1. Better stop global warming. Today. Otherwise the aliens who appreciate our earth more than we do will take over tomorrow. 2. Raising minimum wage, absolutely and under any circumstances, will never result in inflation. 3. It's okay to steal from the rich and give to the poor. 4. It's okay to steal in general, particularly from wicked people like the Russians and casino owners. 5. It's okay to be "green" and still spend $30k/year in gas/electric bills. 6. Social means not-voluntary and Security means there's no real money backing it. 7. The Family Unit should be defined as sleeze in your bedroom for a week. Honestly I can't watch romantic comedies anymore because they all have a live-in. 8. Farmers, eh, we don't need them.
All I know is that my NVidia board with Media Player used to play DVDs. These days it says I'm not licensed to use that media with my graphics card. I say we sue them for free DVD decoders while we're at it. And maybe we can sue whoever made everyone start licensing their DVD decoders and charging $ for them.
And maybe someday after we put NVidia out of business for hiring marketers and management that don't actually communicate with their engineers, ATI will have drivers that actually work half as well as the NVidia beta drivers. I've always liked NVidia's driver design better than ATI. NVidia has bugs with multiple screens, but ATI has bugs with basic things like refresh rate. Of course that was three years ago I did a strong comparison between the two. Has ATI made any good strides in drivers over the past three years? (During which time it appears the NVida has been going down hill?)
I've been hearing the same "the future of computing is home automation" line for at least 15 years. Yeah yeah, the computer's going to turn on the coffee maker in the morning, shut off the back porch light at night and keep tabs on who called during the day.
Yeah, I don't get it. It's not the cost of the parts that's the problem. $400k for a house; what's a few grand in automation? Maybe the advanced education involved in construction management these days? [duck as the hammer flies by...]
Here's what I want in home automation:
1. A nice remote control for the whole house where I can get status and control on everything electronic including lights, fans, outlets, webcams hidden above the front porch and elsewhere, garage doors, music through a number of built-in speakers throughout the house, the furnace, the furnace vents and temperature in every room, all the kitchen appliances, the sprinkler system, plasma panels on walls for photos, fountains in the yard, floor warmers, window positions, the security system, etc.
2. I want it to learn how and when I like the lights, temperature, etc.
3. I want to be able to talk to the system from any room. In other words, I want to shut the light off without getting out of bed or reaching for the remote -- it's the ultimate lazy-man syndrome.
So the one person says your deer rifle isn't much use against the military. Then you counter with AK-47s are holding up pretty well in Iraq. I just want to know this: was there any meat left on the dear after the ten seconds you held the trigger down? You must be from Arkansas. I met some hunters in Arkansas with AK-47s. Hunting in Arkansas is way different from hunting in Idaho where I'm from. Hunting in Idaho takes work. In Arkansas they just put a park bench the back of their truck and then park alongside the freeway waiting for the deer to run out from the forest.
Seriously, the second amendment is there because the founding fathers wanted people to be able to rise up against a too-powerful government. They came to America because they had no way to change their government -- through peaceful means or violent. Of course there were a number of revolutions in Europe in the 1800s; violence ended up being their method. It's what happens when you repress too long. I believe the founding fathers understood a principle that has been forgotten: freedom is worth more than life. These days it seems we give up our freedoms to preserve our life all too easily. We should assume the best in American citizens. Citizens should never lose a freedom until convicted.
And personally, I think a deer rifle would do well against a tank, assuming you had enough of them and, more importantly, enough people willing to use them.
In other words, they are admitting that they start outside the Bible to (re)interpret the Words of Scripture.
I hate that argument with a passion. They have no authority to interpret the bible as such. The word they translate as "create from the nothingness" very clearly in Hebrew means "organize from things already exisiting". I claim no authority to translate it as the latter, but I do believe the leader of my religion does. All I'm saying is this: if you don't believe your religion has authority to interpret scripture, start looking for the truth. If you're looking for religion to thwart science, start looking for the truth. If you believe in "immaterial matter", start looking for the truth -- and don't stop until you find it.
Our schools suck because parents and communities are willing to blame everything but their own disinterest in education, and therefore do nothing to fix the problem.
And where does that attitude come from? Lemme back up; I think there are enough parents and enough community members in nearly every community who care. If there are anti-intellectual sentiments in America these days they stem from two arenas. First, the breakdown of the family: if they have an unstable home life or lop-sided gender influence, why would they care about school?
Second, the socialistic trends in American government tend to lessen the importance of education. Why go to school when you can drive a corvette off minimum wage? If the parents never needed or wanted an education, why would their children? Do other countries (i.e., Japan) oversuppliment the portion of their population who fail in their education? Hardly. They haven't the resources for it.
What this country (US) needs to do is scrap the abomination of the Federal Education Dept./Board/Plan and give the power back to the people. Those neighborhoods who care should adopt and pay for the certification of some international education standard. This eliminates the need for force, helps eliminate national debt, and rewards those communities with parents who care. Heck, a system of 3rd party certification works for the universities -- why not for the other schools as well? The second thing they should do is scrap the minimum wage law altogether and let people get paid what they're worth.
I feel like my needs (as a windows user) are not actually met by these cards.
Here's my issues:
1. It takes an hour to compress a video to MP4
2. It takes an hour to change that compression to MP2 before burning it to a DVD.
3. The only way I'll spend $300 on a video card is to get the above issue fixed.
Supposedly, ATI now supports DivX accelration. Has anyone tried it? Does it work? What boards support it?
I think it is the responsibility of the graphics card companies to work with Nero and Adobe and others to get this video compression/decompression issue fixed. They are the only ones who can help the consumers in this arena.
I'd like to see an ATI Shiny B001 LALA and FluffyPants Edition
Me too, Brain, but how would we get that many pipelines into a pair of FluffyPants? (Not to mention the fact that I have trouble trusting anything from or including L.A. these days....)
I entirely agree that ATI's failings have never been in their hardware (exception: Rage XL) -- it's always been in their drivers. For years their drivers had a confounded refresh rate setting that had to be changed in two places.
Now back to complaining about the Rage XL. How the freak did they manage to get that POS chip on every server board on the planet? Some of my software requires the MS driver for it and some of my software requires ATI's POS driver for it. In both cases, the OpenGL applications look and run like crap. I feel for everyone wanting to put Vista on any of their servers.
I work in Linux and play games in Windows, both on the same machine. Crappy or absent Linux drivers means no ATI for me. It has nothing to do with the lack of games for Linux -- not to mention that there are plenty of OpenGL applications for Linux that would greatly benefit from some decent drivers. And what about the DivX stuff that ATI (supposedly) accelerates? That's a common Linux application.
Let's review their marketing plans and see if you can see why they, with many of their peers, are going down.
1. Make coasters at a cost of $0.25/each
2. Mail them to everybody on the planet at a cost of $0.5/each
3. Profit
or
1. Provide slow internet connections for clueless people
2. Tell them they can do no better and flood their home page with cheap political comentary and pop-up adds
3. Profit
Eh, I could go on from there but not without a redneck joke. Seriously, are they an ISP? And if so, why not work the niche; dig down and compete with local ISP companies. Move into places without ISPs, etc. So many companies fail to work their niche. It goes back to my days at MyComputer.com. This was their thinking: we have great server statistics software. That means we can make mediocre other producs only quasi-related to our niche and people will buy it. Yeah. Uhuh. So what happened? Up and one day MyComputer.com layed off 80% of its workforce and went back to making server statistics software. AOL needs to work their niche or get out altogether.
I use 4GB of RAM all the time. I also need a 64bit OS to do that. I need it for HDL compiles, which still take hours per compile unfortunately. If the so-called reconfigurable computing ever really takes off, all the developers for that will need mounds of RAM. And if the software to compile that becomes "intelligent" such that it recompiles it to match a certain situation (maybe it builds a neural net processor for a certain level in a game) , everybody's computer will need that.
If MSOffice truly took advantage of modern processors, I'm talking 64-bit, SSE2, etc, they could make significant performance enhancements.
You know what one WordPerfect feature keeps me holding on? I can left align and right align on the same freakin line. In MSWord, you have to make a freakin table to do that. O, and the reveal codes feature, that was a beaut. Microsoft should buy that (surely patented) feature from Corel. And why does it take me a full day's labor to get the styles set up in some sensible fashion so they look nice, work with the ToC, make the ToC look nice, and make the keyboard shortcuts for them work right? And how about some intelligent table resizing features? And some intelligent image location features? And why does inserting images drag the thing down -- it's not like I'm lacking in memory? And how about a warning like "you just stretched a low resolution image beyond your printer's DPI -- are you deft or did you honestly do that on purpose?" or "you just inserted a JPEG and described it as a screen capture -- are you deft or did you honestly intend to save a screen capture as a JPEG?" (I wished we had a good way to detect that last one...)
Excel is the most lacking in features. If it had useful statistic functions, matrix functions, linear algebra functions, bit shifts and packing, cell recursion, useable transposes, binary/hex input/output, etc., maybe I could cut down on the number of PHP scripts I have to write just to test algorithms. You would think that a basic maximum function like the Smith-Waterman algorithm would be easy in Excel, but alas, the affine scoring does it in. Multiple values per cell would be a great feature. And how about making the "end" key perform some useful function (maybe they did in a version later than 2k and I just haven't upgraded yet)?
Dump MSAccess to the dogs. Or at least make an OLEDB driver with reasonable speed for the sucker. The thing has always been buggy, dog slow, and lacking in useful features. Is honestly any better now than it was ten years ago? I think they should replace the thing with super-fancy front end for MSSQL server. They could then ship MSSQL server as file-based product -- something like sqlite3. That would be sweet. It would also allow people to easily work up to the full version of MSSQL Server.
unsigned, signed, signed, etc. The built in types should have size specifiers and all use the same names. The whole thing about incompatible long size is confusing and unnecessary. This also lends itself to hardware programming better. You could have an unsigned (i.e., seven bit number) handled by the compiler just fine by building in checks on the eighth bit of a byte instead of relying on the carry flag. It would be a wee bit slower, but still useful.
The second feature is some fixed data types. fixed would have sixteen bits for the whole number portion and sixteen bits for the decimal portion. unfixed would be an unsigned version of the same thing. Why do we need this? So that I can have a freakin cross-platform video and image library. libjpeg runs faster on my local box than on the $13k SGI box in the lab. Why? A nice fellow wrote the thing in fixed point MMX assembly and the Itanium chips don't have 32bit MMX support so it kicks back to the floating point overload of the DCT function. Shifting would also work directly on these fixed point numbers. I'm also a fan of making it so that shifting a floating point number inc/decs the exponent.
Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years.
So does any other time in the last 650 000 years include yesterday? Did it actually go up 27% last night? Wait, what if it included this morning? Somebody took a serious lunch break?
Re:Top 15 games as posted by 1up:
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The frustrating thing is that Final Fantasy jumped in and followed the story-based model of Dragon Warrior, yet they have never come up with a story as good as Dragon Warrior 4, and Dragon Warrior 4 had replayability.
The legend of Zelda and Metroid worked it on the maze idea. Modern games have wimpy mazes. Metroid required a notebook and mapping skills if you were to have any chance of beating the game before that expose' in Nintendo Power.
Punch-Out required an item that seems to be void in many modern games: timing. You could never master the game without great timing. Modern games follow the more ammo and quicker reflexes ideals instead.
I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed StarTropics so much. I remember it had great artwork and an intersting story. I think I enjoyed it because it was right on the border of frustrating and challenging.
I've been working with Altix boxes for the past six months. They rock. The Numalink stuff works really well. I particularly like their FPGA boxes. The only competition for them in that arena is Cray, strangely enough. Nobody else can stream data into FPGAs at 6.5Gb/s straight out of the box. Nallatech, Starbridge, and the others are just wannabes in that arena. If SGI can get their FPGA boxes into the mainstream market they may have a chance for the Altix line to save them (or at least the engineers working on those;-).
Slashdot Mirror
Politics according to Hollywood:
1. Better stop global warming. Today. Otherwise the aliens who appreciate our earth more than we do will take over tomorrow.
2. Raising minimum wage, absolutely and under any circumstances, will never result in inflation.
3. It's okay to steal from the rich and give to the poor.
4. It's okay to steal in general, particularly from wicked people like the Russians and casino owners.
5. It's okay to be "green" and still spend $30k/year in gas/electric bills.
6. Social means not-voluntary and Security means there's no real money backing it.
7. The Family Unit should be defined as sleeze in your bedroom for a week. Honestly I can't watch romantic comedies anymore because they all have a live-in.
8. Farmers, eh, we don't need them.
All I know is that my NVidia board with Media Player used to play DVDs. These days it says I'm not licensed to use that media with my graphics card. I say we sue them for free DVD decoders while we're at it. And maybe we can sue whoever made everyone start licensing their DVD decoders and charging $ for them.
And maybe someday after we put NVidia out of business for hiring marketers and management that don't actually communicate with their engineers, ATI will have drivers that actually work half as well as the NVidia beta drivers. I've always liked NVidia's driver design better than ATI. NVidia has bugs with multiple screens, but ATI has bugs with basic things like refresh rate. Of course that was three years ago I did a strong comparison between the two. Has ATI made any good strides in drivers over the past three years? (During which time it appears the NVida has been going down hill?)
...since I just use Linux, but obviously there are plenty of people oblivious to this triviality.Triviality? Obviously you've never tried to install Linux on an ICH5R device. Digging a floppy drive out of the back room is easy compared to that.
Yeah, I don't get it. It's not the cost of the parts that's the problem. $400k for a house; what's a few grand in automation? Maybe the advanced education involved in construction management these days? [duck as the hammer flies by...]
Here's what I want in home automation:
1. A nice remote control for the whole house where I can get status and control on everything electronic including lights, fans, outlets, webcams hidden above the front porch and elsewhere, garage doors, music through a number of built-in speakers throughout the house, the furnace, the furnace vents and temperature in every room, all the kitchen appliances, the sprinkler system, plasma panels on walls for photos, fountains in the yard, floor warmers, window positions, the security system, etc.
2. I want it to learn how and when I like the lights, temperature, etc.
3. I want to be able to talk to the system from any room. In other words, I want to shut the light off without getting out of bed or reaching for the remote -- it's the ultimate lazy-man syndrome.
So the one person says your deer rifle isn't much use against the military. Then you counter with AK-47s are holding up pretty well in Iraq. I just want to know this: was there any meat left on the dear after the ten seconds you held the trigger down? You must be from Arkansas. I met some hunters in Arkansas with AK-47s. Hunting in Arkansas is way different from hunting in Idaho where I'm from. Hunting in Idaho takes work. In Arkansas they just put a park bench the back of their truck and then park alongside the freeway waiting for the deer to run out from the forest.
Seriously, the second amendment is there because the founding fathers wanted people to be able to rise up against a too-powerful government. They came to America because they had no way to change their government -- through peaceful means or violent. Of course there were a number of revolutions in Europe in the 1800s; violence ended up being their method. It's what happens when you repress too long. I believe the founding fathers understood a principle that has been forgotten: freedom is worth more than life. These days it seems we give up our freedoms to preserve our life all too easily. We should assume the best in American citizens. Citizens should never lose a freedom until convicted.
And personally, I think a deer rifle would do well against a tank, assuming you had enough of them and, more importantly, enough people willing to use them.
In other words, they are admitting that they start outside the Bible to (re)interpret the Words of Scripture.
I hate that argument with a passion. They have no authority to interpret the bible as such. The word they translate as "create from the nothingness" very clearly in Hebrew means "organize from things already exisiting". I claim no authority to translate it as the latter, but I do believe the leader of my religion does. All I'm saying is this: if you don't believe your religion has authority to interpret scripture, start looking for the truth. If you're looking for religion to thwart science, start looking for the truth. If you believe in "immaterial matter", start looking for the truth -- and don't stop until you find it.
Our schools suck because parents and communities are willing to blame everything but their own disinterest in education, and therefore do nothing to fix the problem.
And where does that attitude come from? Lemme back up; I think there are enough parents and enough community members in nearly every community who care. If there are anti-intellectual sentiments in America these days they stem from two arenas. First, the breakdown of the family: if they have an unstable home life or lop-sided gender influence, why would they care about school?
Second, the socialistic trends in American government tend to lessen the importance of education. Why go to school when you can drive a corvette off minimum wage? If the parents never needed or wanted an education, why would their children? Do other countries (i.e., Japan) oversuppliment the portion of their population who fail in their education? Hardly. They haven't the resources for it.
What this country (US) needs to do is scrap the abomination of the Federal Education Dept./Board/Plan and give the power back to the people. Those neighborhoods who care should adopt and pay for the certification of some international education standard. This eliminates the need for force, helps eliminate national debt, and rewards those communities with parents who care. Heck, a system of 3rd party certification works for the universities -- why not for the other schools as well? The second thing they should do is scrap the minimum wage law altogether and let people get paid what they're worth.
NFK, sell the NUMALink to consumers! I want devices that talk at 6.5GB/sec. I want their cool FPGA boards for slightly over cost as well ;-)
You forgot my favorite: the dam parking fee. And I wanted to throw the dam parking fee attendant over the dam fence.
These cards are nice...for windows users.
I feel like my needs (as a windows user) are not actually met by these cards.
Here's my issues:
1. It takes an hour to compress a video to MP4
2. It takes an hour to change that compression to MP2 before burning it to a DVD.
3. The only way I'll spend $300 on a video card is to get the above issue fixed.
Supposedly, ATI now supports DivX accelration. Has anyone tried it? Does it work? What boards support it?
I think it is the responsibility of the graphics card companies to work with Nero and Adobe and others to get this video compression/decompression issue fixed. They are the only ones who can help the consumers in this arena.
I'd like to see an ATI Shiny B001 LALA and FluffyPants Edition
Me too, Brain, but how would we get that many pipelines into a pair of FluffyPants? (Not to mention the fact that I have trouble trusting anything from or including L.A. these days....)
I entirely agree that ATI's failings have never been in their hardware (exception: Rage XL) -- it's always been in their drivers. For years their drivers had a confounded refresh rate setting that had to be changed in two places.
Now back to complaining about the Rage XL. How the freak did they manage to get that POS chip on every server board on the planet? Some of my software requires the MS driver for it and some of my software requires ATI's POS driver for it. In both cases, the OpenGL applications look and run like crap. I feel for everyone wanting to put Vista on any of their servers.
I work in Linux and play games in Windows, both on the same machine. Crappy or absent Linux drivers means no ATI for me. It has nothing to do with the lack of games for Linux -- not to mention that there are plenty of OpenGL applications for Linux that would greatly benefit from some decent drivers. And what about the DivX stuff that ATI (supposedly) accelerates? That's a common Linux application.
are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so, Brain, but how do we get that many processors into a pair of rubber pants?
Let's review their marketing plans and see if you can see why they, with many of their peers, are going down. 1. Make coasters at a cost of $0.25/each 2. Mail them to everybody on the planet at a cost of $0.5/each 3. Profit or 1. Provide slow internet connections for clueless people 2. Tell them they can do no better and flood their home page with cheap political comentary and pop-up adds 3. Profit Eh, I could go on from there but not without a redneck joke. Seriously, are they an ISP? And if so, why not work the niche; dig down and compete with local ISP companies. Move into places without ISPs, etc. So many companies fail to work their niche. It goes back to my days at MyComputer.com. This was their thinking: we have great server statistics software. That means we can make mediocre other producs only quasi-related to our niche and people will buy it. Yeah. Uhuh. So what happened? Up and one day MyComputer.com layed off 80% of its workforce and went back to making server statistics software. AOL needs to work their niche or get out altogether.
I use 4GB of RAM all the time. I also need a 64bit OS to do that. I need it for HDL compiles, which still take hours per compile unfortunately. If the so-called reconfigurable computing ever really takes off, all the developers for that will need mounds of RAM. And if the software to compile that becomes "intelligent" such that it recompiles it to match a certain situation (maybe it builds a neural net processor for a certain level in a game) , everybody's computer will need that.
If MSOffice truly took advantage of modern processors, I'm talking 64-bit, SSE2, etc, they could make significant performance enhancements.
You know what one WordPerfect feature keeps me holding on? I can left align and right align on the same freakin line. In MSWord, you have to make a freakin table to do that. O, and the reveal codes feature, that was a beaut. Microsoft should buy that (surely patented) feature from Corel. And why does it take me a full day's labor to get the styles set up in some sensible fashion so they look nice, work with the ToC, make the ToC look nice, and make the keyboard shortcuts for them work right? And how about some intelligent table resizing features? And some intelligent image location features? And why does inserting images drag the thing down -- it's not like I'm lacking in memory? And how about a warning like "you just stretched a low resolution image beyond your printer's DPI -- are you deft or did you honestly do that on purpose?" or "you just inserted a JPEG and described it as a screen capture -- are you deft or did you honestly intend to save a screen capture as a JPEG?" (I wished we had a good way to detect that last one...)
Excel is the most lacking in features. If it had useful statistic functions, matrix functions, linear algebra functions, bit shifts and packing, cell recursion, useable transposes, binary/hex input/output, etc., maybe I could cut down on the number of PHP scripts I have to write just to test algorithms. You would think that a basic maximum function like the Smith-Waterman algorithm would be easy in Excel, but alas, the affine scoring does it in. Multiple values per cell would be a great feature. And how about making the "end" key perform some useful function (maybe they did in a version later than 2k and I just haven't upgraded yet)?
Dump MSAccess to the dogs. Or at least make an OLEDB driver with reasonable speed for the sucker. The thing has always been buggy, dog slow, and lacking in useful features. Is honestly any better now than it was ten years ago? I think they should replace the thing with super-fancy front end for MSSQL server. They could then ship MSSQL server as file-based product -- something like sqlite3. That would be sweet. It would also allow people to easily work up to the full version of MSSQL Server.
And, yeah, MS Paint. There's a beauty of a program. Whatever you do, don't rewrite that one! I like the Windows 3.0 look and feel of it.
Here's the two features I want:
unsigned, signed, signed, etc. The built in types should have size specifiers and all use the same names. The whole thing about incompatible long size is confusing and unnecessary. This also lends itself to hardware programming better. You could have an unsigned (i.e., seven bit number) handled by the compiler just fine by building in checks on the eighth bit of a byte instead of relying on the carry flag. It would be a wee bit slower, but still useful.
The second feature is some fixed data types. fixed would have sixteen bits for the whole number portion and sixteen bits for the decimal portion. unfixed would be an unsigned version of the same thing. Why do we need this? So that I can have a freakin cross-platform video and image library. libjpeg runs faster on my local box than on the $13k SGI box in the lab. Why? A nice fellow wrote the thing in fixed point MMX assembly and the Itanium chips don't have 32bit MMX support so it kicks back to the floating point overload of the DCT function. Shifting would also work directly on these fixed point numbers. I'm also a fan of making it so that shifting a floating point number inc/decs the exponent.
"Hey, Leave Barbra out of this!"
Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years.
So does any other time in the last 650 000 years include yesterday? Did it actually go up 27% last night? Wait, what if it included this morning? Somebody took a serious lunch break?
The frustrating thing is that Final Fantasy jumped in and followed the story-based model of Dragon Warrior, yet they have never come up with a story as good as Dragon Warrior 4, and Dragon Warrior 4 had replayability.
The legend of Zelda and Metroid worked it on the maze idea. Modern games have wimpy mazes. Metroid required a notebook and mapping skills if you were to have any chance of beating the game before that expose' in Nintendo Power.
Punch-Out required an item that seems to be void in many modern games: timing. You could never master the game without great timing. Modern games follow the more ammo and quicker reflexes ideals instead.
I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed StarTropics so much. I remember it had great artwork and an intersting story. I think I enjoyed it because it was right on the border of frustrating and challenging.
I've been working with Altix boxes for the past six months. They rock. The Numalink stuff works really well. I particularly like their FPGA boxes. The only competition for them in that arena is Cray, strangely enough. Nobody else can stream data into FPGAs at 6.5Gb/s straight out of the box. Nallatech, Starbridge, and the others are just wannabes in that arena. If SGI can get their FPGA boxes into the mainstream market they may have a chance for the Altix line to save them (or at least the engineers working on those ;-).
If only Mr. Twain would have tackled the problem of making the English language a parsable grammar.
The comment about precompiled headers has become a household joke:
Can't remember what the keyboard shortcut was? Check the precompiled headers.
Intruder on the network? Check the precompiled headers. (Let me see you get a copy of those for your no-name hardware router box.)
Trying to disable a program that has taken control of whole country? Yeah. Start with the precompiled headers.