The mail comparision only holds up if people always re-use envelopes though.
They don't, envelopes (for the most part) are a one-time-use item. Money is not. If you get a bank note that has passed through the hands of a criminal at some time (very very common if you look at the stats) do you really want the cops pulling you over because you happen to have a bank note that just happened to have been in the hands of a wanted felon a few months ago?
IIRC they recently did a test to see how many bank notes had come into contact with cocaine, a while ago, the results were quite staggering (most bank notes HAD at some point been in contact with cocaine).
Umm, I thought 10base-5 was AUI, ie 5 signals (CI, TX, RX,(in differential +/- pairs) Gnd and +12v). I always assumed that was where the '5' came from. And I seem to remember that AUI's maximum cable run is significantly more than 500 feet (more like a couple of miles if you plan your network properly, from what I remember).
It always made sense to me that way anyway, AUI is 5 signals, 10base2 (thin-net to the chronologically challenged among us) uses 2 signals.
As I understood it, 10base-100 was the original name for what most people call 100base-TX these days. Some people still seem to refer to it as 10base-100.
Btw, a little nitpick, the TX would refer to 4 pair (all 8 conductors), 10base-T uses 2 pair, 10base-TX and 100base-TX use all 4 pairs.
Well commented code can end up with quite a high percentage of the code base as commments.
I once wrote a 'small' 150k line util. Before I left the company, I was asked to comment it, after decent amounts (ie, more than '// perform the calculation') of comments, the line count was around 230k.
So how many of the quarter million are comments then ?
Not nessecarily, the connectors are a lot smaller, and no doubt sATA manufacturers will squeeze 4+ bus controllers into single chips.
1 Device per connector is my biggest gripe with sATA, but it will probably work out ok.
My second biggest gripe is that they didn't bother to think hard about external cabling issues. sATA doesn't define an external device standard at all, IMO the inside of a PC case is getting too crowded.
(Hell, scale it up. Issue the warrant and use transmitters mounted on every cell phone tower in the county to drop the perp. No cops required!)
Wouldn't work. What happens if/when a perp is driving at 80 on the freeway when it happens? You now have say 30-40 innocent people killed in a pile-up that was caused by the police's 'safe' arrest system. Can you say 'PR nightmare' ?
As for cyanide and other nonsense, again, it wouldn't work. It would only take 2-3 cases where the dosage is accidently released (stand too close to a microwave) and you have another PR nighmare.
Of course, they haven't thought this thru too well as it stands... You pretty much have a guarenteed non-vote by probably all jewish people, and most people old enough to remember/care about the 'ID stamping' that hitler did. Just about every politician fears the eldery's vote as it is.
I'd love to be able to pull out my single CPU and put in a new one, all without shutting the machine down;)
As long as the board maintains the RAM contents, and can vector a newly inserted CPU to an area of memory capable of setting up the CPU where it was previously, this shouldn't be too impossible.
After all, its not that far removed from 'hibernation' mode that most laptops offer (under windows), with the difference that you're not powering up the whole machine back to a previous state, just the CPU.
Is it a useful feature on a single CPU machine? Maybe, Maybe not. It would reduce downtime for a server running on a 1 CPU box, but most serious servers where that matters aren't running 1 CPU.
The only complication would be that most legitimate reasons to allow hot-swapping a CPU on a single-CPU board are based around failure conditions, where you probably can't assume that the contents of RAM are 'sane'.
IMO, the best solution is to have the physics definitions modular, or at least programmable. This is one of the advantages of UT, its physics can be overriden fairly easily.
Even on games where there doesn't appear to be any need for modular physics, there will always be some mod author that sees a need. Say you are writing a racer, you might think that the physics should be fixed to real-world physics, but the mod author that wants to write a 'dune buggies on the moon' mod, is going to disagree with you, so keep it modular:)
You might want to check the mailing lists. I believe there was some 'Audigy works' traffic on it a few days ago.
The soundcard matrix isn't terribly up to date at the best of times to be honest, though it might be tested against 0.5.x releases rather than the 'beta' 0.9.x series.
Look a little further down the list for the other submissions by the 'bio' contributor, and you'd see 'block I/O'.
Hey, there's one of the reasons why the names are useful, you can attribute the area of code that is probably being changed, if the changelog messasge is a little terse
50 years and we don't have a significantly better language than Smalltalk
Eh? Smalltalk isn't THAT old, its only 20 years old (the original spec was Smalltalk-80 after all). That makes it newer than Lisp, C, Fortran, Cobol, most Algol derived languages, etc.
Common lisp dates back to around the same time as smalltalk (81-82ish), but original Lisp dates back to the fairly early days of computing ('58 ish).
ADA dates back to around 79-80, though the original DOD study goes back a couple of years earlier.
The fact is, very few successful languages have appeared in the last 20 years. Most of the post-1980 languages are extensions/redesigns of existing languages (C->C++, Pascal->Modula/Oberon series, Fortran->F90). About the only sucessful 'language' that is totally original that has appeared in the last 20 years, that I can think of, is Perl.
I just did a weekly trawl of the alsa mailing lists, and it appears that the bug was fixed in 0.9.0beta10, and it was kernel 2.4.14+ specific. So tomorrow will be a day to devote a chunk of to upgrading alsa on my machines.
Also, if anyone out there is planning to upgrade to 2.4.14/2.4.16 kernel and uses alsa, be aware that this situation does exist, and you'll need to grab the latest alsa beta to have midi, most likely.
For me, the big advantage is the MIDI subsystem, it handles multiple ports elegantly (without a lot of/dev/sequencer* entries) and you can easily enumerate ports, get port features and synth 'type' (GM/GS/XG/MT32).
Unfortunately, 0.9.0beta9 completely broke midi here ('invalid IOCTL' on every attempt to open a connection to the MIDI subsystem). So I've had to suspend work on my MIDI/Audio app for the time being. (I should install 0.9.0beta10 and see if things work again, but it takes a bit of a chunk of a day to do)
ALSA also offers a lot of drivers for cards that aren't covered in OSS-lite.
Also, the PCM drivers offer similar advantages to the MIDI subsystem, in terms of enumerating devices and device capabilities. This makes it somewhat attractive from a app development point of view. Admittably I haven't looked at OSS in a while, so it might have gained some enumeration/caps abilities, but last time I looked it was fairly limited and you had to probe/dev/sndstat to get some minimal info)
Many DVD-RAM drives don't even need the cartridge to write a Type-II disc, I know my Hitachi will write Type-II with or without the cartridge.
Since only one DVD-ROM i have will read DVD-RAM Type II's, and its the DVD-ROM in the same machine, it makes no sense to remove the disks from the cartridge though for me, as the cartridge adds a little extra dust/scratch protection.
*Some* DVD-ROM drives will read Type II cartridge-less DVD-RAM drives, many of the newer ones in fact.
*Some* DVD players will even read them, but its fairly rare since there is little incentive to add it as a feature unless you're using a common DVD mechanism that just happens to support DVD-RAM.
While others have replied with other good reasons, there is one important reason that everyone has missed.... PSU dependance...
With an internal DVD-R drive you're talking about quite a lot of extra power drain on your PC's PSU. Not a big deal if you're using a P2, but on a P3/P4/Athlon with a power hungry video card, it can make enough of a difference to need a new PSU. I know PSU's aren't that expensive, but the hassle of disassembling a working system to replace the PSU IS. And yes, its a lot more hassle than adding an IDE drive would be.
An external drive means an external/seperate PSU. When you have 3 or 4 external drives, the advantage is probably close to 200W of power dependance removed from the PC's PSU.
Also, as I understand it, DVD-R's can run quite hot, another good reason to remove them from the 'main' PC case if possible.
IGN (and probably other Snowball sites) have been using these 'inline shockwave' ads for a while that appear OVER the page you're reading. They're very very annoying because usually they spend some time completely covering what you're trying to read before they minimise/disappear.
As I've said before here, the most annoying of these ads is the one where numbers drop from the top of the page to the bottom, accumulating in a big heap, until the whole page is obscured. Then some 'is your long distance THIS cheap' ad pops up in the page, and the numbers vanish. It wouldn't be THAT annoying except that thet whole process takes a couple of minutes, and it becomes progressively harder to read the page you're trying to read.
They're annoying enough that for the most part I don't read IGN anymore, and others I know have made the same decision. I hope these ads bring a lot of revenue per display, because more and more sites will see their readers drop off sharply when they start utilising them.
Try World of Spectrum... Which is a repository for all things spectrum.
The best DOS Speccy emu right now is realspec (Ramsoft), which will run under dosemu (minus sound or joystick support), but there are many emulators for various systems, so take a look at worldofspectrum and take your pick:)
Basically, about 1.8 billion years ago, an area of africa containing Uranium 235 fissioned (?is that a word?) naturally, over a period of around a million years.
If this is GMIC its referring to, which it looks like it is, then its not even ethernet at all, but a custom protocol somewhat like S/PDIF or AES/EBU, but a multiplexed bitstream put onto a CAT5 cable. When Gibson announced GMIC about 2-3 years ago, they never made any mention of it BEING ethernet, just that it would use existing ethernet cable/connectors for sake of convienence.
Well, FOX ought to be careful. I've heard lots of rumors about various production companies considering ditching FOX if they don't get their act together, due to pre-emption and lousy timeslots.
The way things are going, FOX could lose Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, etc. I suppose if they put sports above all of those anyway, which they seem to, they won't care that much...
Btw, if sports are so important to FOX, why don't they leverage their FOX Sports network more? I find it hard to believe that the hardcore sports fans out there are all still watching OTA, heck, I find it hard to believe that even a reasonably sized minority of hardcore sports fans are still OTA.
To illustrate the insanity of FOX pre-emptions, last week a football game ended early. Instead of carrying on with regular scheduled programming (if the game had finished on time, it would have been King of the Hill), they decided that they'd fill the extra 10 minutes, and the next hour, by bringing in an unscheduled game, hence pre-empting King of the Hill. Pre-emption for a game that wasn't supposed to be aired anyway? How insane is that?
To be honest, I'd rather wait the extra few weeks, and NOT have to put up with 'this weeks episode of Futurama has been pre-empted by game X of the NFL season' - which is the reason WHY they delayed the season premiere, from what I've read.
I am *still* puzzled over this weeks simpsons being bumped for Star Wars: Episode 1, sure its an OK movie, but bumping Simpsons for it? come on, surely someone could have thought out the scheduling a little better...
They're not exactly proprietary, you can buy the screwdrivers for the screws nintendo uses at just about any electronics supply place. They are usually referred to as 'security bolt' drivers, and only cost a couple of dollars.
As to WHY they use them, no idea. I suppose it convinces a handful of would be 'fix it myself' people to bother opening the console, though the people that have enough of a clue to do repairs themselves won't be put off by it really. So maybe it reduces any potential liability a little further than just the 'no user servicable parts inside'.
The triangular head screws on GB/GBC/GBA probably have some basis in nessecity, the screws are smaller and require less clearance room than regular philips screws of a similar size.
I haven't seen the GameCube's screws yet, but I suspect they're the same screws as used on SNES and N64 consoles and carts, and (although much smaller) on GB/GBC/GBA carts.
In the end, they only people they stop gaining access to the machine/cart is the casual tinkerer, and perhaps thats the real intention, as those are the people more likely to rip a console apart, then be surprised when it no longer works, and demand a replacement under warrenty.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't, envelopes (for the most part) are a one-time-use item. Money is not. If you get a bank note that has passed through the hands of a criminal at some time (very very common if you look at the stats) do you really want the cops pulling you over because you happen to have a bank note that just happened to have been in the hands of a wanted felon a few months ago?
IIRC they recently did a test to see how many bank notes had come into contact with cocaine, a while ago, the results were quite staggering (most bank notes HAD at some point been in contact with cocaine).
It always made sense to me that way anyway, AUI is 5 signals, 10base2 (thin-net to the chronologically challenged among us) uses 2 signals.
Btw, a little nitpick, the TX would refer to 4 pair (all 8 conductors), 10base-T uses 2 pair, 10base-TX and 100base-TX use all 4 pairs.
I once wrote a 'small' 150k line util. Before I left the company, I was asked to comment it, after decent amounts (ie, more than '// perform the calculation') of comments, the line count was around 230k.
So how many of the quarter million are comments then ?
1 Device per connector is my biggest gripe with sATA, but it will probably work out ok.
My second biggest gripe is that they didn't bother to think hard about external cabling issues. sATA doesn't define an external device standard at all, IMO the inside of a PC case is getting too crowded.
We still have SCSI160 and SCSI320 I guess...
Wouldn't work. What happens if/when a perp is driving at 80 on the freeway when it happens? You now have say 30-40 innocent people killed in a pile-up that was caused by the police's 'safe' arrest system. Can you say 'PR nightmare' ?
As for cyanide and other nonsense, again, it wouldn't work. It would only take 2-3 cases where the dosage is accidently released (stand too close to a microwave) and you have another PR nighmare.
Of course, they haven't thought this thru too well as it stands... You pretty much have a guarenteed non-vote by probably all jewish people, and most people old enough to remember/care about the 'ID stamping' that hitler did. Just about every politician fears the eldery's vote as it is.
As long as the board maintains the RAM contents, and can vector a newly inserted CPU to an area of memory capable of setting up the CPU where it was previously, this shouldn't be too impossible.
After all, its not that far removed from 'hibernation' mode that most laptops offer (under windows), with the difference that you're not powering up the whole machine back to a previous state, just the CPU.
Is it a useful feature on a single CPU machine? Maybe, Maybe not. It would reduce downtime for a server running on a 1 CPU box, but most serious servers where that matters aren't running 1 CPU.
The only complication would be that most legitimate reasons to allow hot-swapping a CPU on a single-CPU board are based around failure conditions, where you probably can't assume that the contents of RAM are 'sane'.
Even on games where there doesn't appear to be any need for modular physics, there will always be some mod author that sees a need. Say you are writing a racer, you might think that the physics should be fixed to real-world physics, but the mod author that wants to write a 'dune buggies on the moon' mod, is going to disagree with you, so keep it modular :)
The soundcard matrix isn't terribly up to date at the best of times to be honest, though it might be tested against 0.5.x releases rather than the 'beta' 0.9.x series.
Hey, there's one of the reasons why the names are useful, you can attribute the area of code that is probably being changed, if the changelog messasge is a little terse
Also, from what I remember 'saint nicholas' was/is the patron saint of Russia...
Eh? Smalltalk isn't THAT old, its only 20 years old (the original spec was Smalltalk-80 after all). That makes it newer than Lisp, C, Fortran, Cobol, most Algol derived languages, etc.
Common lisp dates back to around the same time as smalltalk (81-82ish), but original Lisp dates back to the fairly early days of computing ('58 ish).
ADA dates back to around 79-80, though the original DOD study goes back a couple of years earlier.
The fact is, very few successful languages have appeared in the last 20 years. Most of the post-1980 languages are extensions/redesigns of existing languages (C->C++, Pascal->Modula/Oberon series, Fortran->F90). About the only sucessful 'language' that is totally original that has appeared in the last 20 years, that I can think of, is Perl.
I just did a weekly trawl of the alsa mailing lists, and it appears that the bug was fixed in 0.9.0beta10, and it was kernel 2.4.14+ specific. So tomorrow will be a day to devote a chunk of to upgrading alsa on my machines.
Also, if anyone out there is planning to upgrade to 2.4.14/2.4.16 kernel and uses alsa, be aware that this situation does exist, and you'll need to grab the latest alsa beta to have midi, most likely.
Unfortunately, 0.9.0beta9 completely broke midi here ('invalid IOCTL' on every attempt to open a connection to the MIDI subsystem). So I've had to suspend work on my MIDI/Audio app for the time being. (I should install 0.9.0beta10 and see if things work again, but it takes a bit of a chunk of a day to do)
ALSA also offers a lot of drivers for cards that aren't covered in OSS-lite.
Also, the PCM drivers offer similar advantages to the MIDI subsystem, in terms of enumerating devices and device capabilities. This makes it somewhat attractive from a app development point of view. Admittably I haven't looked at OSS in a while, so it might have gained some enumeration/caps abilities, but last time I looked it was fairly limited and you had to probe /dev/sndstat to get some minimal info)
If you put metal in a microwave, you'll get thrown back in time and get stuck!!!
Since only one DVD-ROM i have will read DVD-RAM Type II's, and its the DVD-ROM in the same machine, it makes no sense to remove the disks from the cartridge though for me, as the cartridge adds a little extra dust/scratch protection.
*Some* DVD players will even read them, but its fairly rare since there is little incentive to add it as a feature unless you're using a common DVD mechanism that just happens to support DVD-RAM.
With an internal DVD-R drive you're talking about quite a lot of extra power drain on your PC's PSU. Not a big deal if you're using a P2, but on a P3/P4/Athlon with a power hungry video card, it can make enough of a difference to need a new PSU. I know PSU's aren't that expensive, but the hassle of disassembling a working system to replace the PSU IS. And yes, its a lot more hassle than adding an IDE drive would be.
An external drive means an external/seperate PSU. When you have 3 or 4 external drives, the advantage is probably close to 200W of power dependance removed from the PC's PSU.
Also, as I understand it, DVD-R's can run quite hot, another good reason to remove them from the 'main' PC case if possible.
As I've said before here, the most annoying of these ads is the one where numbers drop from the top of the page to the bottom, accumulating in a big heap, until the whole page is obscured. Then some 'is your long distance THIS cheap' ad pops up in the page, and the numbers vanish. It wouldn't be THAT annoying except that thet whole process takes a couple of minutes, and it becomes progressively harder to read the page you're trying to read.
They're annoying enough that for the most part I don't read IGN anymore, and others I know have made the same decision. I hope these ads bring a lot of revenue per display, because more and more sites will see their readers drop off sharply when they start utilising them.
The best DOS Speccy emu right now is realspec (Ramsoft), which will run under dosemu (minus sound or joystick support), but there are many emulators for various systems, so take a look at worldofspectrum and take your pick :)
Natural Fission in africa
A longer article
Basically, about 1.8 billion years ago, an area of africa containing Uranium 235 fissioned (?is that a word?) naturally, over a period of around a million years.
If this is GMIC its referring to, which it looks like it is, then its not even ethernet at all, but a custom protocol somewhat like S/PDIF or AES/EBU, but a multiplexed bitstream put onto a CAT5 cable. When Gibson announced GMIC about 2-3 years ago, they never made any mention of it BEING ethernet, just that it would use existing ethernet cable/connectors for sake of convienence.
The way things are going, FOX could lose Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, etc. I suppose if they put sports above all of those anyway, which they seem to, they won't care that much...
Btw, if sports are so important to FOX, why don't they leverage their FOX Sports network more? I find it hard to believe that the hardcore sports fans out there are all still watching OTA, heck, I find it hard to believe that even a reasonably sized minority of hardcore sports fans are still OTA.
To illustrate the insanity of FOX pre-emptions, last week a football game ended early. Instead of carrying on with regular scheduled programming (if the game had finished on time, it would have been King of the Hill), they decided that they'd fill the extra 10 minutes, and the next hour, by bringing in an unscheduled game, hence pre-empting King of the Hill. Pre-emption for a game that wasn't supposed to be aired anyway? How insane is that?
I am *still* puzzled over this weeks simpsons being bumped for Star Wars: Episode 1, sure its an OK movie, but bumping Simpsons for it? come on, surely someone could have thought out the scheduling a little better...
As to WHY they use them, no idea. I suppose it convinces a handful of would be 'fix it myself' people to bother opening the console, though the people that have enough of a clue to do repairs themselves won't be put off by it really. So maybe it reduces any potential liability a little further than just the 'no user servicable parts inside'.
The triangular head screws on GB/GBC/GBA probably have some basis in nessecity, the screws are smaller and require less clearance room than regular philips screws of a similar size.
I haven't seen the GameCube's screws yet, but I suspect they're the same screws as used on SNES and N64 consoles and carts, and (although much smaller) on GB/GBC/GBA carts.
In the end, they only people they stop gaining access to the machine/cart is the casual tinkerer, and perhaps thats the real intention, as those are the people more likely to rip a console apart, then be surprised when it no longer works, and demand a replacement under warrenty.