"That, plus reporters jumping up in windows and trying to snap pictures just really traumatized the younger members and the older members of the family."
If they started doing that to me, I'd put mirrors in front of my windows.
You really don't want an amoebic infection of the bloodstream. My stepfather got one while clearing out the drains in our cottage (disused farmhouse cottage). We don't know how long it had been brewing, but for about three nights he would go to bed and then start having "the shakes". He was deathly white, and was shivering with an amplitude of an inch. I was just about expecting something to burst out at any minute.
Fortunately, we got him to the doctor for a checkup. As his white blood cell count was somewhere beyond the solar system, the doc immediately sent him to hospital. The medics managed to drain around 2 litres of gunk out of his liver, and then injected him full of antibiotics. After that, he had a full checkup to find out how the amoeba's got into his bloodstream. The doctors suspect the cause was a missing filling.
Fortunately, people are discarding their old mobile phones, and buying new ones every six months. At least, users aren't able to save application programs in SIM card memory. I always wonder why thin client mobile phones (where everything is stored on a server, rather than on the phone itself) haven't taken off.
I Bet a 20" multisync monitor will put out more RF than the main unit itself. My parents used to enjoy listening to BBC radio 4 on long wave (198 Khz). When I bought a new graphics card, the default video resolution (1280x1024x85?) happened to have a frequency that matched the radio station exactly. For a radius of 10 metres (the entire house), it was impossible to receive the radio signal. Until we found out what the cause was. A quick change of the refresh rate fixed this problem.
You're right - I looked at the Seagram building. The blinds are exactly the same. I would never believe that an architect would go down to that level of micro-managing the appearance of a building. I always thought that would be responsibility of the interior designer.
The central processor was a 36 bit architecture, capable of executing most simple arithmetic instructions in one 4 microsecond cycle time. Multiplication of two 36-bit integers took 12 microseconds, and division of a 72-bit dividend by a 36-bit divisor 31.3 microseconds. The processor performed 36-bit single precision floating point arithmetic in hardware, but did not implement double precision floating point.
The UNIVAC's word size was 72 data bits, which held eleven digits plus a sign, plus one parity bit for each six data bits, giving a total of 84. The mercury delay line memory amounted to 1000 words. Besides numbers, the UNIVAC could represent alphanumeric data (letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks) using six bits for each character with twelve characters to the word. Codes were assigned for the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks, such as 010100 for A, 010101 for B, 010110 for C and so on.
That reminds me of the days when I first used a Dell PC . The internal battery on the computer was bit iffy - some custom Dell mofo which looked like somebody had put some chile-con-carne in a plastic cube and glued it shut. During the development of various DOS graphics applications, the computer would crash, reboot, but not find the hard disk drives - You had to enter the BIOS menu, and "remind" the computer which type of hard disk drive it was using (40 track - 20 megabytes, blah-blah sectors). And the real-time clock was always stuck sometime in 1980. I ended up having a print-out of the BIOS settings pinned up beside the monitor, so I would always have access to them when needed.
Wow! I thought "The Wet Bird" was a photograph at first. The only thing that gave it away as a computer rendered image was that all the blinds of the first building were at one of several different levels.
We were working in our garden one weekend, when a very dressy continental European lady walked past, stopped and asked in a very upmarket accent "Do you know where I can find a bonk that is open on a Saturday afternoon?". We assumed, she meant a bank, so pointed her in the direction towards downtown. Otherwise, we would have pointed her in the direction of the harbour.
The first laptop using an autostereo display to show images in 3D without special glasses was the Sharp Mebius PC-RD3D in Japan, later released in the US as the Sharp Actius RD3D
Is the version without this feature, the Sharp Actius R2D2?
Reminds me of an "experiment" a friend of mine once did with a empty 2 litre Pepsi bottle. The goal of the experiment was to demonstrate to his kids how a water would expand on freezing and could crack drain pipes. The bottle was filled with water, allowed to freeze overnight on the sundeck and examined the following day. The experiment was a success, with the water forming a solid 6 inch tall cylinder, 2 inches thick with a holow core, and with the plastic of the bottle split open. However, this led to a problem. How to dispose of the ice? He didn't want to wait for the ice to melt, so figured it would be simple enough to throw it onto the ground outside. So, at a suitable time, when there wasn't anyone or anything in the vicinity, he threw it onto the snow covered ground below. With a slight thump, it left a small crater in the snow and dug a chunk out of the ground. His landlady was quick to notice, and the cover story was that the chunk of ice must have fallen off an aircraft.
Seriously, what actual real use were they to anyone?
I used to have one for taking notes during lectures and presentations. The advantage over paper was that I could insert paragraphs of text whenever the speaker went back over something. With paper, I'd have to put a ring around the text along with an arrow indicating where it should go, and then have to retype the whole lot back when I got back into the office. Most speakers would have the overhead slides printed out as handouts, with a few having CD-ROMs. The truely enlightened had them available on the web, ready to be downloaded. A wireless network connection would really have helped in this case.
But, if I had a high-speed wireless connection, then I'd want to be to make VoIP telephone calls. Also, being able to take photographs of overhead slides and whiteboard diagram would also be desirable. All of these additional features are now supported by mobile phones (at least in Japan). So there isn't much left that a PDA can do that a mobile phone can't do.
For me, getting a good nights sleep involves being in a room that is pitch dark, completely silent, with plenty of cool fresh air. If I'm not feeling too tired, I'll read a chapter of a novel for 30 minutes.
My parents home is out in the countryside, and each window has iron shutters on the outside, which can be folded horizontally. For extremes of weather these can be unfolded and used to cover the windows, depending on weather conditions. For stormy weather, these stop the danger of stuff being blown into the windows, and in Summer, these reflect the heat of the Sun while allowing a breeze to blow through. In Winter, they help to keep the heat in the house. At night, they can be used to keep the persistant orange glow of the streetlights out. Every night gives me a solid night's sleep. The air is cool and fresh. I feel sharp in the morning, and can work for eight hours non-stop.
Getting a good night's sleep in the city is much difficult. The apartment I rent has thin curtains, no shutters, and so the orange glow of streetlights is present in every single room throughout the night. Opening the windows to get a cool breeze introduces its own problems, since other residents tend to take taxi's home up until 4am, and the taxi cabs hang around for 10 minutes with the engine idling until the next call. Not forgetting the occasional ambulance/police car, the upstairs neighbour running their spindryer at 7am in the morning, the downstairs neighbour renovating their ceiling, somebody upstairs coming home from a pary in the early hours of the morning, and getting a good night's sleep is much harder.
Given the high population density in Japan, I'm not surprised they have difficulty getting a good night's sleep.
Although this is a step in the right direction, terrorists also seem to be advancing in their use of tank-busting mechanisms.
Consider it genetic algorithms in action. The terrorists will try everything and anything they know about. They'll drop the methods that aren't successful. For those methods that are successful, they'll reuse.For those methods that are partially successful, they'll try something slightly different: use more explosives, heavier chunks of metal, better concealment or more accurate timing, or try combining two methods which were partially successful.
As someone who has collected the five reprints of the Daily Mail from D-Day, I can say you will see far more than just the historical facts. There is a style of cartoon drawing (Illingworth) that would probably have you suspended from high school if you were to draw anything similar Not forgetting the aerial photographs of the D-Day landings. And there are those wacky adverts (what on earth was "Grandpa Kruschen" advertising?).
Re:Hardware Progression Causing Lazy Programming?
on
486 Turns 15 Years Old
·
· Score: 1
The constant race between AMD & Intel and Nvidia & ATI to make their products faster has undoubtedly been good for their bottom-line, but is it promoting laziness in programmers?
The techniques used by the current game engines were originally designed for use with CPU software based rendering. This led to the development of concepts like the PVS (Potentially Visible Set), lightmaps etc. These are still in use today.
With ATI and Nvidia, the early DirectX/OpenGL extensions simply added some hardware stages to fix an immediate need. However, with the introduction of vertex and fragment programs, game engine programmers have the opportunity to write optimised code. Also, have a look at gpgpu.org where researchers are looking at ways of modify algorithms to run on GPU's. And there are other opensource projects where people are experimenting with engines based on real-time ray-tracing.
These are same reasons they still have the original elevator motors in the Empire State Building. "They simply dont make motors as durable as these anymore. They've been running continuously since 1933."
The control rooms of the Panama Canal amaze me. After 90 years, they still have the same 3D user interface that the architects originally designed.
Also, given that modern optimizing C compilers can often optimize better than humans, it may make sense to embed critical sections of assembly into C code, and let the compiler optimize the rest...
In the past, I used to do a lot of assembly language programming, but would always end up being burnt by having to completely rewrite everything for a new CPU/graphics card. It's much more productive to write a generic algorithm in C/C++ and use the assembly output to identify where the optimisations can be made. In nearly all cases, I could restructure the C code to match the optimum assembler output.
1. What are the odds of this actually being pulled off?
It shouldn't be that difficult. BT's telephone network is based on System X (and it's competitor System Y). The national network is completely digital. Each customer line would be analog (unless you have ISDN) until the local exchange, where the signal would be converted into 64 Kbits digital. Advances in technology allowed a single circuit board (A4 sized) to handle up to 4 customer lines, so the entire telephone exchange for a small village could be inside a shed. BT would probably start with upgrading the national network, then do a local exchange trial in London, and then roll out across the country.
2. How much will this effect me, a regular dialup and telephone user of British Telecom?
You probably wouldn't notice anything. For each exchange, they would do a gradual switch over. They'd start by adding the new links using IP packets, test them, then allow customer calls to use them, and finally disable the old system.
Do you mena the Apple Pimpin'? That comes with a fur covered main unit, gold plated controllers, and an exclusive pair of sunclasses. Optional accessories include a rottweiler and a gold plated rumble stick, for those all-weekend LAN parties.
Slashdot Mirror
"That, plus reporters jumping up in windows and trying to snap pictures just really traumatized the younger members and the older members of the family."
If they started doing that to me, I'd put mirrors in front of my windows.
I'll take the amoebas any day.
You really don't want an amoebic infection of the bloodstream. My stepfather got one while clearing out the drains in our cottage (disused farmhouse cottage). We don't know how long it had been brewing, but for about three nights he would go to bed and then start having "the shakes". He was deathly white, and was shivering with an amplitude of an inch. I was just about expecting something to burst out at any minute.
Fortunately, we got him to the doctor for a checkup. As his white blood cell count was somewhere beyond the solar system, the doc immediately sent him to hospital. The medics managed to drain around 2 litres of gunk out of his liver, and then injected him full of antibiotics. After that, he had a full checkup to find out how the amoeba's got into his bloodstream. The doctors suspect the cause was a missing filling.
Fortunately, people are discarding their old mobile phones, and buying new ones every six months. At least, users aren't able to save application programs in SIM card memory. I always wonder why thin client mobile phones (where everything is stored on a server, rather than on the phone itself) haven't taken off.
I Bet a 20" multisync monitor will put out more RF than the main unit itself. My parents used to enjoy listening to BBC radio 4 on long wave (198 Khz). When I bought a new graphics card, the default video resolution (1280x1024x85?) happened to have a frequency that matched the radio station exactly. For a radius of 10 metres (the entire house), it was impossible to receive the radio signal. Until we found out what the cause was. A quick change of the refresh rate fixed this problem.
You're right - I looked at the Seagram building. The blinds are exactly the same. I would never believe that an architect would go down to that level of micro-managing the appearance of a building. I always thought that would be responsibility of the interior designer.
The original manual can be found at bitsavers.org.
My mistake. From this page, It still looks the Univac I had the precision of 12 decimal places?
From The Case 1107
The central processor was a 36 bit architecture, capable of executing most simple arithmetic instructions in one 4 microsecond cycle time. Multiplication of two 36-bit integers took 12 microseconds, and division of a 72-bit dividend by a 36-bit divisor 31.3 microseconds. The processor performed 36-bit single precision floating point arithmetic in hardware, but did not implement double precision floating point.
From Univac I
The UNIVAC's word size was 72 data bits, which held eleven digits plus a sign, plus one parity bit for each six data bits, giving a total of 84. The mercury delay line memory amounted to 1000 words. Besides numbers, the UNIVAC could represent alphanumeric data (letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks) using six bits for each character with twelve characters to the word. Codes were assigned for the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks, such as 010100 for A, 010101 for B, 010110 for C and so on.
According to Why do We need a floating-point arithmetic standard?
Univac 110x float:
Underflow limit = 2^-129 ~ 1.5 x 10^-39
Overflow limit = 2^27 ~ 1.7 x 10^8
That reminds me of the days when I first used a Dell PC . The internal battery on the computer was bit iffy - some custom Dell mofo which looked like somebody had put some chile-con-carne in a plastic cube and glued it shut. During the development of various DOS graphics applications, the computer would crash, reboot, but not find the hard disk drives - You had to enter the BIOS menu, and "remind" the computer which type of hard disk drive it was using (40 track - 20 megabytes, blah-blah sectors). And the real-time clock was always stuck sometime in 1980. I ended up having a print-out of the BIOS settings pinned up beside the monitor, so I would always have access to them when needed.
If only things were that simple now.
Wow! I thought "The Wet Bird" was a photograph at first. The only thing that gave it away as a computer rendered image was that all the blinds of the first building were at one of several different levels.
In http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/media/ir/2004/197_2 07_1.jpg that photo, I think I see a wire.
It's probably one of The Clangers. Otherwise it's the soup dragon.
We were working in our garden one weekend, when a very dressy continental European lady walked past, stopped and asked in a very upmarket accent "Do you know where I can find a bonk that is open on a Saturday afternoon?". We assumed, she meant a bank, so pointed her in the direction towards downtown. Otherwise, we would have pointed her in the direction of the harbour.
The first laptop using an autostereo display to show images in 3D without special glasses was the Sharp Mebius PC-RD3D in Japan, later released in the US as the Sharp Actius RD3D
Is the version without this feature, the Sharp Actius R2D2?
Reminds me of an "experiment" a friend of mine once did with a empty 2 litre Pepsi bottle. The goal of the experiment was to demonstrate to his kids how a water would expand on freezing and could crack drain pipes. The bottle was filled with water, allowed to freeze overnight on the sundeck and examined the following day. The experiment was a success, with the water forming a solid 6 inch tall cylinder, 2 inches thick with a holow core, and with the plastic of the bottle split open. However, this led to a problem. How to dispose of the ice? He didn't want to wait for the ice to melt, so figured it would be simple enough to throw it onto the ground outside. So, at a suitable time, when there wasn't anyone or anything in the vicinity, he threw it onto the snow covered ground below. With a slight thump, it left a small crater in the snow and dug a chunk out of the ground. His landlady was quick to notice, and the cover story was that the chunk of ice must have fallen off an aircraft.
Seriously, what actual real use were they to anyone?
I used to have one for taking notes during lectures and presentations. The advantage over paper was that I could insert paragraphs of text whenever the speaker went back over something. With paper, I'd have to put a ring around the text along with an arrow indicating where it should go, and then have to retype the whole lot back when I got back into the office. Most speakers would have the overhead slides printed out as handouts, with a few having CD-ROMs. The truely enlightened had them available on the web, ready to be downloaded. A wireless network connection would really have helped in this case.
But, if I had a high-speed wireless connection, then I'd want to be to make VoIP telephone calls. Also, being able to take photographs of overhead slides and whiteboard diagram would also be desirable. All of these additional features are now supported by mobile phones (at least in Japan). So there isn't much left that a PDA can do that a mobile phone can't do.
For me, getting a good nights sleep involves being in a room that is pitch dark, completely silent, with plenty of cool fresh air. If I'm not feeling too tired, I'll read a chapter of a novel for 30 minutes.
My parents home is out in the countryside, and each window has iron shutters on the outside, which can be folded horizontally. For extremes of weather these can be unfolded and used to cover the windows, depending on weather conditions. For stormy weather, these stop the danger of stuff being blown into the windows, and in Summer, these reflect the heat of the Sun while allowing a breeze to blow through. In Winter, they help to keep the heat in the house. At night, they can be used to keep the persistant orange glow of the streetlights out. Every night gives me a solid night's sleep. The air is cool and fresh. I feel sharp in the morning, and can work for eight hours non-stop.
Getting a good night's sleep in the city is much difficult. The apartment I rent has thin curtains, no shutters, and so the orange glow of streetlights is present in every single room throughout the night. Opening the windows to get a cool breeze introduces its own problems, since other residents tend to take taxi's home up until 4am, and the taxi cabs hang around for 10 minutes with the engine idling until the next call. Not forgetting the occasional ambulance/police car, the upstairs neighbour running their spindryer at 7am in the morning, the downstairs neighbour renovating their ceiling, somebody upstairs coming home from a pary in the early hours of the morning, and getting a good night's sleep is much harder.
Given the high population density in Japan, I'm not surprised they have difficulty getting a good night's sleep.
Although this is a step in the right direction, terrorists also seem to be advancing in their use of tank-busting mechanisms.
Consider it genetic algorithms in action. The terrorists will try everything and anything they know about. They'll drop the methods that aren't successful. For those methods that are successful, they'll reuse.For those methods that are partially successful, they'll try something slightly different: use more explosives, heavier chunks of metal, better concealment or more accurate timing, or try combining two methods which were partially successful.
At this rate of development, it won't be long before somebody has the Linux kernel implemented in PHP.
As someone who has collected the five reprints of the Daily Mail from D-Day, I can say you will see far more than just the historical facts. There is a style of cartoon drawing (Illingworth) that would probably have you suspended from high school if you were to draw anything similar Not forgetting the aerial photographs of the D-Day landings. And there are those wacky adverts (what on earth was "Grandpa Kruschen" advertising?).
The constant race between AMD & Intel and Nvidia & ATI to make their products faster has undoubtedly been good for their bottom-line, but is it promoting laziness in programmers?
The techniques used by the current game engines were originally designed for use with CPU software based rendering. This led to the development of concepts like the PVS (Potentially Visible Set), lightmaps etc. These are still in use today.
With ATI and Nvidia, the early DirectX/OpenGL extensions simply added some hardware stages to fix an immediate need. However, with the introduction of vertex and fragment programs, game engine programmers have the opportunity to write optimised code. Also, have a look at gpgpu.org where researchers are looking at ways of modify algorithms to run on GPU's. And there are other opensource projects where people are experimenting with engines based on real-time ray-tracing.
These are same reasons they still have the original elevator motors in the Empire State Building. "They simply dont make motors as durable as these anymore. They've been running continuously since 1933."
The control rooms of the Panama Canal amaze me. After 90 years, they still have the same 3D user interface that the architects originally designed.
Also, given that modern optimizing C compilers can often optimize better than humans, it may make sense to embed critical sections of assembly into C code, and let the compiler optimize the rest...
In the past, I used to do a lot of assembly language programming, but would always end up being burnt by having to completely rewrite everything for a new CPU/graphics card. It's much more productive to write a generic algorithm in C/C++ and use the assembly output to identify where the optimisations can be made. In nearly all cases, I could restructure the C code to match the optimum assembler output.
1. What are the odds of this actually being pulled off?
It shouldn't be that difficult. BT's telephone network is based on System X (and it's competitor System Y). The national network is completely digital. Each customer line would be analog (unless you have ISDN) until the local exchange, where the signal would be converted into 64 Kbits digital. Advances in technology allowed a single circuit board (A4 sized) to handle up to 4 customer lines, so the entire telephone exchange for a small village could be inside a shed. BT would probably start with upgrading the national network, then do a local exchange trial in London, and then roll out across the country.
2. How much will this effect me, a regular dialup and telephone user of British Telecom?
You probably wouldn't notice anything. For each exchange, they would do a gradual switch over. They'd start by adding the new links using IP packets, test them, then allow customer calls to use them, and finally disable the old system.
Do you mena the Apple Pimpin'? That comes with a fur covered main unit, gold plated controllers, and an exclusive pair of sunclasses. Optional accessories include a rottweiler and a gold plated rumble stick, for those all-weekend LAN parties.
I'm waiting for someone to discover the equation used to generate the sequence of slashdot moderation scores.