Meanwhile, everyone just happily tolerated Windoze BSODs, even though they were, and still are, no more informative than Amiga Guru Meditations.
What's that supposed to mean? If having information, even cryptic info, is helpful for the Amiga, why is it only "tolerated" in the BSOD?
Perhaps I was unclear. BSODs were/are tolerated in the Windows world, but Guru Meditations weren't tolerated. According to industry pundits at the time, Guru Meditations were offered as "proof" that Amiga was an unreliable platform that should be avoided. Then comes crash-happy Windows, and the pundits acknowledge BSODs very rarely, and only then with the aphorism, "Oh well, it happens."
Those of us who were Amiga stalwarts saw this overt practice of double-standards as just the tiniest bit unfair.
Everyone likes to malign the Amiga system crash dialog, simply because it bore the term 'Guru Meditation'. "Ha ha," they joke, "see how primitive and useless the error message was."
You have to understand that this was a massive advance forward. Prior to that, the major systems were first-generation Macs (which displayed a certain number of bomb icons and nothing else); and Apple ]['s, Commodore-64s, and MS-DOS-running PC clones -- all of which displayed nothing; it just (if you were lucky) silently locked up.
Carl Sassenrath, designer and author of the Amiga's 'kernel', thought this state of affairs sucked, so he did something about it. Amiga's Guru Meditations, cryptic though they were, told the programmer which task was responsible for the crash (first hex number), and what exception it generated (second hex number). You could then hit the right mouse button to drop into a very primitive serial debugger to get more information. While these numbers were useless to 95% of the users out there, it was information the user could give to the vendor, helping them track down the problem more easily -- information they never had before.
Meanwhile, everyone just happily tolerated Windoze BSODs, even though they were, and still are, no more informative than Amiga Guru Meditations.
CVS has too many inherent limitations to make it a good choice for large-scale projects. Although it's been around for just ever and is fairly solid, there are a couple of issues that make CVS a sub-optimal choice.
First, CVS is built on top of RCS and, as such, doesn't handle binary files. Okay, that's a fib; it sorta kinda does, but it's very klunky, and easily prone to errors. Further, it's easy for the "binary-ness" of a file to be lost (i.e. be treated as text), resulting in all kinds of nasty corruption. Best Practices will avoid this, but everyone has to be on their toes all the time.
Second, CVS has no notion of "transactions". Let's say you check in a bugfix/new feature to the kernel. The change involves modifying six different files. CVS does not see this checkin as a single transaction, but six completely separate ones. So a lot of information about the scope of a given change is not easily found. The only way you can know a particular change affected multiple files is by noticing that their checkin comments are identical. Further, if you perform a checkin against multiple files and one or more of them has a conflict (someone else checked in a change before you did), CVS will simply halt at the conflicting file; earlier files successfully checked in up to that point are not backed out. Thus, the repository is left in an inconsistent state. Best Practices can avoid this but, again, everyone has to be on their toes.
Other source control systems don't have these problems. In particular, Subversion is transaction-based, so groups of files checked in at once either all get checked in, or none of them do, keeping the repository consistent. Also, Subversion handles arbitrary meta-data for each file, including its MIME type, so the "binary-ness" of a file cannot be lost or modified unless you expressly change its MIME type. Even better, Subversion will automatically perform newline translation to/from your local platform when checking out/in text files.
For small projects with small numbers of people, CVS is perfectly okay. But beyond a certain scale, CVS's limitations start to get in the way, and you need something better.
But eventually, I got tired of waiting for terrible shipping delays, having my shipments sent back because nobody was available to pick up at 10:00 in the morning (does UPS realize that people work during the day and can't pick up packages at home?)
That's why I used to have all my online orders delivered to me at work. I'd get a polite phone call from our receptionist telling me a package had arrived, and I'd go upstairs and get it. AFAIK, credit card companies will let you specify an alternate shipping address (and since you usually give them your work address as well, that can also be an authenticated address).
The only hazard was that, occasionally, the package would get delivered not to me but to the Charles Schwab brokerage downstairs.
But it's an unpublished work. How the hell is anyone supposed to know it's copyrighted?
Some weasel saunters into your legal department representing an organization guilty of deception, fraud, and negligent homicide. He claims that some data on your servers is his "property" and must be deleted. You're going to just take his word for it?
DRM (Digital Restrictions Mechanism) is a bug. It is the intentional introducton of a capacity for failure where one otherwise wouldn't have existed. Recording of the data would have happened perfectly and without incident had the DRM facilities not been incorporated.
In other words, the cable company is providing you with a cable box it knows full well to be defective.
It's clear what the small shafts are for. You launch a guided missile down them, then steer them into the MatCen switch, shutting off construction of more virus-infected drones.
Sorry, I just finished Descent 3, and suddenly find myself wanting to fly a Pyro-GL through the Great Pyramid's shaftwork.
The parent post is a stock troll, cribbed from a story on Kuro5hin, and sprinkled with inflammatory allusions to, "bearded Linux hippies [living] in their parents' basement." It is also signed with the moniker HYBTT, which stands for, "Have You Been Trolled Today?"
It is also a dangerously deceptive re-casting of Jefferson's words into an entirely misleading light. Jefferson strenuously opposed copyrights, as they are a form of monopoly. Jefferson opposed monopolies in all forms, as they inevitably lead to abuses. An example of an abusive monopoly contemporary to Jefferson was the East India Company, whose record of abuse was well-documented.
What Jefferson was really saying in the famous quote cited above was, "Look, information leaks no matter what you do to contain it. No natural law sustains the notion of copyright. So save yourself the ulcer and don't bother trying."
Jefferson eventually agreed to establishment of copyright, but it was not in the form he wanted, and he still feared the abuses it might bring -- fears which, 200 years later, appear to have been borne out.
A more complete, balanced, troll-free discussion of Jefferson's and Madison's thoughts concerning copyright may be found here, also on Kuro5hin.
Well, you took the EE course and I didn't, but your explanation of LCD technology is not what I learned when I was trying to write display/graphics drivers for BeOS.
As I was led to understand, the individual elements in an LCD display are bi-stable: on or off. Shades of grey are obtained via two primary methods, both performed by the controller: dithering and duty-cycle modulation.
Dithering is what you'd expect, except that the dither pattern changes every field. There are usually four or eight dither patterns through which the controller cycles, thereby avoiding any static pattern artifacts appearing on the display.
Duty-cycle modulation is where you turn the cell on for 50% of the time, then turn it off for the other 50% to obtain a 50% grey. For a 75% grey, you turn it on for 75% of the time, and off for 25%. The rate at which you turn the cell on and off is too fast for the eye to see directly (and LCDs smear out rapid changes, anyway).
And, just to make things harder, every panel model is different. Each panel has different physical characteristics, signalling requirements, etc. Thus, you can't, for example, pull a Citizen panel out of a laptop and replace it with a Matsushita. Even assuming the electrical connections were identical (they're not), the difference in physical response characteristics would cause the image to be anywhere between ugly and invisible. This was one reason why flat panel support was so difficult under BeOS. Each panel model needs the controller software to be hand-tweaked to get the optimum quality image out of it. Exact duty cycle timings need to be experimented with; different dither patterns and pattern sequences need to be explored until the image looks best. All this hand-tooled knowledge is hard-coded in the laptop BIOS. Since BeOS couldn't call the BIOS, we had to punch the registers and hope. Much of the time it worked. But on those occasions where it didn't, we were hosed.
Anyway, that's what I learned. But, again, since I never took an EE course, I'm probably wrong.
Schwab
Re:Is Quake Still Played?
on
Tenebrae Quake
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· Score: 2
You betcha it's still played. I never warmed up to Quake 2 (too ugly) or Unreal Tournament (flaky network handling), so I still play QuakeWorld a lot. My favorite servers are NOBODY'S QUAKEWORLD (yes, all caps), and MommySue's Happy Place.
I've actaully been doing a fair amount of checking on this very subject over the last few days. I'm a SCSI bigot, I have been since the Amiga days, my system is all SCSI all the time, and it's going to stay that way, thank you. (And yes, all my ten-year-old Amiga drives are still directly readable on my rig.)
However, I don't have a CD-R/RW drive yet. I do have a Plextor 40x CD-ROM drive with a Wide Ultra SCSI interface, so my first thought was to get a Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive.
Yikes! $250 for a 12x writer? I think not. Other manufacturers aren't too much better. The best deal I've found so far for native SCSI is the Yamaha CRW-F1ZS, which is a 44x drive for around $220-250.
However, if you're willing to be a little sneaky (and live on the bleeding edge), there's a company called ACard that makes an IDE-to-SCSI bridge. This little gadget slaps on the back of any IDE drive, effectively turning it into a SCSI device. They are available in wide and narrow flavors. They also have LVD flavors. The best prices I've found so far for the single-ended versions are around $70 for narrow, and $74 for wide. I haven't found any prices for the LVD versions.
For most hard drives, this is a huge win. You can easily pay $200 for a SCSI drive, and the largest size you can typically find is a paltry 18G. Subtract $70 for the IDE-SCSI bridge, and you can buy a fscking huge IDE drive for $130. However, for CD-RW drives, it doesn't put you too far ahead of the game in terms of cost. 40x IDE writers are about $150. Add $70 for the bridge, and you're back in the $220-250 range, which is what you can get a native SCSI drive for.
And there's a problem: While hard drives and CD-ROM drives are fairly standardized in terms of command packet format, CD-RW drives aren't yet. As such, ACard won't guarantee their bridge will work with the CD-RW drive of your choice, since it may require an untranslateable packet. (They've only tested against, and guarantee interoperability with, Ricoh drives.)
In this case, an unobvious (mis-)feature caused a user to lose hours of work. That's a software problem, and specifically, a problem with a particular software feature, DRM. It shows that DRM reduces usability in practice.
I would go further and say it's more than just, "reduced usability." It's a defect.
What's more, it's an intentional defect. It's an artificially-introduced capacity for failure where none would otherwise exist. If they hadn't bothered to go to the extra expense of developing a childish copy-protection scheme, the files would have Just Worked. No downtime. No failure. No defects.
You can sue manufacturers for intentionally releasing defective merchandise, can't you?
Yes, but there are no "Soup-uters" out there that allow you to make unlimited, perfect copies of your can of soup and instantly deliver the soup to millions of people around the globe for free. If there were, you can bet Campbells would be very interested in controlling what you did with your can of soup.
Congratulations. You have just discovered the reason why the childish meme, "Copying is Theft," has no basis whatsoever in reality.
The "Soup-uter" -- or replicator, if you will -- is coming. The first hints have been created in labs today. When that happens, there will be no more scarcity. People will be able to have as much as they want of whatever they want. After all, isn't that the goal technology has been striving for since the invention of the plow: Increased abundance at reduced cost?
But there's a teensy little problem: When the replicator arrives, the market-based economy will cease to exist, because its foundation in scarcity will cease to exist. That means a lot of people will lose a lot of power. Not only will manufacturing concerns be panic-stricken ("No one's buying our cars anymore; they're making their own copies!"), but so also will the government as they watch their taxes on commerce dry up.
They will look to preserve themselves. They will look for answers. They will turn to history for solutions. "Oh, look," they will say, "at how the 'problem' of software copying was solved." And before you know it, you'll have copy-protected food. (Oops! it's already here, courtesy of Monsanto.)
Well, all good and wonderful, one supposes, except... What do you say to that emaciated family starving in third-world Africa? What do you say to the millions suffering from medical shortages in South America? Where the fsck do we get off telling these people that they can't use their replicator to make food and medicines for themselves, to improve their lot in life, unless and until they pay us our, "rightful tribute?"
That is a perfect formula for social disorder. That's the stuff civil wars are made of. And that's exactly what we're facing, unless we get off this childish sense of entitlement and get it through our thick, whining skulls:
Copying Is Not Theft.
By arguing on the subject of, "intellectual property," you are (perhaps unwittingly) participating in the construction of a crucial part of your own future. Make damn sure you know what you're asking for; there are people out there all too willing to give it to you.
I just rebuilt OpenSSH-portable yesterday on my FreeBSD box, finally getting around to addressing the newest vulnerabilities in 3.3.
I did a cvsup of the entire ports tree, then built OpenSSH-portable-3.4p1 as root. The build went fine; no MD5 checksum problems were reported. Did I get in just after the problem had been fixed, or am I screwed?
BTW, pkg_info now reports that I have openssh-portable-3.4p1 installed alongside openssh-portable-3.3 (the last version I built from ports). Is this a problem? If so, how do I fix it?
Civil liberites my ass. Someone doesn't give you a seat on the pannel, so you go to the meeting and make jokes. Think you'll get one next time?
Dude, weren't you paying attention? The hearing was rigged! The fix, as they say, was in. Anyone, particularly the EFF, holding views contrary to the pre-established, bought-and-paid-for conclusion were expressly barred from participating. How is one expected to "work within" such a system?
You do *not* have a legal right in the United States to modify any property you own in any manner you choose.
Only to the extent that narrowly-tailored laws prevent you. The only remotely applicable law in this case is the properly-reviled DMCA.
Further, these constraints issue solely from the government. In exchange for the privilege of imposing these constraints, we correctly demand from the government transparency and accountability. Sony has offered us neither.
Guess what? It's not the possession of the lockpit set that got him busted.
Nice rhetorical gambit, conflating mod chips with lockpicking tools, except for two things:
You have the right to modify your property in any manner you see fit. That includes chipping your PS2.
There's nothing wrong with picking locks that belong to you.
However, point #2 notwithstanding, possession of lockpicks is prima facie illegal in some US states. Fortunately, this is not true of mod chips (though Hollywood is calling in every favor it has to make it so).
Sounds vaguely similar to how BeOS's scheduler worked internally.
Schwab
Games Listed Don't Exploit {I,Omni}MAX Format
on
Gaming on the IMAX
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Maybe it's just me, but aside from the resolution problems of blowing an NTSC display up to OmniMAX sizes, seeing Virtua Fighter $(N) on an OmniMAX screen just doesn't make me want to get up and check out the competition. NFL Fever? Please. The X-style games (Tony Hawk, SSX Tricky) and racing games (Gran Turismo) might possibly be interesting.
OTOH, if you want to get me to claw my way to the head of the line, all you have to do is set up nearly any of the Star Wars spaceflight games (Star Wars Starfighter, XWing Alliance, etc.). Crank the resolution to 1280 * 1024 * 32bpp and even on an IMAX screen it would look stunning. Go the extra mile and compensate for the spherical projection surface, and you could have a major spectator attraction on your hands ("Come ride shotgun in an XWing fighter as some of the best gamers on the planet go after the Death Star").
I've always wanted to experience a truly immersive space flight simulator. XWing Alliance on an OmniMAX screen would do it.
Amory Lovins has been pushing this kind of thing for years. Except, instead of a fuel cell, Lovins suggests using an ordinary gas engine whose sole duty is to power a generator; rather like a diesel locomotive. He theorizes that, because the engine can run at a constant RPM and torque load, it can be smaller and reduce weight, so fuel efficiency goes up. Also, getting rid of the transmission and other mechanical linkages reduces weight, so fuel efficiency goes up.
Given that, it's not clear why Detroit is interested in pursuing highly advanced fuel cell tech.
Interesting how here on/., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task.
Hey, I'd love to give OS-X a try. And if it were $200-300 to try it out and write some exploratory apps for it, I'd snap it up in a heartbeat.
But trying it out doesn't cost two or three hundred dollars. It costs two or three thousand. Yeah, I know, the eMac is inexpensive hovering around $800, but it's far too slow, comes with a monitor that's too small, a keyboard that I can't seem to make friends with, and a mouse with one-third the number of buttons it should have. Apple also seems to provide only set bundles: This machine comes with these accessories, period. I'd like to make the cost/performance tradeoff decisions myself and pick my own combination of components.
In short, there doesn't seem to be a way to give OS-X a fair shake without spending a farkload of money.
the fact is that many developers prefer it to DirectX, and not for ideological reasons.
Unfortunately, this is not as true as we might wish it to be. Micros~1, as usual, has stacked the deck in its favor.
If you're a graphics card manufacturer, you want to make sure that your drivers will do the right thing. Thus, you need to test the hell out of it. Surprise, surprise, Micros~1 has a little thing called WHQL (Windoze Hardware Quality Labs) which exhaustively tests your hardware and drivers to make certain they behave properly. If you pass, you get a little WHQL sticker to put on your box. Thus, the graphics OEM can save the expense of creating its own verification department.
What do you have to do to earn WHQL certification? Well, that changes over time as Windoze acquires more cruft^H^H^H^H^Hfeatures. But one thing you must do is fully complete their DirectX validation suite. If you fail, you don't get the sticker.
So who does OpenGL validation? Well, Micros~1 will do that for you, too. But it's optional, not required. Moreover, they won't perform OpenGL testing unless and until you've already passed DirectX testing. So, if you're a graphics OEM living on razor-thin margins, you're not going to spend one engineering dollar more than is absolutely necessary to get that WHQL sticker, and to heck with everything else. So OpenGL gets short shrift.
So why did OpenGL get anywhere at all? Two words: John Carmack. Carmack and id Software are the de facto certification authority for OpenGL: "If Quake runs, it works." Trouble is, earlier versions of Quake only used a subset of the full OpenGL API, so card makers only supported exactly that. As Carmack exercised more of the API in new releases of Quake, card vendors slowly got the idea that supporting the complete API was probably a wise move. NVidia got the hint way early, and it didn't hurt that they had a bunch of ex-SGI engineers on staff.
But even so, OpenGL support remains spotty and uneven, because there is no comprehensive certification authority (that wields any political clout) for OpenGL. If your DirectX implementation is broken, Micros~1 will tell you exactly what you messed up. There is, to my knowledge, no such facility in place for testing OpenGL. Thus, OpenGL implementations are broken in different ways across different cards. DirectX is fundamentally broken, but because of WHQL testing, it's broken the same way across all cards. Because of this comparative uniformity across cards, game developers just go straight to DirectX, and maybe will write an OpenGL rendering layer as an afterthought, despite the fact that OpenGL is easier to write for, and can often be seen offering higher performance. id Software was the sole exception to this rule, offering OpenGL support only. It looked like CroTeam, creators of Serious Sam, were going to boost OpenGL's mindshare, but they have since caved in, and their latest Serious Sam release features DirectX support.
Now, Micros~1 has acquired the lever it needs to kill OpenGL. Vertex shaders are the Next Big Thing in hardware-assisted rendering, and they have been under development for some time. It was hacked into DirectX as of DX8 (IIRC), but the OpenGL ARB has been trying to come up with an equivalent solution that is cross-platform and network-transparent. (Hence the perception that OpenGL is "lagging" DirectX.) Even if the ARB makes vertex shaders an optional extension, it will effectively kill OpenGL's already-tenuous popularity as a rendering API, because developers won't be able to rely on vertex shading extensions being installed. Thus, if you're a game developer, and you want vertex shading in your game, then you'll use DirectX and nothing else.
This is Micros~1's idea of, "Competing on the merits."
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I was unclear. BSODs were/are tolerated in the Windows world, but Guru Meditations weren't tolerated. According to industry pundits at the time, Guru Meditations were offered as "proof" that Amiga was an unreliable platform that should be avoided. Then comes crash-happy Windows, and the pundits acknowledge BSODs very rarely, and only then with the aphorism, "Oh well, it happens."
Those of us who were Amiga stalwarts saw this overt practice of double-standards as just the tiniest bit unfair.
Schwab
Everyone likes to malign the Amiga system crash dialog, simply because it bore the term 'Guru Meditation'. "Ha ha," they joke, "see how primitive and useless the error message was."
You have to understand that this was a massive advance forward. Prior to that, the major systems were first-generation Macs (which displayed a certain number of bomb icons and nothing else); and Apple ]['s, Commodore-64s, and MS-DOS-running PC clones -- all of which displayed nothing; it just (if you were lucky) silently locked up.
Carl Sassenrath, designer and author of the Amiga's 'kernel', thought this state of affairs sucked, so he did something about it. Amiga's Guru Meditations, cryptic though they were, told the programmer which task was responsible for the crash (first hex number), and what exception it generated (second hex number). You could then hit the right mouse button to drop into a very primitive serial debugger to get more information. While these numbers were useless to 95% of the users out there, it was information the user could give to the vendor, helping them track down the problem more easily -- information they never had before.
Meanwhile, everyone just happily tolerated Windoze BSODs, even though they were, and still are, no more informative than Amiga Guru Meditations.
Schwab
CVS has too many inherent limitations to make it a good choice for large-scale projects. Although it's been around for just ever and is fairly solid, there are a couple of issues that make CVS a sub-optimal choice.
First, CVS is built on top of RCS and, as such, doesn't handle binary files. Okay, that's a fib; it sorta kinda does, but it's very klunky, and easily prone to errors. Further, it's easy for the "binary-ness" of a file to be lost (i.e. be treated as text), resulting in all kinds of nasty corruption. Best Practices will avoid this, but everyone has to be on their toes all the time.
Second, CVS has no notion of "transactions". Let's say you check in a bugfix/new feature to the kernel. The change involves modifying six different files. CVS does not see this checkin as a single transaction, but six completely separate ones. So a lot of information about the scope of a given change is not easily found. The only way you can know a particular change affected multiple files is by noticing that their checkin comments are identical. Further, if you perform a checkin against multiple files and one or more of them has a conflict (someone else checked in a change before you did), CVS will simply halt at the conflicting file; earlier files successfully checked in up to that point are not backed out. Thus, the repository is left in an inconsistent state. Best Practices can avoid this but, again, everyone has to be on their toes.
Other source control systems don't have these problems. In particular, Subversion is transaction-based, so groups of files checked in at once either all get checked in, or none of them do, keeping the repository consistent. Also, Subversion handles arbitrary meta-data for each file, including its MIME type, so the "binary-ness" of a file cannot be lost or modified unless you expressly change its MIME type. Even better, Subversion will automatically perform newline translation to/from your local platform when checking out/in text files.
For small projects with small numbers of people, CVS is perfectly okay. But beyond a certain scale, CVS's limitations start to get in the way, and you need something better.
Schwab
That's why I used to have all my online orders delivered to me at work. I'd get a polite phone call from our receptionist telling me a package had arrived, and I'd go upstairs and get it. AFAIK, credit card companies will let you specify an alternate shipping address (and since you usually give them your work address as well, that can also be an authenticated address).
The only hazard was that, occasionally, the package would get delivered not to me but to the Charles Schwab brokerage downstairs.
Schwab
But it's an unpublished work. How the hell is anyone supposed to know it's copyrighted?
Some weasel saunters into your legal department representing an organization guilty of deception, fraud, and negligent homicide. He claims that some data on your servers is his "property" and must be deleted. You're going to just take his word for it?
Schwab
Really? I'm an American out of work right now. What are they paying?
Schwab
DRM (Digital Restrictions Mechanism) is a bug. It is the intentional introducton of a capacity for failure where one otherwise wouldn't have existed. Recording of the data would have happened perfectly and without incident had the DRM facilities not been incorporated.
In other words, the cable company is providing you with a cable box it knows full well to be defective.
Schwab
It's clear what the small shafts are for. You launch a guided missile down them, then steer them into the MatCen switch, shutting off construction of more virus-infected drones.
Sorry, I just finished Descent 3, and suddenly find myself wanting to fly a Pyro-GL through the Great Pyramid's shaftwork.
Schwab
The parent post is a stock troll, cribbed from a story on Kuro5hin, and sprinkled with inflammatory allusions to, "bearded Linux hippies [living] in their parents' basement." It is also signed with the moniker HYBTT, which stands for, "Have You Been Trolled Today?"
It is also a dangerously deceptive re-casting of Jefferson's words into an entirely misleading light. Jefferson strenuously opposed copyrights, as they are a form of monopoly. Jefferson opposed monopolies in all forms, as they inevitably lead to abuses. An example of an abusive monopoly contemporary to Jefferson was the East India Company, whose record of abuse was well-documented.
What Jefferson was really saying in the famous quote cited above was, "Look, information leaks no matter what you do to contain it. No natural law sustains the notion of copyright. So save yourself the ulcer and don't bother trying."
Jefferson eventually agreed to establishment of copyright, but it was not in the form he wanted, and he still feared the abuses it might bring -- fears which, 200 years later, appear to have been borne out.
A more complete, balanced, troll-free discussion of Jefferson's and Madison's thoughts concerning copyright may be found here, also on Kuro5hin.
Schwab
Well, you took the EE course and I didn't, but your explanation of LCD technology is not what I learned when I was trying to write display/graphics drivers for BeOS.
As I was led to understand, the individual elements in an LCD display are bi-stable: on or off. Shades of grey are obtained via two primary methods, both performed by the controller: dithering and duty-cycle modulation.
Dithering is what you'd expect, except that the dither pattern changes every field. There are usually four or eight dither patterns through which the controller cycles, thereby avoiding any static pattern artifacts appearing on the display.
Duty-cycle modulation is where you turn the cell on for 50% of the time, then turn it off for the other 50% to obtain a 50% grey. For a 75% grey, you turn it on for 75% of the time, and off for 25%. The rate at which you turn the cell on and off is too fast for the eye to see directly (and LCDs smear out rapid changes, anyway).
And, just to make things harder, every panel model is different. Each panel has different physical characteristics, signalling requirements, etc. Thus, you can't, for example, pull a Citizen panel out of a laptop and replace it with a Matsushita. Even assuming the electrical connections were identical (they're not), the difference in physical response characteristics would cause the image to be anywhere between ugly and invisible. This was one reason why flat panel support was so difficult under BeOS. Each panel model needs the controller software to be hand-tweaked to get the optimum quality image out of it. Exact duty cycle timings need to be experimented with; different dither patterns and pattern sequences need to be explored until the image looks best. All this hand-tooled knowledge is hard-coded in the laptop BIOS. Since BeOS couldn't call the BIOS, we had to punch the registers and hope. Much of the time it worked. But on those occasions where it didn't, we were hosed.
Anyway, that's what I learned. But, again, since I never took an EE course, I'm probably wrong.
Schwab
You betcha it's still played. I never warmed up to Quake 2 (too ugly) or Unreal Tournament (flaky network handling), so I still play QuakeWorld a lot. My favorite servers are NOBODY'S QUAKEWORLD (yes, all caps), and MommySue's Happy Place.
Grab yourself a client and join in!
Schwab
I've actaully been doing a fair amount of checking on this very subject over the last few days. I'm a SCSI bigot, I have been since the Amiga days, my system is all SCSI all the time, and it's going to stay that way, thank you. (And yes, all my ten-year-old Amiga drives are still directly readable on my rig.)
However, I don't have a CD-R/RW drive yet. I do have a Plextor 40x CD-ROM drive with a Wide Ultra SCSI interface, so my first thought was to get a Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive.
Yikes! $250 for a 12x writer? I think not. Other manufacturers aren't too much better. The best deal I've found so far for native SCSI is the Yamaha CRW-F1ZS, which is a 44x drive for around $220-250.
However, if you're willing to be a little sneaky (and live on the bleeding edge), there's a company called ACard that makes an IDE-to-SCSI bridge. This little gadget slaps on the back of any IDE drive, effectively turning it into a SCSI device. They are available in wide and narrow flavors. They also have LVD flavors. The best prices I've found so far for the single-ended versions are around $70 for narrow, and $74 for wide. I haven't found any prices for the LVD versions.
For most hard drives, this is a huge win. You can easily pay $200 for a SCSI drive, and the largest size you can typically find is a paltry 18G. Subtract $70 for the IDE-SCSI bridge, and you can buy a fscking huge IDE drive for $130. However, for CD-RW drives, it doesn't put you too far ahead of the game in terms of cost. 40x IDE writers are about $150. Add $70 for the bridge, and you're back in the $220-250 range, which is what you can get a native SCSI drive for.
And there's a problem: While hard drives and CD-ROM drives are fairly standardized in terms of command packet format, CD-RW drives aren't yet. As such, ACard won't guarantee their bridge will work with the CD-RW drive of your choice, since it may require an untranslateable packet. (They've only tested against, and guarantee interoperability with, Ricoh drives.)
Hope this helps.
Schwab
"You call that mowin' the lawn? Bad Webmower! No cookie!"
Schwab
I would go further and say it's more than just, "reduced usability." It's a defect.
What's more, it's an intentional defect. It's an artificially-introduced capacity for failure where none would otherwise exist. If they hadn't bothered to go to the extra expense of developing a childish copy-protection scheme, the files would have Just Worked. No downtime. No failure. No defects.
You can sue manufacturers for intentionally releasing defective merchandise, can't you?
Schwab
Congratulations. You have just discovered the reason why the childish meme, "Copying is Theft," has no basis whatsoever in reality.
The "Soup-uter" -- or replicator, if you will -- is coming. The first hints have been created in labs today. When that happens, there will be no more scarcity. People will be able to have as much as they want of whatever they want. After all, isn't that the goal technology has been striving for since the invention of the plow: Increased abundance at reduced cost?
But there's a teensy little problem: When the replicator arrives, the market-based economy will cease to exist, because its foundation in scarcity will cease to exist. That means a lot of people will lose a lot of power. Not only will manufacturing concerns be panic-stricken ("No one's buying our cars anymore; they're making their own copies!"), but so also will the government as they watch their taxes on commerce dry up.
They will look to preserve themselves. They will look for answers. They will turn to history for solutions. "Oh, look," they will say, "at how the 'problem' of software copying was solved." And before you know it, you'll have copy-protected food. (Oops! it's already here, courtesy of Monsanto.)
Well, all good and wonderful, one supposes, except... What do you say to that emaciated family starving in third-world Africa? What do you say to the millions suffering from medical shortages in South America? Where the fsck do we get off telling these people that they can't use their replicator to make food and medicines for themselves, to improve their lot in life, unless and until they pay us our, "rightful tribute?"
That is a perfect formula for social disorder. That's the stuff civil wars are made of. And that's exactly what we're facing, unless we get off this childish sense of entitlement and get it through our thick, whining skulls:
Copying Is Not Theft.
By arguing on the subject of, "intellectual property," you are (perhaps unwittingly) participating in the construction of a crucial part of your own future. Make damn sure you know what you're asking for; there are people out there all too willing to give it to you.
Schwab
I just rebuilt OpenSSH-portable yesterday on my FreeBSD box, finally getting around to addressing the newest vulnerabilities in 3.3.
I did a cvsup of the entire ports tree, then built OpenSSH-portable-3.4p1 as root. The build went fine; no MD5 checksum problems were reported. Did I get in just after the problem had been fixed, or am I screwed?
BTW, pkg_info now reports that I have openssh-portable-3.4p1 installed alongside openssh-portable-3.3 (the last version I built from ports). Is this a problem? If so, how do I fix it?
Schwab
HP Classic would never have pulled a stunt like this. They would have gone, "Oops, my bad, here's a bugfix everyone."
As time goes on, it looks more and more as if Walter Hewlett and David Packard were right: This whole "New HP" thing is just so much hogwash.
Schwab
Dude, weren't you paying attention? The hearing was rigged! The fix, as they say, was in. Anyone, particularly the EFF, holding views contrary to the pre-established, bought-and-paid-for conclusion were expressly barred from participating. How is one expected to "work within" such a system?
Schwab
Only to the extent that narrowly-tailored laws prevent you. The only remotely applicable law in this case is the properly-reviled DMCA.
Further, these constraints issue solely from the government. In exchange for the privilege of imposing these constraints, we correctly demand from the government transparency and accountability. Sony has offered us neither.
Schwab
Nice rhetorical gambit, conflating mod chips with lockpicking tools, except for two things:
However, point #2 notwithstanding, possession of lockpicks is prima facie illegal in some US states. Fortunately, this is not true of mod chips (though Hollywood is calling in every favor it has to make it so).
Schwab
Sounds vaguely similar to how BeOS's scheduler worked internally.
Schwab
Maybe it's just me, but aside from the resolution problems of blowing an NTSC display up to OmniMAX sizes, seeing Virtua Fighter $(N) on an OmniMAX screen just doesn't make me want to get up and check out the competition. NFL Fever? Please. The X-style games (Tony Hawk, SSX Tricky) and racing games (Gran Turismo) might possibly be interesting.
OTOH, if you want to get me to claw my way to the head of the line, all you have to do is set up nearly any of the Star Wars spaceflight games (Star Wars Starfighter, XWing Alliance, etc.). Crank the resolution to 1280 * 1024 * 32bpp and even on an IMAX screen it would look stunning. Go the extra mile and compensate for the spherical projection surface, and you could have a major spectator attraction on your hands ("Come ride shotgun in an XWing fighter as some of the best gamers on the planet go after the Death Star").
I've always wanted to experience a truly immersive space flight simulator. XWing Alliance on an OmniMAX screen would do it.
Schwab
Amory Lovins has been pushing this kind of thing for years. Except, instead of a fuel cell, Lovins suggests using an ordinary gas engine whose sole duty is to power a generator; rather like a diesel locomotive. He theorizes that, because the engine can run at a constant RPM and torque load, it can be smaller and reduce weight, so fuel efficiency goes up. Also, getting rid of the transmission and other mechanical linkages reduces weight, so fuel efficiency goes up.
Given that, it's not clear why Detroit is interested in pursuing highly advanced fuel cell tech.
Schwab
Hey, I'd love to give OS-X a try. And if it were $200-300 to try it out and write some exploratory apps for it, I'd snap it up in a heartbeat.
But trying it out doesn't cost two or three hundred dollars. It costs two or three thousand. Yeah, I know, the eMac is inexpensive hovering around $800, but it's far too slow, comes with a monitor that's too small, a keyboard that I can't seem to make friends with, and a mouse with one-third the number of buttons it should have. Apple also seems to provide only set bundles: This machine comes with these accessories, period. I'd like to make the cost/performance tradeoff decisions myself and pick my own combination of components.
In short, there doesn't seem to be a way to give OS-X a fair shake without spending a farkload of money.
Schwab
Unfortunately, this is not as true as we might wish it to be. Micros~1, as usual, has stacked the deck in its favor.
If you're a graphics card manufacturer, you want to make sure that your drivers will do the right thing. Thus, you need to test the hell out of it. Surprise, surprise, Micros~1 has a little thing called WHQL (Windoze Hardware Quality Labs) which exhaustively tests your hardware and drivers to make certain they behave properly. If you pass, you get a little WHQL sticker to put on your box. Thus, the graphics OEM can save the expense of creating its own verification department.
What do you have to do to earn WHQL certification? Well, that changes over time as Windoze acquires more cruft^H^H^H^H^Hfeatures. But one thing you must do is fully complete their DirectX validation suite. If you fail, you don't get the sticker.
So who does OpenGL validation? Well, Micros~1 will do that for you, too. But it's optional, not required. Moreover, they won't perform OpenGL testing unless and until you've already passed DirectX testing. So, if you're a graphics OEM living on razor-thin margins, you're not going to spend one engineering dollar more than is absolutely necessary to get that WHQL sticker, and to heck with everything else. So OpenGL gets short shrift.
So why did OpenGL get anywhere at all? Two words: John Carmack. Carmack and id Software are the de facto certification authority for OpenGL: "If Quake runs, it works." Trouble is, earlier versions of Quake only used a subset of the full OpenGL API, so card makers only supported exactly that. As Carmack exercised more of the API in new releases of Quake, card vendors slowly got the idea that supporting the complete API was probably a wise move. NVidia got the hint way early, and it didn't hurt that they had a bunch of ex-SGI engineers on staff.
But even so, OpenGL support remains spotty and uneven, because there is no comprehensive certification authority (that wields any political clout) for OpenGL. If your DirectX implementation is broken, Micros~1 will tell you exactly what you messed up. There is, to my knowledge, no such facility in place for testing OpenGL. Thus, OpenGL implementations are broken in different ways across different cards. DirectX is fundamentally broken, but because of WHQL testing, it's broken the same way across all cards. Because of this comparative uniformity across cards, game developers just go straight to DirectX, and maybe will write an OpenGL rendering layer as an afterthought, despite the fact that OpenGL is easier to write for, and can often be seen offering higher performance. id Software was the sole exception to this rule, offering OpenGL support only. It looked like CroTeam, creators of Serious Sam, were going to boost OpenGL's mindshare, but they have since caved in, and their latest Serious Sam release features DirectX support.
Now, Micros~1 has acquired the lever it needs to kill OpenGL. Vertex shaders are the Next Big Thing in hardware-assisted rendering, and they have been under development for some time. It was hacked into DirectX as of DX8 (IIRC), but the OpenGL ARB has been trying to come up with an equivalent solution that is cross-platform and network-transparent. (Hence the perception that OpenGL is "lagging" DirectX.) Even if the ARB makes vertex shaders an optional extension, it will effectively kill OpenGL's already-tenuous popularity as a rendering API, because developers won't be able to rely on vertex shading extensions being installed. Thus, if you're a game developer, and you want vertex shading in your game, then you'll use DirectX and nothing else.
This is Micros~1's idea of, "Competing on the merits."
Schwab