And when something is too large I burn it to a CDROM or DVDROM.
And how do you do that ???
With a magnifying glass and a large pair of reading glasses. But you have to wait for a sunny day with a clear sky, and to make sure you have memorized the sequence of one's and zero's you want to burn. It's very easy to forget which block of data you were writing. And do be careful not to look towards the Sun when you're wearing your reading glasses.
br> Interesting. We have a guy who did a course in Advanced Display Systems. According to his course notes, plasma displays only have a lifetime of five years. I'm starting to wonder if this a myth propagated by local LCD manufacturers.
I should have mentioned at this time, Direct3D wasn't really around. Game developers were still doing 2D/pseudo-3D platform games. Then Microsoft bought out RenderMorphics, ripped out the core rendering libraries and repackaged them as Direct3D. And game developers weren't exactly too happy about DirectX retained mode.
Back in the early 1990's, Microsoft saw the re-emergence of console systems, and realised the PC platform was under threat. After consulting with many game developers, the one complaint that kept coming up was the lack of a consistent interface to control hardware. Game developers had to write their own drivers to support all the different sounds cards, video cards and CPU's that were available. So Microsoft announced a set of of libraries that would give programmers direct control of the hardware without needing to resort to hardware programming. This set of libaries became known as DirectX.
Has anyone know about the power (electrical) requirements of this? It's not much good if you're electricity bill is higher than your credit card bill after purchasing it!
On the bright side, your heating bill will be much lower, and with a custom plumbing system, you'll probably be able to eliminate the hot water boiler.
They have vaccuum inside, and they're diamond, so they're strong enough to handle the pressure. So, they end up being diamonds that float in our atmosphere.
You'd probably need a good few layers of carbon atoms to make sure no oxygen, nitrogen or even hydrogen atoms sneaked in. Not forgetting the byproducts of cosmic rays. My guess is that the total mass of the casing / volume would exceed the density of the surrounding air.
Buckminster Fuller has a similar idea, but on a much grander scale. He figured you could could create floating cities from ordinary steel. If you could imagine a geodesic polyhedron 2 miles in radius with steel pipes 2-3 metres in radius for the edges, the force exerted by raising the air temperature inside the pipes by just a couple of degrees would be enough to make the structure float in the air.
The closest real-world implementation at present is a nyoln fibre airship, with helium gas for lift. Roughly, you get 1 Kg of lift for every cubic metre of Helium. For a 6x2 metre airship with 25 cubic metres, the weight of the skin is around 8 Kg, when inflated, and 25kg of lifting weight.
Plasma TV's will only last around five years. During that time the brightness will continue to decline. This makes them great for outdoor displays/public events, since there is more chance of a unit being rendered inoperable through transportation/assembly than there is through normal use. The following paper has a graph demonstrating the decline.
2) they simulated the music in which case they're in copyright violation--unless of course they paid simulated money.
According to this article, Black holes produce the lowest note in the universe, at 57 octaves below middle C. It will be interesting to see what the movie of this simulation looks like.
... the intergalactic branch of the RIAA has filed a "Cease and Desist" order against the scientists, citing Copyright law; that anyone giving out free copies of the universe without first seeking permission from the copyright holder is a violation of intergalactic intellectual property rights.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
doesn't anyone realize we're using more electrical power than ever before? Even when we have vaccum tube TV's?
I thought the energy saved from switching to LCD's from CRT's more than enough compensation for the increase in power demands from the CPU(s).
While I believe this is very interesting I have a hard time understanding how they are going to map mood to design. Some people might be in the zone and very angry at the same time. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Try playing 'bzflag' some time. Because this game is multiplayer, there are many servers each with different size maps and maximum numbers of player. Large maps with a small number of players require more strategy and calm thinking in order to achieve the goal of getting another tank into range, without being shot yourself. Small levels with a large number of players are intense, especially when you've got a good superflag and you want to get into a good location to make full use of it.
The capture-the-flag variations also require careful thought. While the basic goals may be the same (shoot other tanks), the presence of a team flag creates other duties (guarding the home base/flag, raiding the other teams home base, escorting the tank who has captured the opponents team flag. And you have to be careful to make sure a stray shot doesn't bounce off the walls and hit a team-mate.
I find playing the first and latter games helps me slow down and move into a more cognitive state, after a days work. Other puzzle games such as KSokoban and Klickety also have the same effect.
How can the price range be so slow when the processing power is claimed to be so many times faster than Intel chips?
For many reasons:
The improvements they make to each successive generation of chips are incremental, which keeps R&D costs down.
They have a large range of products going from latops to high-end workstations. The R&D for high -end systems trickles down to low-end systems.
They only make the chipsets, not the graphics boards. So they avoid the expensive of manufacturing, storing and packaging graphics boards+accessories.
The chips themselves are optimised for two tasks (2D/3D/4D vector/matrix mathematics) and textured triangle rasterisation. These are predictive tasks where the same algorithm is called over and over again. Non-predictive tasks are your standard CPU tasks which have no certainty eg. GUI processing, conditional processing The CPU has to use cache memory to support the kernel, running processes and the possible execution task that each can make.
Both audio and visual processing are heavily dependant on the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). These break up a waveform into its component frequencies (frequency space). By applying basic 1D and 2D image masking methods with floating point images, you can do all sorts of things like remove banding/background buzz, speckles/pops and crackles, smoothing/softening. Since GPU's now support floating point textures, implement these algorithms in hardware is now possible.
Actually, there are quite a few similarities (especially in the vision system).
Your retina is very much like a CCD array. The rods are sensitive enough to pick up a single photon and convert it into an electrical impulse. The cones are very similar to multispectral CCD arrays in that they selectively pick various color bands, of which various species can pick up three or more (tetrachromatic), due to the different opsin molecules (equivalent to photosensitve materials). The various layers of the retine are also used to implement various image processing operations such as "white balancing", "motion compensation" and "texture classification". Look up Gabor filters in particular.
Vision is also performed by many neurons at the same time (this is referred to as parallel processing in computer terms). Although slow, the extremely large amount compensates for the slow speed. Also, neurons for vision are arranged in two major groups; one to determine what you are looking at, and the other to determine where it is in visual space). In computer terms, these would be referred to as "data buses". The optic nerve performs no calculations by itself, so it too can be considered a data bus (much like a firewire cable).
Here's another experiment. Sit at your desk, pick up a pen, write something, put the pen down, and turn around. Can you reach round and pick up the pen without looking. As you walk around, you're mind is memorising the location and type of every object in sight; more or less creating a 3D relational database (terms like inside/outside/in front/behind/below/under/above are handled). We can refer to this as a local store, as it tends to fade away as time passes.
"Due to copyright restrictions, we cannot provide audio or video of Steve Ballmer's speech. Instead, we have employed our inhouse team of animators to provide an equivalent cartoon animation of the speech instead".
Interesting. Maybe word recognition uses a small cache to perform error correction if characters are swapped around by 2-3 spaces. In the case of the reversed characters, this won't work.
1250 fps? Talk about overkill, I'm usually happy with about 40-60.
How else are you going to shoot those pesky vermin in the fields around your farm, while remaining in your computer chair and reading slashdot at the same time? I just hope the BB gun comes with a laser sight and zoom lens (both pointing towards the target).
What I want to know is, what was the lowest involuntary turnover rate?
From the article: This marks the third year in a row that voluntary turnover has dropped, and this figure is the lowest in the history of the surveys, which date back to the mid-1980s.
My favourite slashdot quote is the "Reading SCO news is like watching the crazy guy arguing with himself. Fun to watch, but only from a safe distance".
... Apply have announced that their next generation laptop will feature a 600" inch screen, and will feature a keyboard/mouse that can be converted into a futon when not in use.
You really need to worry about the security of your possessions when you move OFF campus to a house or something where there are parties going on. Mix in 100+ people who are imbibing, and there's always the potential for something bad to happen. Generally it's not theft, it's puke. Here again, locking your door at all times will keep 99.995% of the problems away.
Wearing a jacket when going to a party or pub crawl can be just as risky. The last thing you want to do is to leave anything valuable in your pockets (wallet, PDA), then find out it's gone. Some restaurants are fairly good, they have a secure room which only the staff can use.
Waiter: Can I take your jacket, sir?
Customer: Well, you can try, but I'll call the police if you do.
Can I run Doom 3 on it in maximum resolution mode?
More than likely. For that amount of performance, they're bound to bundle a high-performance graphics card. Although, having 96 CPU's isn't probably going to make much difference for Doom 3
Although, I look forward to see the real-time graphics demos they will be able to implement:
o Real-time Mandelbrot set zooming at 120 frames/sec at maximum resolution (Like PixelPlanes).
o Real-time NUR?BS/subdivision surface character animation with complex shaders. With 96 processors, they could slice the distribution of processors in any way they like. One processor per frame, or distribute a frame between 96 processors.
New skilled IT people look at PHBs and think, I don't want to be like that, so I won't become a manager.
Too right. I've been to interviews for several companies where they claimed to be "looking for senior system engineers", when in fact they were "looking for senior system engineers wanting to move into full-time management". When I found out their management structure for the project consisted of lead programmer, team leader, project manager, systems architect and technical director (but no admin), and that the project manager was expected to spend Friday afternoons playing golf, I practically fled the building. The last I heard, the company had seriously downsized their management.
Slashdot Mirror
... it would be interesting to see if Microsoft feels if that were a violation of their trademark.
And when something is too large I burn it to a CDROM or DVDROM.
And how do you do that ???
With a magnifying glass and a large pair of reading glasses. But you have to wait for a sunny day with a clear sky, and to make sure you have memorized the sequence of one's and zero's you want to burn. It's very easy to forget which block of data you were writing. And do be careful not to look towards the Sun when you're wearing your reading glasses.
Plasma TV's will only last around five years.
False.
br>
Interesting. We have a guy who did a course in Advanced Display Systems. According to his course notes, plasma displays only have a lifetime of five years. I'm starting to wonder if this a myth propagated by local LCD manufacturers.
This will be the real Beaker, and not a human impersonator?
I should have mentioned at this time, Direct3D wasn't really around. Game developers were still doing 2D/pseudo-3D platform games. Then Microsoft bought out RenderMorphics, ripped out the core rendering libraries and repackaged them as Direct3D. And game developers weren't exactly too happy about DirectX retained mode.
Back in the early 1990's, Microsoft saw the re-emergence of console systems, and realised the PC platform was under threat. After consulting with many game developers, the one complaint that kept coming up was the lack of a consistent interface to control hardware. Game developers had to write their own drivers to support all the different sounds cards, video cards and CPU's that were available. So Microsoft announced a set of of libraries that would give programmers direct control of the hardware without needing to resort to hardware programming. This set of libaries became known as DirectX.
Has anyone know about the power (electrical) requirements of this? It's not much good if you're electricity bill is higher than your credit card bill after purchasing it!
On the bright side, your heating bill will be much lower, and with a custom plumbing system, you'll probably be able to eliminate the hot water boiler.
They have vaccuum inside, and they're diamond, so they're strong enough to handle the pressure. So, they end up being diamonds that float in our atmosphere.
You'd probably need a good few layers of carbon atoms to make sure no oxygen, nitrogen or even hydrogen atoms sneaked in. Not forgetting the byproducts of cosmic rays. My guess is that the total mass of the casing / volume would exceed the density of the surrounding air.
Buckminster Fuller has a similar idea, but on a much grander scale. He figured you could could create floating cities from ordinary steel. If you could imagine a geodesic polyhedron 2 miles in radius with steel pipes 2-3 metres in radius for the edges, the force exerted by raising the air temperature inside the pipes by just a couple of degrees would be enough to make the structure float in the air.
The closest real-world implementation at present is a nyoln fibre airship, with helium gas for lift. Roughly, you get 1 Kg of lift for every cubic metre of Helium. For a 6x2 metre airship with 25 cubic metres, the weight of the skin is around 8 Kg, when inflated, and 25kg of lifting weight.
Plasma TV's will only last around five years. During that time the brightness will continue to decline. This makes them great for outdoor displays/public events, since there is more chance of a unit being rendered inoperable through transportation/assembly than there is through normal use. The following paper has a graph demonstrating the decline.
2) they simulated the music in which case they're in copyright violation--unless of course they paid simulated money.
According to this article, Black holes produce the lowest note in the universe, at 57 octaves below middle C. It will be interesting to see what the movie of this simulation looks like.
... the intergalactic branch of the RIAA has filed a "Cease and Desist" order against the scientists, citing Copyright law; that anyone giving out free copies of the universe without first seeking permission from the copyright holder is a violation of intergalactic intellectual property rights.
doesn't anyone realize we're using more electrical power than ever before? Even when we have vaccum tube TV's?
I thought the energy saved from switching to LCD's from CRT's more than enough compensation for the increase in power demands from the CPU(s).
While I believe this is very interesting I have a hard time understanding how they are going to map mood to design. Some people might be in the zone and very angry at the same time. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Try playing 'bzflag' some time. Because this game is multiplayer, there are many servers each with different size maps and maximum numbers of player. Large maps with a small number of players require more strategy and calm thinking in order to achieve the goal of getting another tank into range, without being shot yourself. Small levels with a large number of players are intense, especially when you've got a good superflag and you want to get into a good location to make full use of it.
The capture-the-flag variations also require careful thought. While the basic goals may be the same (shoot other tanks), the presence of a team flag creates other duties (guarding the home base/flag, raiding the other teams home base, escorting the tank who has captured the opponents team flag. And you have to be careful to make sure a stray shot doesn't bounce off the walls and hit a team-mate.
I find playing the first and latter games helps me slow down and move into a more cognitive state, after a days work. Other puzzle games such as KSokoban and Klickety also have the same effect.
How can the price range be so slow when the processing power is claimed to be so many times faster than Intel chips?
For many reasons:
The improvements they make to each successive generation of chips are incremental, which keeps R&D costs down.
They have a large range of products going from latops to high-end workstations. The R&D for high -end systems trickles down to low-end systems.
They only make the chipsets, not the graphics boards. So they avoid the expensive of manufacturing, storing and packaging graphics boards+accessories.
The chips themselves are optimised for two tasks (2D/3D/4D vector/matrix mathematics) and textured triangle rasterisation. These are predictive tasks where the same algorithm is called over and over again. Non-predictive tasks are your standard CPU tasks which have no certainty eg. GUI processing, conditional processing The CPU has to use cache memory to support the kernel, running processes and the possible execution task that each can make.
Both audio and visual processing are heavily dependant on the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). These break up a waveform into its component frequencies (frequency space). By applying basic 1D and 2D image masking methods with floating point images, you can do all sorts of things like remove banding/background buzz, speckles/pops and crackles, smoothing/softening. Since GPU's now support floating point textures, implement these algorithms in hardware is now possible.
Actually, there are quite a few similarities (especially in the vision system).
Your retina is very much like a CCD array. The rods are sensitive enough to pick up a single photon and convert it into an electrical impulse. The cones are very similar to multispectral CCD arrays in that they selectively pick various color bands, of which various species can pick up three or more (tetrachromatic), due to the different opsin molecules (equivalent to photosensitve materials). The various layers of the retine are also used to implement various image processing operations such as "white balancing", "motion compensation" and "texture classification". Look up Gabor filters in particular.
Vision is also performed by many neurons at the same time (this is referred to as parallel processing in computer terms). Although slow, the extremely large amount compensates for the slow speed. Also, neurons for vision are arranged in two major groups; one to determine what you are looking at, and the other to determine where it is in visual space). In computer terms, these would be referred to as "data buses". The optic nerve performs no calculations by itself, so it too can be considered a data bus (much like a firewire cable).
Here's another experiment. Sit at your desk, pick up a pen, write something, put the pen down, and turn around. Can you reach round and pick up the pen without looking. As you walk around, you're mind is memorising the location and type of every object in sight; more or less creating a 3D relational database (terms like inside/outside/in front/behind/below/under/above are handled). We can refer to this as a local store, as it tends to fade away as time passes.
"Due to copyright restrictions, we cannot provide audio or video of Steve Ballmer's speech. Instead, we have employed our inhouse team of animators to provide an equivalent cartoon animation of the speech instead".
Interesting. Maybe word recognition uses a small cache to perform error correction if characters are swapped around by 2-3 spaces. In the case of the reversed characters, this won't work.
1250 fps? Talk about overkill, I'm usually happy with about 40-60.
How else are you going to shoot those pesky vermin in the fields around your farm, while remaining in your computer chair and reading slashdot at the same time? I just hope the BB gun comes with a laser sight and zoom lens (both pointing towards the target).
Looking at the list of banned words, the following mathematics question is also banned:
How do I calculate the GCD of the sides of a simple triangle that is drawn out on a sheet of paper?
What I want to know is, what was the lowest involuntary turnover rate?
From the article:
This marks the third year in a row that voluntary turnover has dropped, and this figure is the lowest in the history of the surveys, which date back to the mid-1980s.
My favourite slashdot quote is the "Reading SCO news is like watching the crazy guy arguing with himself. Fun to watch, but only from a safe distance".
... Apply have announced that their next generation laptop will feature a 600" inch screen, and will feature a keyboard/mouse that can be converted into a futon when not in use.
You really need to worry about the security of your possessions when you move OFF campus to a house or something where there are parties going on. Mix in 100+ people who are imbibing, and there's always the potential for something bad to happen. Generally it's not theft, it's puke. Here again, locking your door at all times will keep 99.995% of the problems away.
Wearing a jacket when going to a party or pub crawl can be just as risky. The last thing you want to do is to leave anything valuable in your pockets (wallet, PDA), then find out it's gone. Some restaurants are fairly good, they have a secure room which only the staff can use.
Waiter: Can I take your jacket, sir?
Customer: Well, you can try, but I'll call the police if you do.
Can I run Doom 3 on it in maximum resolution mode?
More than likely. For that amount of performance, they're bound to bundle a high-performance graphics card. Although, having 96 CPU's isn't probably going to make much difference for Doom 3
Although, I look forward to see the real-time graphics demos they will be able to implement:
o Real-time Mandelbrot set zooming at 120 frames/sec at maximum resolution (Like PixelPlanes).
o Real-time NUR?BS/subdivision surface character animation with complex shaders. With 96 processors, they could slice the distribution of processors in any way they like. One processor per frame, or distribute a frame between 96 processors.
New skilled IT people look at PHBs and think, I don't want to be like that, so I won't become a manager.
Too right. I've been to interviews for several companies where they claimed to be "looking for senior system engineers", when in fact they were "looking for senior system engineers wanting to move into full-time management". When I found out their management structure for the project consisted of lead programmer, team leader, project manager, systems architect and technical director (but no admin), and that the project manager was expected to spend Friday afternoons playing golf, I practically fled the building. The last I heard, the company had seriously downsized their management.