every successful order, and can also resell access to that network of PC's to other spammers, along with your E-mail address, credit card information.
Starting with Basic, Fortran or C is just going to turn off most kids.
Using Basic (with Atari, BBC, Commodore 64's, Vic-20's) was how most game programmers first started.
Setting up a graphics screen only required a single graphics 7 call. Playing a sound of particlar type only required a single sound command. Getting user input from the joystick, button or paddle controller only required a single call to the relevant command.
Then, for the more advanced programmers, there was custom character sets, assembly language, display list interrupts, vertical blank interrupts and player missile graphics or sprites.
Have you seen the website albinoblacksheep.com". They have dozens of simple but fun games written in Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how much graphics accelerator cards used to cost back in the mid 1980's - and they didn't even do texture-mapping or 3D.
Hercules Graphics Station Card = $750
+ 2Mbyte VRAM + PROM chips = $200
Yes, but not when every one of 10 million people in the nearest large city want to cut down a few trees so they too can live in a house next to the forest.
But my favorite was this quote in the NYTimes: "It will also be able to display images at a high-definition resolution equivalent to that of digital projectors in movie theaters."
From Film Brats - Behind the Scenes
Digital projectors make the picture look better in that there are fewer artifacts and scratches and there is no color fading. However, digital still cannot compare to film in terms of resolution. Film currently provides 4850 lines by 4850 lines per inch of resolution. Digital projection boasts 1280 X 1024 lines, which is
less than HDTV's 1920 X 1080. Either way you resolve it, film is far superior.
It's a step up for a console system, but no change for a PC.
Given a bunch of cell chips, why not use AI to build worlds (or at least, extensions to worlds like side alleys,....) on the fly. That way the game would be different each time. That way art modules (tiles in 3d...) could be put together in recombinant ways, ....
That's what makes 'nethack' so addictive - the chance that the next level is going to be a magic wand/spellbook hypermarket.
But for various first-person games like "Goldeneye" and "Zelda: Ocarina of Time", every part of the gmae has to be unique in order to create the story plot.
The tricky part for a console system, is going to be able to save all this level data. This can be solved by using prefabricated pieces of geometry.
But for any multiplayer capture-the-flag game like 'bzflag' or 'quake' the levels have to be well balanced in order to be playable.
Heck, there are even guns that don't look like guns.
Gun disguised as key ring
Disguised as mobile phones
Not forgetting this guy, who accidently injures himself at a school talk.
It's not just the US Congress; the promoters of softare patent legislation in Europe attempted to tack on the software patent legislation onto the end of the Agricultural and Fisheries bill. Fortunately, this was blocked by Poland. More details here.
The worst item is got to be a fizzed up bottle of Coke, which is furiously fizzed up because it was dropped on the floor sometime in its lifetime.
The spray gets everywhere - on the screen, mousemat, keyboard, and mouse. And if you don't clean the keyboard immediately, you get sticky keys.
A guy at college bought his second-hand PC from a fish warehouse - three months after buying it, it still had that "fresh-from-the-sea" smell.
... then the ground will be coldere and firmer.
But if you want a game system for your kids, you don't want the worry about having to fix viruses, spamware, having your connection cut off because some spammer decided to use your PC as an E-mail server. Plus a PC needs a permanent desk or table somewheree in a bedroom or in a seperate room, while a console system can be stored beside (or underneath) the TV in the living room, where everyone can use it.
That's very true - I was at the shopping mall yesterday, where the local video game store had the following notice about the Sony PSP:
Sony PSP will be available for sale here on xxxxx. Note that this product WILL sell out, so you must buy early in the day.
Given that this campaign is originating from the UK, I do wonder if it has anything to do with software patents and the attempts to push software patent legislation through the EU parliament.
At the moment, there is this big push to get British universities to follow the US lead, and have their graduate students become entrepeneurs and set up their own companies. The idea is that the research carried out by the students will become the intellectual property of the university, which will in turn be licensed back to the company that the students set up. Although this, and the lack of job security is leading to knowledge hoarding where people don't give everything they know away, but keep it until they leave university.
It is a classic in British high/secondary English literature classes.
And the movie "Brazil" made it to the Cinema club.
But they have been exterminating startup companies that try to compete against their products.
Or a geeky nerd with a six-pack of Jolt Cola, and a magic monitor that can project images of the screen onto the user, and makes a chattering noise at the same time. Passwords should always be displayed as 2-inch high *'s, but not be more that six letters in length. Printing or saving a document must not take less than 30 seconds or at least until the bad guys have entered the building. Accessing a shared directory must trigger the entire building alarm network, while encrypted documents must be easy to decode for the good guys but impossible for the bad guys.
The Register has an article about how radioactive tritium "glowring" keyrings cannot be imported into the US since the authorities have placed an embargo on the civilian use of radioactive material.
More details on Tritium.
Given these restrictions, we probably won't have nuclear powered laptops, but it will help make space probes lighter.
Yikes! Living in an apartment where everything folds or slides into everything else would be like living inside a Chinese puzzle or Pinhead's box or "The Cube". I'd hate having to remember the right sequence of moves to find my front door.
You can actually edit the microcode of your Intel Pentium CPU
The Ars Technica page on hyperthreading with the Xeon might provide some clues. It lists which parts of the CPU are replicated, partitioned and shared.
...
...
One final bit of information that should be included in a discussion of partitioned resources is the fact that when the Xeon is executing only one thread, all of its partitioned resources can be combined so that the single thread can use them for maximum performance. When the Xeon is operating in single-threaded mode, the dynamically partitioned queues stop enforcing any limits on the number of entries that can belong to one thread, and the statically partitioned queues stop enforcing their boundaries as well.
The same can be said for the register file, another crucial shared resource. The Xeon's 128 microarchitectural general purpose registers (GPRs) and 128 microarchitectural floating-point registers (FPRs) have no idea that the data they're holding belongs to more than one thread--it's all just data to them, and they, like the execution units, remain unchanged from previous iterations of the Xeon core.
For a simultaneously multithreaded processor, the cache coherency problems associated with SMP all but disappear. Both logical processors on an SMT system share the same caches as well as the data in those caches. So if a thread from logical processor 0 wants to read some data that's cached by logical processor 1, it can grab that data directly from the cache without having to snoop another cache located some distance away in order to ensure that it has the most current copy.
You might think since the Xeon's two logical processors share a single cache, this means that the cache size is effectively halved for each logical processor. If you thought this, though, you'd be wrong: it's both much better and much worse. Let me explain.
Each of the Xeon's caches--the trace cache, L1, L2, and L3--is SMT-unaware, and each treats all loads and stores the same regardless of which logical processor issued the request. So none of the caches know the difference between one logical processor and another, or between code from one thread or another.
If no special instructions are in use, can't somebody just find the right system call to replace and return whatever string is acceptable?
That was the old hack proposed for defeating CPUID in the first place.
Chutzpah: I read an advert in the small columns of the paper that offered to tell me the secret of making money through newspaper adverts for only $10.
I sent off $10 - they sent back a reply telling me to place an advert in the paper.
In reality, the spammer hijacks PC's through spamware, sends millions of junk E-mails,
and gets a commission for every successful order, and can also resell access to that network of PC's to other spammers, along with your E-mail address, credit card information.
In several news reports, Bill Gates was making a speech at a conference of reporters, and said he regretted giving out stock options to his employees.
The University of Derby in England is looking for more women game programmers to fill their BSc (Hons) Computer Games Programming Degree
Starting with Basic, Fortran or C is just going to turn off most kids.
Using Basic (with Atari, BBC, Commodore 64's, Vic-20's) was how most game programmers first started.
Setting up a graphics screen only required a single graphics 7 call. Playing a sound of particlar type only required a single sound command. Getting user input from the joystick, button or paddle controller only required a single call to the relevant command.
Then, for the more advanced programmers, there was custom character sets, assembly language, display list interrupts, vertical blank interrupts and player missile graphics or sprites.
Have you seen the website albinoblacksheep.com". They have dozens of simple but fun games written in Flash.