He just created a new model, a new rule set, a new abstraction of math to deal with the case of "x/0". In general, dividing by zero is bad for most algorithms. I mean, from a CPU's perspective, I don't see how adding any additional hardware would help.
I would argue the main problem isn't battery life, but the ridiculously small size of the ipod. If they extended the back of the player another 0.25" you could probably get a battery in there for another 8 hours of play time. But oh... that wouldn't look sleek and consumers wouldn't buy it:\
No where to be found! Even if they do start making HD-DVD and Blueray drives for the PC's you KNOW for SURE that they won't let them play HD movies. Why? Because the companies like to shoot themselves in the foot. They think that as soon as they release the devices as add ons for PC's, people are going to start h4x0ring them. Have they ever thought about expanding their market to the hundreds of millions of PC's that already have HD capability? Guess not, they are too worried about piracy at this point.
I've only seen HD-DVD drives on laptops, which is patently ridiculous. Who wants to watch a movie on such a small screen and pay a premium for the pleasure of doing so? Blueray drives are available, but costly, and they won't play blueray movies! And this is only because of the DRM issue, no performance/technical issues are involved here.
Nothing more fun than IEEE cameras, high power lasers, picomoters, and LabVIEW! Yes, this was something I actually designed, but I'd rather not have to work in a laser lab again. Those places scare me.
Yeah, I don't understand it either. If you have a device that is so rarely used, why would it have to waste the entire spectrum that blankets the U.S.? Why can't all digital protocols be intelligent instead of wasting significant spectrum space. We'd all be better off.
Yes, I never understood why, even if you have plenty of free memory, the swap system tends to swap things back to disk for no reason in particular. I'm going to completely disable the swap file in my new system, because 4GB is reasonably affordable ($600), and I can't think of any application I would run that would need more memory than that.
Man, their prices on aero gel are expensive. $$0 for a little fragment that came off of a larger piece they accidentally broke apart? Rip off. Aero gel is pretty nifty, it looks like a solid gas, but it feels like styrofoam.
I'd be surprised if they will ever be manufactured again though. Of course, there will probably be tens of millions of them in stockrooms:)
Hey, you can get all the free microcontroller samples you want. If your a hobbyist, for the most part you can get many parts free from manfactures if you ask nicely.
Have you seen what's broadcast on regular over the air TV lately? You got 4 maybe 5 networks, out of how many channels? It's at least 69 on your TV dial. That right there is a complete and utter waste. Especially when you have something stupid like a home shopping channel. Okay, so something that would only need a few kbits/second of digital bandwidth needs the ENTIRE CHANNEL because it has to use the old analog standard.
Meanwhile, mobile computer users are waiting for a high speed, low cost, wireless everywhere solution for data. I personally think they should open up more frequencies for home Wifi systems since many more people would benefit from that. If you look at a chart of the frequencies available to the public, it's a very, VERY, small chunk of the entire spectrum.
Let's see... 750GB hard drives, fast power efficient media processors... DVR's will catch up much faster than what HD can throw at them. Heck, Blueray is 50GB, so a 750GB drive is at least several hours of content still.
If you're seriously into electronics as a hobby you won't even fathom going to radio shack for anything. I typically get parts from Jameco, Allied Electronics, or Mouser, and the selection/price is always better. Shipping can usually be done within 2 days for a decent price.
Its very rare that I'll order anything like a transistor or IC anymore though. Pretty much everything you'll ever need can be found on any variety of embedded computer systems that are out there now. Digital, analog I/O, ethernet interface... but to be fair, I'm not into the fixing amplifiers and old radios crowd.
And I'm going to scream the next time I see someone suggesting a 555 timer instead of a microcontroller for pulse/timer generation!
my observations with core 6
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, I recently installed Fedora Core 6 on a new computer for my class, here are my observations as an infrequent Linux user:
-Frequently crashes on I/O errors (I assume a bad driver, not working well with dual core?). -Inconsistency between control panels (too many tools do the same thing, scattered around the system). -File sharing is a _little_ easier to setup, but I still had issues with it. Why can't a right click a folder, set permissions, and share? -Fonts are still INCREDIBLY UGLY and illegible even after almost 10 years of Redhat. -Still can't play.MOV files (i.e. movie trailers) -Can't play divx out of the box -Flash wasn't installed with Firefox.
Yeah, there are probably ways I could fix the last three, but come on, these should be standard. Are any other flavors of Linux ready for the consumer desktop? I mostly just use it for research, because it's a good platform for that. I can't stand it though for just a desktop OS. I've done slackware before, even scarier to me. Any other distro suggestions?
I've got a Toughbook tablet PC at work and I've got to say, it's an incredible machine (build wise). I've dropped it at least two times from table height onto a hard floor with just a small scratch in the corner. It's really hard to justify the price though. The only reason I needed it at work is because I mostly do field support of industrial control systems, and the 500 nits screen is much easier to read than the crummy 180 nits you find on most laptops. Oh, and the battery lasts about 5 hours to boot!
I've seen someone use a green laser pointer during a meeting for a presentation. It's just waay to distracting. Not because it's green, but because it was so bright! It almost hurt my eyes to look at it. It's like staring at a bright light bulb across the room. Not something that helps your vision as you'd get ghost images of it after looking around. I guess a blue laser pointer would be okay, but not if it's extraordinarily bright.
Wow, keeping something electronic longer than two years? I dunno, living in the bay area, I don't see a lot of that. I see computers thrown in dumpsters all the time that can't be more than 4 or 5 years old. I've thrown a few Pentium II machines away myself simply because I don't have room for them. I also do tend to upgrade a major component in my computer every 6 months or so, so I have a lot of older expansion cards and HD that I have to get rid of regularly. Heck, who wants an old 56k modem, 10bT ISA ethernet card, or 2GB hard drive anyway? Sure there might be someone out there, but honestly I don't have the time or patience to deal with e-bay. Not worth how much I could get for this junk.
I am however responsible... I have a 19" CRT that's in good condition that I have to PAY to get disposed of simply because I don't use it anymore. Soon to be replaced by a 24", 6ms Samsung:D
You know, so you don't have huge crowds like this? Charge a premium to those that want to pick it up the day it's released. No wonder Sony is loosing so much money. If there is that much demand for their product, why aren't they charging more?
I for one don't miss Colbert. Was sick of seeing so many clips of that show as if it was somehow "insightful" as if they have any idea how politics actually works in the real world.
If DeBeers isn't a U.S. company, I would say there is good reason for the U.S. to subsidize companies in the U.S. that manufacture diamonds. Money spent on diamonds made in the U.S. would stay in the U.S. I'm sure other countries would support this formula too.
How many technologies do they think they are going to cram into the 2.4GHz range? It's ridiculus. Bluetooth, 802.11, ZigBee, Microwave ovens, cordless phones, game controllers, and now USB? Why can't the FCC open up more frequencies to the public instead of selling them of to the cellphone corporations?
I have to say, this is my opinion exactly. The real problem is that environmentalist keep trying to give human emotions and wants to plants, animals, and the earth. It's ridicilus. The earth doesn't "want" this or that environment or polution. It just exists. It doesn't care how it exists, it just does. If humans did not exist it wouldn't matter if the earth were a barren like mars, a tropical rainforest, or a huge vate of bacterial goo. It doesn't matter, because mattering is a human concept. We should develop the earth to optimize our existance, like any other species does. Of course, that does mean preservering species and environments if it's to our benefit, but we shouldn't worry that "oh no I stepped on an ant and made mother earth cry"
Wow, that's a pretty stupid thing to say, considering most game user interfaces are vector based. A vector graphics program does nothing but draw polygons, which umm... yeah, graphics cards are pretty good at rendering millions of them and shading them. Inkscape probably isn't using all of the proper windows API's for 2D acceleration anyway. I'd be surprised if it was in linux either.
Even the windows GDI is hardware acceleration, which will probably be rolled into directX at some point. To have a vector program not use hardware accelleration with 1920x1600 resolution is pathetic.
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He just created a new model, a new rule set, a new abstraction of math to deal with the case of "x/0". In general, dividing by zero is bad for most algorithms. I mean, from a CPU's perspective, I don't see how adding any additional hardware would help.
I would argue the main problem isn't battery life, but the ridiculously small size of the ipod. If they extended the back of the player another 0.25" you could probably get a battery in there for another 8 hours of play time. But oh... that wouldn't look sleek and consumers wouldn't buy it :\
No where to be found! Even if they do start making HD-DVD and Blueray drives for the PC's you KNOW for SURE that they won't let them play HD movies. Why? Because the companies like to shoot themselves in the foot. They think that as soon as they release the devices as add ons for PC's, people are going to start h4x0ring them. Have they ever thought about expanding their market to the hundreds of millions of PC's that already have HD capability? Guess not, they are too worried about piracy at this point.
I've only seen HD-DVD drives on laptops, which is patently ridiculous. Who wants to watch a movie on such a small screen and pay a premium for the pleasure of doing so? Blueray drives are available, but costly, and they won't play blueray movies! And this is only because of the DRM issue, no performance/technical issues are involved here.
Sony, Toshiba, you both suck.
Nothing more fun than IEEE cameras, high power lasers, picomoters, and LabVIEW! Yes, this was something I actually designed, but I'd rather not have to work in a laser lab again. Those places scare me.
Yeah, I don't understand it either. If you have a device that is so rarely used, why would it have to waste the entire spectrum that blankets the U.S.? Why can't all digital protocols be intelligent instead of wasting significant spectrum space. We'd all be better off.
Yes, I never understood why, even if you have plenty of free memory, the swap system tends to swap things back to disk for no reason in particular. I'm going to completely disable the swap file in my new system, because 4GB is reasonably affordable ($600), and I can't think of any application I would run that would need more memory than that.
Man, their prices on aero gel are expensive. $$0 for a little fragment that came off of a larger piece they accidentally broke apart? Rip off. Aero gel is pretty nifty, it looks like a solid gas, but it feels like styrofoam.
Hey, we'll import your prescription drugs and you can import our tax free CDRs/DVDRs and we'll call it even :)
I'd be surprised if they will ever be manufactured again though. Of course, there will probably be tens of millions of them in stockrooms :)
Hey, you can get all the free microcontroller samples you want. If your a hobbyist, for the most part you can get many parts free from manfactures if you ask nicely.
A PIC10F is less than $0.50 btw.
Have you seen what's broadcast on regular over the air TV lately? You got 4 maybe 5 networks, out of how many channels? It's at least 69 on your TV dial. That right there is a complete and utter waste. Especially when you have something stupid like a home shopping channel. Okay, so something that would only need a few kbits/second of digital bandwidth needs the ENTIRE CHANNEL because it has to use the old analog standard.
Meanwhile, mobile computer users are waiting for a high speed, low cost, wireless everywhere solution for data. I personally think they should open up more frequencies for home Wifi systems since many more people would benefit from that. If you look at a chart of the frequencies available to the public, it's a very, VERY, small chunk of the entire spectrum.
Let's see... 750GB hard drives, fast power efficient media processors... DVR's will catch up much faster than what HD can throw at them. Heck, Blueray is 50GB, so a 750GB drive is at least several hours of content still.
If you're seriously into electronics as a hobby you won't even fathom going to radio shack for anything. I typically get parts from Jameco, Allied Electronics, or Mouser, and the selection/price is always better. Shipping can usually be done within 2 days for a decent price.
Its very rare that I'll order anything like a transistor or IC anymore though. Pretty much everything you'll ever need can be found on any variety of embedded computer systems that are out there now. Digital, analog I/O, ethernet interface... but to be fair, I'm not into the fixing amplifiers and old radios crowd.
And I'm going to scream the next time I see someone suggesting a 555 timer instead of a microcontroller for pulse/timer generation!
Okay, I recently installed Fedora Core 6 on a new computer for my class, here are my observations as an infrequent Linux user:
.MOV files (i.e. movie trailers)
-Frequently crashes on I/O errors (I assume a bad driver, not working well with dual core?).
-Inconsistency between control panels (too many tools do the same thing, scattered around the system).
-File sharing is a _little_ easier to setup, but I still had issues with it. Why can't a right click a folder, set permissions, and share?
-Fonts are still INCREDIBLY UGLY and illegible even after almost 10 years of Redhat.
-Still can't play
-Can't play divx out of the box
-Flash wasn't installed with Firefox.
Yeah, there are probably ways I could fix the last three, but come on, these should be standard. Are any other flavors of Linux ready for the consumer desktop? I mostly just use it for research, because it's a good platform for that. I can't stand it though for just a desktop OS. I've done slackware before, even scarier to me. Any other distro suggestions?
I've got a Toughbook tablet PC at work and I've got to say, it's an incredible machine (build wise). I've dropped it at least two times from table height onto a hard floor with just a small scratch in the corner. It's really hard to justify the price though. The only reason I needed it at work is because I mostly do field support of industrial control systems, and the 500 nits screen is much easier to read than the crummy 180 nits you find on most laptops. Oh, and the battery lasts about 5 hours to boot!
I've seen someone use a green laser pointer during a meeting for a presentation. It's just waay to distracting. Not because it's green, but because it was so bright! It almost hurt my eyes to look at it. It's like staring at a bright light bulb across the room. Not something that helps your vision as you'd get ghost images of it after looking around. I guess a blue laser pointer would be okay, but not if it's extraordinarily bright.
Wow, keeping something electronic longer than two years? I dunno, living in the bay area, I don't see a lot of that. I see computers thrown in dumpsters all the time that can't be more than 4 or 5 years old. I've thrown a few Pentium II machines away myself simply because I don't have room for them. I also do tend to upgrade a major component in my computer every 6 months or so, so I have a lot of older expansion cards and HD that I have to get rid of regularly. Heck, who wants an old 56k modem, 10bT ISA ethernet card, or 2GB hard drive anyway? Sure there might be someone out there, but honestly I don't have the time or patience to deal with e-bay. Not worth how much I could get for this junk.
:D
I am however responsible... I have a 19" CRT that's in good condition that I have to PAY to get disposed of simply because I don't use it anymore. Soon to be replaced by a 24", 6ms Samsung
You know, so you don't have huge crowds like this? Charge a premium to those that want to pick it up the day it's released. No wonder Sony is loosing so much money. If there is that much demand for their product, why aren't they charging more?
The FBI is going to break into your house just for reading this slashdot article! You are now an enemy of the state!
I for one don't miss Colbert. Was sick of seeing so many clips of that show as if it was somehow "insightful" as if they have any idea how politics actually works in the real world.
Really? That sucks...
If DeBeers isn't a U.S. company, I would say there is good reason for the U.S. to subsidize companies in the U.S. that manufacture diamonds. Money spent on diamonds made in the U.S. would stay in the U.S. I'm sure other countries would support this formula too.
How many technologies do they think they are going to cram into the 2.4GHz range? It's ridiculus. Bluetooth, 802.11, ZigBee, Microwave ovens, cordless phones, game controllers, and now USB? Why can't the FCC open up more frequencies to the public instead of selling them of to the cellphone corporations?
I have to say, this is my opinion exactly. The real problem is that environmentalist keep trying to give human emotions and wants to plants, animals, and the earth. It's ridicilus. The earth doesn't "want" this or that environment or polution. It just exists. It doesn't care how it exists, it just does. If humans did not exist it wouldn't matter if the earth were a barren like mars, a tropical rainforest, or a huge vate of bacterial goo. It doesn't matter, because mattering is a human concept. We should develop the earth to optimize our existance, like any other species does. Of course, that does mean preservering species and environments if it's to our benefit, but we shouldn't worry that "oh no I stepped on an ant and made mother earth cry"
I memorized pi to 200 digits one day because I was bored. Yes i'm good at math and generally unhappy :(
3.141592653589... umm.. ah forget it...
Wow, that's a pretty stupid thing to say, considering most game user interfaces are vector based. A vector graphics program does nothing but draw polygons, which umm... yeah, graphics cards are pretty good at rendering millions of them and shading them. Inkscape probably isn't using all of the proper windows API's for 2D acceleration anyway. I'd be surprised if it was in linux either.
Even the windows GDI is hardware acceleration, which will probably be rolled into directX at some point. To have a vector program not use hardware accelleration with 1920x1600 resolution is pathetic.