Like all 8-bit home computer vendors, they made their own audio and graphics ASIC chips. Sound programming consisted of variants of ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) programming which was replaced with industry standard MIDI with the Atari ST. Graphics programming was based on different text and pixel video modes and player missile graphics/sprite programming. Text modes allowed characters of single/double/half character widths, and double/regular heights. Pixel modes were between 1, 2 and four bits per pixel. The added boost was with player-missile graphics which was an extension of the 2600 console and sprite programming (similar to the Commodore 64 and TI-99/4A). You programmed in little pixelmap images then set registers to position them. Add some extra code to automatically update their positions and you had animation with a very simply physics engine (velocity, acceleration, collision detection). Some video modes supported 16-colors (rainbow or various shades of a particular color). Some programmers developed an APAC mode (any pixel any color) where two video frames are used to pick two different standard colors for each pixel to make a new pixel color. - effectively 24-bit color).
De Re Atari was considered the holy book on programming.
They had their own trackball, light pen and graphics tablet controllers, but didn't include an RS232 interface - that came as an extra podule that plugged in through the serial bus. Other home computer systems had these as standard, so you could use generic dot-matrix printers, modems and frame grabbers.
This was a brief period of time in the industry where international standards/methods were too expensive silicon wise, so everyone tried clever hardware design techniques for IO, graphics and sound.
In the UK, they were used for rape seed fields - giant fields full of bright yellow flowers. Just driving along the road, and the air would smell oily/greasy. Even back in the 1990's, farmers noticed that these fields would make the large bees slow and dozy as they flew along. On a double decker bus, I would seen them being squished on the windows. Sometimes I see them crawling along the ground. Never sure whether it was just old age, exhaustion or something parasitic - their wings would seem to be dark brown rather than clear transparent.
From what i've seen of the bees in our garden, they would have a specific preference for a flower of a particular species and even then only pick those flowerheads that were the highest first (maybe they have more sunlight/pollen).
If you are unemployed because of a lack of skills, then a maintenance wage which simply covers food and rent would be enough. You need more money to buy equipment, take retraining courses. Or even relocate - which can sometimes involve weeks in a hotel while you look for somewhere to rent.
That's the same situation in many countries including the UK. That's not simply the fault of the unemployed - they would do whatever it takes to earn the maximum amount of money. With the farm industry, we've got international workers willing to live full-time on on-site dormitories. They earn £15/hour but pay half that for a bunk bed. A local worker with a family want their own house. That requires at least £25/hour to pay for a car, utiities and heating. Home owners also want to keep the value of their homes up, so don't want massive housing developments that will fill up with neighbors-from-hell. That keeps the cost of housing up, so that a minimum wage job won't cover the cost of home ownership.
When you upgrade your Firefox web browser, the old cache directories still remain there in.mozilla/firefox/*.defaulted.
Law enforcement have always been pushing for Internet usage and browser histories to be archived. Remember the fuss over various Windows media players sending back lists of movies watched.
In London, services are always being canceled when it rains because the flooding plays havoc with the substations and electric lines. You should see the sparks coming off the wheels - it's like they have stuck fireworks under the carriages.
The problem is that there are so many commuters traveling by train into and out of London that they try and get the load spread through off-peak hours through pricing. And people are commuting from outside of London because of the problems of gang crime and that housing in safe areas is unaffordable - much of the brownfield sites are having huge apartment developments which are simply sold off to international investors in the Far East and Russia
So if you try and take a train from Liverpool (West Coast) at 8am to Folkestone (East Coast, through London) at 3pm, they figure "oh, you are going through London at peak hours, we better charge you". They tried to charge me around £800 because my journey was at peak times and went through London. I did a ticket split and reduced the price down to just over £200 (which is more than a return ticket to New York in the USA).
In other parts of the country like Portsmouth, the train station is actually partially over water as it is right next to a ferry terminal. If you take the ferry to the train station, then there is exactly one ticket machine between the platforms and the ferry terminal exits. Sometimes there are only minutes between getting up the exit ramps and your train departing. There simply isn't time to wait 10 in line in a queue to book a ticket. A monthly season pass is the best bet.
At other stations the biggest holdup is the ticket inspectors who close the barriers at rush hour and try and inspect each ticket individually. On the Isle of Wight you can pay for a ticket while on the train. On the mainland it's a criminal offense not to have paid for a ticket before getting on board a train.
It's true what you say about Windows 7 and 10:) I've also had to dump various Linux distro's because the UI backgrounds were so annoying (hand draw crayon pictures don't feel "technical" enough for me). Tried installing the old SGI GUI system and it looks so dated now.
I remember the days of university reading BYTE magazine (1980's - 1990's) and 8-bit/16-bit home computers. Seeing what systems like Amiga and Atari could do (and all the others), while desktop PC's were stuck with CGA graphics. Though PC's did move forward with 16-color EGA, 256-color VGA, 24-bit color SVGA, SXVGA, pixblitter cards and Intel processors going from the 16-bit 8086 to the 80386, Pentium, 80486 (with a built in floating coprocessor), multimedia instructions. Around 2000, all the innovation started moving in graphics accelerator boards (or GPU's). First fully hardware accelerated graphics pipeline, programmable pipelines, high level shading languages. Around 2005, was the time PCI bus architecture changed, and it was time for everyone to buy new motherboards with SLI/Crossfire. Consumer CPU's were starting to go multi-core along with hyper-threading.
Now high-end gaming CPU's have 10 overclocked 4GHz cores, 3D monitors and 4K displays. But keyboards, mice, graphics tablets, monitors, hard disk drives, DVD/CD players are all the same as they were a decade ago. Vendors of motherboards like Supermicro and ASUS offer systems which have dual Xeon socket CPUs with quad Crossfire/SLI and hundreds of Gigabytes of RAM memory. But a quad-socket CPU like the Intel E5-4669 costs around $7000. Xeon Phi's and Knights Landing are slightly cheaper,
Liquid rocket engines pump the cold fuel around the engine cone to simultaneously heat the fuel up and to keep the engine cool. You can shut down a liquid fuel engine, but once you've started up a solid fuel engine, it's impossible to shut down.
Four years is way too long for a university course in computer technology. Just compare the technology between any four years in the past forty years. By the time you finish, the technology is completely different from when you started. Between 2002 and 2006, Crossfire/SLI systems appeared when the video bus slots changed. Then smartphones and tablets emerged. Now you can build what would be considered a supercomputer by 1990's standards from second hand parts.
They would put the electric sockets at the most convenient locations - like electric sockets behind the sink or on the mid-level half way up the staircase. Maybe not to code, but the most logical and practical location for hoovering a staircase or using an electric drill or saw.
The $60000/year salary wouldn't get you much in terms of housing or rent in Silicon Valley. That's a rent of $1500/month. You might be able to afford an apartment along the main roads in Sunnyvale. There used to be waiting lists for people wanting to live in one of the apartment blocks right next to the campus buildings. To rent a house in Menlo Park or Palo Alto, you would be lookin at $3000 upwards.
Graduates from Stanford and Berkeley are more likely to want to work for startups rather than working as verification or maintenance engineers for a large corporation.
Anyone with $500,000 of savings can move to the USA without having to go through the visa program. I've known students to have built a deep mining data system as part of their research to be offered that much money by a US investment company then move to the USA.
What if something were so tightly packed that it started absorbing neutrinos and other particles that would normally travel straight through regular matter?
Helium-4 seems to do something strange when cooled to a super-liquid - it's just not possible to cool down into a solid because the kinetic energy exceeds the electron bond strengths.
The idea of the registry was to place all critical information about the system in a location that would be inaccessible to hackers and spyware. This file could then be easily backed up and restored rather than having all the information scattered all over the place.
AI stagnated in academia because the average research budget grant simply didn't cover the cost of high performance computing at the time. In the late 1980's, MSDOS PC's were stuck with 4.77MHz/16MHz CPU's, 256 color VGA modes, and 64 kbyte memory segment block allocation sizes (aka tiny, small, medium, large and huge memory models for code generation). Academics were lucky to have a 80x87 floating-point coprocessor. Even the 32-bit or 64-bit workstations weren't that much faster due to the fact that many had external storage on the network. Even when there were fast workstations, they decided to slow everything down with interpreted languages like LISP, Prolog and Scheme. Some did compile into native executable code but required large code libraries. A lot of academics had to make do with PC's to do image processing. Unless they had an i860 coprocessor with a framegrabber board, they had to store images on disk, fetch each column or row of pixels one by one, do a FFT or inverse FFT, then write the data out, repeating the process for the other axis. Now the same work can be done using a HD webcam, a smartphone or an ink-jet printer.
Supercomputers were restricted to weather simulations and aerodynamics. Around 2005, it was possible for a desktop or laptop to do 3D volume visualization with some old school texture mapping tricks and high-level shaders. Now there are a dozen different methods of doing rendering and image processing each taking advantage of GPU capabilities; OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA, DirectX, compute shaders, Matlab, Blender, GIMP, ImageMagick, WebGL, Java, Python (PyCuda, PyGL)
Some games were simply tied to the CPU clock speed (like Dragonfly. Running at 25MHz, the targets would zip around, while at 4.77MHz, things were a bit more leisurely.
in other news, printing, typesetting has also been automated with the use of laser printers and word processors. Syndication of articles has also been automated through electronic news feeds.
Slashdot Mirror
Like all 8-bit home computer vendors, they made their own audio and graphics ASIC chips. Sound programming consisted of variants of ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) programming which was replaced with industry standard MIDI with the Atari ST. Graphics programming was based on different text and pixel video modes and player missile graphics/sprite programming. Text modes allowed characters of single/double/half character widths, and double/regular heights. Pixel modes were between 1, 2 and four bits per pixel. The added boost was with player-missile graphics which was an extension of the 2600 console and sprite programming (similar to the Commodore 64 and TI-99/4A). You programmed in little pixelmap images then set registers to position them. Add some extra code to automatically update their positions and you had animation with a very simply physics engine (velocity, acceleration, collision detection). Some video modes supported 16-colors (rainbow or various shades of a particular color). Some programmers developed an APAC mode (any pixel any color) where two video frames are used to pick two different standard colors for each pixel to make a new pixel color. - effectively 24-bit color).
De Re Atari was considered the holy book on programming.
They had their own trackball, light pen and graphics tablet controllers, but didn't include an RS232 interface - that came as an extra podule that plugged in through the serial bus. Other home computer systems had these as standard, so you could use generic dot-matrix printers, modems and frame grabbers.
This was a brief period of time in the industry where international standards/methods were too expensive silicon wise, so everyone tried clever hardware design techniques for IO, graphics and sound.
In the UK, they were used for rape seed fields - giant fields full of bright yellow flowers. Just driving along the road, and the air would smell oily/greasy. Even back in the 1990's, farmers noticed that these fields would make the large bees slow and dozy as they flew along. On a double decker bus, I would seen them being squished on the windows. Sometimes I see them crawling along the ground. Never sure whether it was just old age, exhaustion or something parasitic - their wings would seem to be dark brown rather than clear transparent.
From what i've seen of the bees in our garden, they would have a specific preference for a flower of a particular species and even then only pick those flowerheads that were the highest first (maybe they have more sunlight/pollen).
If you are unemployed because of a lack of skills, then a maintenance wage which simply covers food and rent would be enough. You need more money to buy equipment, take retraining courses. Or even relocate - which can sometimes involve weeks in a hotel while you look for somewhere to rent.
That's the same situation in many countries including the UK. That's not simply the fault of the unemployed - they would do whatever it takes to earn the maximum amount of money. With the farm industry, we've got international workers willing to live full-time on on-site dormitories. They earn £15/hour but pay half that for a bunk bed. A local worker with a family want their own house. That requires at least £25/hour to pay for a car, utiities and heating. Home owners also want to keep the value of their homes up, so don't want massive housing developments that will fill up with neighbors-from-hell. That keeps the cost of housing up, so that a minimum wage job won't cover the cost of home ownership.
When you upgrade your Firefox web browser, the old cache directories still remain there in .mozilla/firefox/*.defaulted.
Law enforcement have always been pushing for Internet usage and browser histories to be archived. Remember the fuss over various Windows media players sending back lists of movies watched.
In London, services are always being canceled when it rains because the flooding plays havoc with the substations and electric lines. You should see the sparks coming off the wheels - it's like they have stuck fireworks under the carriages.
The problem is that there are so many commuters traveling by train into and out of London that they try and get the load spread through off-peak hours through pricing. And people are commuting from outside of London because of the problems of gang crime and that housing in safe areas is unaffordable - much of the brownfield sites are having huge apartment developments which are simply sold off to international investors in the Far East and Russia
So if you try and take a train from Liverpool (West Coast) at 8am to Folkestone (East Coast, through London) at 3pm, they figure "oh, you are going through London at peak hours, we better charge you". They tried to charge me around £800 because my journey was at peak times and went through London. I did a ticket split and reduced the price down to just over £200 (which is more than a return ticket to New York in the USA).
In other parts of the country like Portsmouth, the train station is actually partially over water as it is right next to a ferry terminal. If you take the ferry to the train station, then there is exactly one ticket machine between the platforms and the ferry terminal exits. Sometimes there are only minutes between getting up the exit ramps and your train departing. There simply isn't time to wait 10 in line in a queue to book a ticket. A monthly season pass is the best bet.
At other stations the biggest holdup is the ticket inspectors who close the barriers at rush hour and try and inspect each ticket individually. On the Isle of Wight you can pay for a ticket while on the train. On the mainland it's a criminal offense not to have paid for a ticket before getting on board a train.
It's true what you say about Windows 7 and 10 :) I've also had to dump various Linux distro's because the UI backgrounds were so annoying (hand draw crayon pictures don't feel "technical" enough for me). Tried installing the old SGI GUI system and it looks so dated now.
I remember the days of university reading BYTE magazine (1980's - 1990's) and 8-bit/16-bit home computers. Seeing what systems like Amiga and Atari could do (and all the others), while desktop PC's were stuck with CGA graphics. Though PC's did move forward with 16-color EGA, 256-color VGA, 24-bit color SVGA, SXVGA, pixblitter cards and Intel processors going from the 16-bit 8086 to the 80386, Pentium, 80486 (with a built in floating coprocessor), multimedia instructions. Around 2000, all the innovation started moving in graphics accelerator boards (or GPU's). First fully hardware accelerated graphics pipeline, programmable pipelines, high level shading languages. Around 2005, was the time PCI bus architecture changed, and it was time for everyone to buy new motherboards with SLI/Crossfire. Consumer CPU's were starting to go multi-core along with hyper-threading.
Now high-end gaming CPU's have 10 overclocked 4GHz cores, 3D monitors and 4K displays. But keyboards, mice, graphics tablets, monitors, hard disk drives, DVD/CD players are all the same as they were a decade ago. Vendors of motherboards like Supermicro and ASUS offer systems which have dual Xeon socket CPUs with quad Crossfire/SLI and hundreds of Gigabytes of RAM memory. But a quad-socket CPU like the Intel E5-4669 costs around $7000. Xeon Phi's and Knights Landing are slightly cheaper,
Liquid rocket engines pump the cold fuel around the engine cone to simultaneously heat the fuel up and to keep the engine cool. You can shut down a liquid fuel engine, but once you've started up a solid fuel engine, it's impossible to shut down.
Four years is way too long for a university course in computer technology. Just compare the technology between any four years in the past forty years. By the time you finish, the technology is completely different from when you started. Between 2002 and 2006, Crossfire/SLI systems appeared when the video bus slots changed. Then smartphones and tablets emerged. Now you can build what would be considered a supercomputer by 1990's standards from second hand parts.
You've never visited "There, I've fixed it?" :)
http://failblog.cheezburger.co...
The mystery Google car:
https://i.chzbgr.com/full/4575...
They would put the electric sockets at the most convenient locations - like electric sockets behind the sink or on the mid-level half way up the staircase. Maybe not to code, but the most logical and practical location for hoovering a staircase or using an electric drill or saw.
The $60000/year salary wouldn't get you much in terms of housing or rent in Silicon Valley. That's a rent of $1500/month. You might be able to afford an apartment along the main roads in Sunnyvale. There used to be waiting lists for people wanting to live in one of the apartment blocks right next to the campus buildings. To rent a house in Menlo Park or Palo Alto, you would be lookin at $3000 upwards.
Graduates from Stanford and Berkeley are more likely to want to work for startups rather than working as verification or maintenance engineers for a large corporation.
Anyone with $500,000 of savings can move to the USA without having to go through the visa program. I've known students to have built a deep mining data system as part of their research to be offered that much money by a US investment company then move to the USA.
It's up for debate:
http://news.emory.edu/stories/...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
http://www.nature.com/news/wor...
for a Linux software house, it's Powerpoint, Web based Email and OpenOffice.
What if something were so tightly packed that it started absorbing neutrinos and other particles that would normally travel straight through regular matter?
Helium-4 seems to do something strange when cooled to a super-liquid - it's just not possible to cool down into a solid because the kinetic energy exceeds the electron bond strengths.
https://phys.org/news/2009-05-...
The iBong?
The idea of the registry was to place all critical information about the system in a location that would be inaccessible to hackers and spyware. This file could then be easily backed up and restored rather than having all the information scattered all over the place.
AI stagnated in academia because the average research budget grant simply didn't cover the cost of high performance computing at the time. In the late 1980's, MSDOS PC's were stuck with 4.77MHz/16MHz CPU's, 256 color VGA modes, and 64 kbyte memory segment block allocation sizes (aka tiny, small, medium, large and huge memory models for code generation). Academics were lucky to have a 80x87 floating-point coprocessor. Even the 32-bit or 64-bit workstations weren't that much faster due to the fact that many had external storage on the network. Even when there were fast workstations, they decided to slow everything down with interpreted languages like LISP, Prolog and Scheme. Some did compile into native executable code but required large code libraries. A lot of academics had to make do with PC's to do image processing. Unless they had an i860 coprocessor with a framegrabber board, they had to store images on disk, fetch each column or row of pixels one by one, do a FFT or inverse FFT, then write the data out, repeating the process for the other axis. Now the same work can be done using a HD webcam, a smartphone or an ink-jet printer.
Supercomputers were restricted to weather simulations and aerodynamics. Around 2005, it was possible for a desktop or laptop to do 3D volume visualization with some old school texture mapping tricks and high-level shaders. Now there are a dozen different methods of doing rendering and image processing each taking advantage of GPU capabilities; OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA, DirectX, compute shaders, Matlab, Blender, GIMP, ImageMagick, WebGL, Java, Python (PyCuda, PyGL)
One, Two, Many, Many-Many ,,,
We need a "spyware" button just like the "turbo" button. Like the days there were software firewalls that had an emergency stop button.
Some games were simply tied to the CPU clock speed (like Dragonfly. Running at 25MHz, the targets would zip around, while at 4.77MHz, things were a bit more leisurely.
in other news, printing, typesetting has also been automated with the use of laser printers and word processors. Syndication of articles has also been automated through electronic news feeds.