Well, some glitches with various hardware is definately due to buggy/crappy drivers rather than the windows OS.
By demanding that hardware manufacturers get a certified driver, MS can say for anyone else that "It's not certified by us, we never made it, so it's not our fault"
Certainly given the craploads of issues I've had with some manufacturers' products (*cough* ATI *cough*), I'd happily pin a large portion of the blame on their buggy drivers rather than an issue with the OS itself.
Have to post anon since I've moderated in this area...
A signature may be a written form of one's name, but it can also be defined a somewhat unique identifier given in written or even audible/etc format. Therefore, so long as a signature complies to a unique format, why not?
I'm thinking that perhaps I'll start signing my name and embed the date in every signature. Or perhaps the day of week. Then if somebody ever does try to fraud my card with a faked signature, I can say "it wasn't mine, because my signature is to sign my name with the current day of week"
Yes, but isn't a black hole created by an object whose mass/gravity has become so great it consumes itself and then other objects nearby? How can you have a black hole without the gravity... would it really be a black hole?
I've had scripts that ran into nice infinite loops, run on servers that weren't very powerful (my last being a K6-2/400, before last weekend's PSU surge turned it into a smoking ruin).
Even when several processes were torquing the machine to the point where it *crawled* I was still able to get in and do a "killall" on the offending processes.
Didn't MS introduce their own "standard" for stylesheets at one point? Perhaps they're just gunning to introduce a new "MS standard" to blow off browsers using the real standard?
It costs you to recieve SMS messages... which puts it along the same lines as faxes in that advertisers cannot do so at your expense (on a per-item basis anyhow, even email costs overall).
Why not? Some laws deal with the process of email address "harvesting" and/or guessing. If it's a unique address not used for other purposes, then it has been harvested.
If anything, it's a way of proving that the spammer is using illegal methods. This is more baiting then entrapment.
there responce: "Your email address is not on our mailing list."
To me it looks genuine, if I don't get any cruse emails in my spam email account I'll say it's probably totally genuine.
It might be now, but keep in mind they've already been sued over it... so using the "unsubscribe" links to validify harvested addresses would likely, in fact, net them larger punitive damages in future lawsuits.
Mumma provided Omega World Travel with a valid, lawful opt out request as provided for by 5[a(3)(A)(i) of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 on Jan. 1
SCO was, in fact, not so frivilous in the eyes of the court. As it went on it definately started to reek of bullshit, but there was a possibility nearer the start that at least some for claims were true. In addition, due to the technical an particular natures of the claims at hand, most judges wouldn't be in a position to easily dismiss them.
As for Oreo cookies, well it's a stupid claim however you see smokers winning against tobacco companies (yes, I know oreo doesn't contain nicotime).
In this case, however, somebody is being sued for following and using the law. To allow a lawsuit based on this would be a very bad precedent. If the spammer (or indeed anyone) has a problem with the law itself, he should attack the law not the company applying it.
My current version (Linux Debian/Unstable) seems to be rendering fine lately. The version on my windows box (either 1.0 or 1.0.1) tends to be stupid about it and will crap layers over top of each other, etc... so that the article/comments text overlaps the left nav bars.
We have some on computers at work. They lag to high hell even running a decent opengl screensaver . Same screensaver runs fine on a cheap desktop with integrated SIS video (not notably well accelerated either).
The only thing Extreme about the Intel graphics cards is the lag... definately not comparable to a decent Radeon. Another laptop has an older radeon-mobile chipset and the screensavers work fine on that, too... though it's a lesser machine otherwise.
But what they're doing is making it illegal for others to sell you the tools to do so, do the job for you, and perhaps even document for you how to do it yourself.
If you can figure out how to manually mod your PS2 best of luck it's probably still legal, but nobody else will be able to help you with it.
Strangely enough, I have issues with other sounds (low sounds in a crowded room), but I'm still doing fine with high pitches. I can hear those annoying squeeky monitors, TV sets, and various other electronic phenomenoa that are caused by crappy capacitors, etc.
As a Canadian, I have for a very long time wondered why so many contests stated "Entries valid from anywhere in Canada excluding the province of Quebec" etc
I thought perhaps this had to do a lot with all the weird scams that tend to come from there (every summer it seems we get a "scratch and win" where the "winners" call and get put on-hold with an expensive 900 number in Quebec), but I suppose that's a seperate issue.
I think that what tells is the end result though. If a device running at 90Mhz could say, output 60Fps of raytraced video, it would be better (for that application) than my current GPU - which does fine at standard GL/D3D graphics but can't render attractive Ray graphics realtime...
But depending on the actual graphics output, not too bad for a rendering device. You're better off to compare it to your video card than your desktop CPU. Even on my par 3Ghz machine though raytracing can be dog slow and certainly not near realtime.
I can't comment too much since we're suffering from the slashdot effect (can RTFA but the pics aren't loading), but depending on chip size one could imagine this being very useful on a handheld device or something similar. Perhaps a small integrated graphics tablet would benefit from this?
OK, actually now I've got JPEG's showing the renders, quality looks decent but as far as speed I'd like to see it in real action for realtime rendering.
I could see this working best as a "realtime" colour filter, especially if you're using a pen or something similar. Scratch near a border and view the result... if it goes a bit beyond where you want scratch on the other side of the border. If it's not quite enough lengthen your scratch.
I wonder how much CPU power is required, if you could do this realtime or close to it would be quite awesome, but having to make your scratches and click "apply filter" then wait for 30 seconds would not be nearly as useful/efficient.
I dabble more in the area of 3d art, but at times I've lifted a pencil and come up with some decent b&w sketches. Pencil shading is easy but sometimes getting the colours just right is more difficult than you might think.
When I looked at a lot of B&W webcomics, I can see that they'd look better in colour (especially the ones where the artist does occasionally do vibrant colour cells, but usually don't have time). This could change that though... want to see what your character would look like with a gold uniform... scribble a few colours within the borders. Want to see what that night-sky would like like with a red moon and rouged horizon, scribble a little red in and let the program do the work.
For cases where you want to preview colours, or just don't do colour well yourself, this would be a boon indeed!
How about something as simple as a search through an array of data.
You could have a CPU do a sort-based search, or a linear search. You could have two CPU's divide and conquer your list independantly and tackle it on a first-there basis.
For example, a list of names. If threaded became commonplace (if multi-CPU were common), a thread function might become:
Take list of 10000 clients where you are looking for client "Doug Ellis"
CPU #1 tags all items (assuming alphabetical sort by lastname) between 1 and 5000. CPU #2 takes 10000-5001.
The race begins, CPU #1 will hit the result and CPU #2's process can be terminated. OK, so this probably isn't much faster than your standard search.
But how about "Al Sanders"... a single CPU could would have more divides to reach that name, dividing names and finding if the target result would be more/less than the middle name. A linear search would take longer.
With either way, a second CPU starting from the list end would tag that name first, ending the search faster. Of course, a single CPU which was truely 2x faster than either of the duals would do nicely as well... but when we've reached a point where more MHZ aren't so easily forthcoming then dual CPU's handle the situation nicely indeed.
Actually, when you think about it an improved threading model would actually strongly benefit well-programmed games. Why? Because there are a lot of semi-related processes occuring. Sound, graphics, physics, etc etc... they're all part of the game but work in very different ways.
Now if you're working with a multithreaded CPU, one processor can be handling your CPU-bound graphics work (much of this is handed off to the video card anyhow), another can be doing sound/surround mixing, etc.
In an FPS with complicated AI, you could theoretically hand that off to CPU #2 while #1 is handling different things. Your graphics engine might not have ugly-mofo-alien #235 onscreen to render, but meanwhile he's watching you and looking for a boulder that will offer him good cover to snipe you from instead of just sitting like a drone waiting for a computer-acurate headshot.
Now let's say that PC's going multi-CPU. Maybe you don't need a single superpowerful processor, just a videocard and a few lower-powerful processors. Processor #1 is handing off the environmental data, #2 is prepping it for rendering and shovelling your GPU full of vertices, #3 is playing pinpoint surround for that cricket chirping behind the rock on your far left, and #4 is doing AI for ugly alien mofo #287.
When I think about how games are advancing a lot can come down to interprocess communications and/or bandwidth limitations. The GPU still handles much of the video stuff so your CPU isn't really a bottleneck there in many cases, but as internet connections speed up then you're going to have MMORPGs, FPS's, and more chock full of "actors" that make up sight, sound, physics, and AI that could very well benefit from more CPU's rather than extra ticks on your overclocked single processor.
After all, eye-candy is only a part of realism. True realism is also very much about a multitude of things happening at once.
For awhile, I noticed that SPAM in general seemed to be down on my various accounts. Then suddenly I've had a major surge of spam. The odd thing is that I'm getting it with on three different addresses from a particular sender.
To: A LUG email, and one I've used to post on slashdot (obfuscated)
CC: My primary email
Obviously somebody's got my number, so it's probably one main spammer... I'd love to figure out who that is any how he/she got my addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, some glitches with various hardware is definately due to buggy/crappy drivers rather than the windows OS.
By demanding that hardware manufacturers get a certified driver, MS can say for anyone else that "It's not certified by us, we never made it, so it's not our fault"
Certainly given the craploads of issues I've had with some manufacturers' products (*cough* ATI *cough*), I'd happily pin a large portion of the blame on their buggy drivers rather than an issue with the OS itself.
Have to post anon since I've moderated in this area... A signature may be a written form of one's name, but it can also be defined a somewhat unique identifier given in written or even audible/etc format. Therefore, so long as a signature complies to a unique format, why not?
I'm thinking that perhaps I'll start signing my name and embed the date in every signature. Or perhaps the day of week. Then if somebody ever does try to fraud my card with a faked signature, I can say "it wasn't mine, because my signature is to sign my name with the current day of week"
Yes, but isn't a black hole created by an object whose mass/gravity has become so great it consumes itself and then other objects nearby? How can you have a black hole without the gravity... would it really be a black hole?
I've had scripts that ran into nice infinite loops, run on servers that weren't very powerful (my last being a K6-2/400, before last weekend's PSU surge turned it into a smoking ruin).
Even when several processes were torquing the machine to the point where it *crawled* I was still able to get in and do a "killall" on the offending processes.
You have it the wrong way around. Don't know me that you only have one master (your Mac)?
Didn't MS introduce their own "standard" for stylesheets at one point? Perhaps they're just gunning to introduce a new "MS standard" to blow off browsers using the real standard?
It costs you to recieve SMS messages... which puts it along the same lines as faxes in that advertisers cannot do so at your expense (on a per-item basis anyhow, even email costs overall).
Why not? Some laws deal with the process of email address "harvesting" and/or guessing. If it's a unique address not used for other purposes, then it has been harvested.
If anything, it's a way of proving that the spammer is using illegal methods. This is more baiting then entrapment.
there responce: "Your email address is not on our mailing list." To me it looks genuine, if I don't get any cruse emails in my spam email account I'll say it's probably totally genuine.
It might be now, but keep in mind they've already been sued over it... so using the "unsubscribe" links to validify harvested addresses would likely, in fact, net them larger punitive damages in future lawsuits.
Mumma provided Omega World Travel with a valid, lawful opt out request as provided for by 5[a(3)(A)(i) of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 on Jan. 1
SCO was, in fact, not so frivilous in the eyes of the court. As it went on it definately started to reek of bullshit, but there was a possibility nearer the start that at least some for claims were true. In addition, due to the technical an particular natures of the claims at hand, most judges wouldn't be in a position to easily dismiss them.
As for Oreo cookies, well it's a stupid claim however you see smokers winning against tobacco companies (yes, I know oreo doesn't contain nicotime).
In this case, however, somebody is being sued for following and using the law. To allow a lawsuit based on this would be a very bad precedent. If the spammer (or indeed anyone) has a problem with the law itself, he should attack the law not the company applying it.
My current version (Linux Debian/Unstable) seems to be rendering fine lately. The version on my windows box (either 1.0 or 1.0.1) tends to be stupid about it and will crap layers over top of each other, etc... so that the article/comments text overlaps the left nav bars.
Within the above companies, I know that some at least use Linux or linux/BSD-derived products within their own.
Cisco is a good example, they make Linksys products which I believe are known to use such iptables or something similar?
We have some on computers at work. They lag to high hell even running a decent opengl screensaver . Same screensaver runs fine on a cheap desktop with integrated SIS video (not notably well accelerated either).
The only thing Extreme about the Intel graphics cards is the lag... definately not comparable to a decent Radeon. Another laptop has an older radeon-mobile chipset and the screensavers work fine on that, too... though it's a lesser machine otherwise.
But what they're doing is making it illegal for others to sell you the tools to do so, do the job for you, and perhaps even document for you how to do it yourself.
If you can figure out how to manually mod your PS2 best of luck it's probably still legal, but nobody else will be able to help you with it.
Strangely enough, I have issues with other sounds (low sounds in a crowded room), but I'm still doing fine with high pitches. I can hear those annoying squeeky monitors, TV sets, and various other electronic phenomenoa that are caused by crappy capacitors, etc.
As a Canadian, I have for a very long time wondered why so many contests stated "Entries valid from anywhere in Canada excluding the province of Quebec" etc
I thought perhaps this had to do a lot with all the weird scams that tend to come from there (every summer it seems we get a "scratch and win" where the "winners" call and get put on-hold with an expensive 900 number in Quebec), but I suppose that's a seperate issue.
Dahhhling, that banner looks absolutely fabulous, but don't you think the popup would look much nicer with maybe a pink hem and some frills.
Fashion meets web design.... brrrrrrr I just had a chill.
I think that what tells is the end result though. If a device running at 90Mhz could say, output 60Fps of raytraced video, it would be better (for that application) than my current GPU - which does fine at standard GL/D3D graphics but can't render attractive Ray graphics realtime...
But depending on the actual graphics output, not too bad for a rendering device. You're better off to compare it to your video card than your desktop CPU. Even on my par 3Ghz machine though raytracing can be dog slow and certainly not near realtime.
I can't comment too much since we're suffering from the slashdot effect (can RTFA but the pics aren't loading), but depending on chip size one could imagine this being very useful on a handheld device or something similar. Perhaps a small integrated graphics tablet would benefit from this?
OK, actually now I've got JPEG's showing the renders, quality looks decent but as far as speed I'd like to see it in real action for realtime rendering.
I could see this working best as a "realtime" colour filter, especially if you're using a pen or something similar. Scratch near a border and view the result... if it goes a bit beyond where you want scratch on the other side of the border. If it's not quite enough lengthen your scratch.
I wonder how much CPU power is required, if you could do this realtime or close to it would be quite awesome, but having to make your scratches and click "apply filter" then wait for 30 seconds would not be nearly as useful/efficient.
I dabble more in the area of 3d art, but at times I've lifted a pencil and come up with some decent b&w sketches. Pencil shading is easy but sometimes getting the colours just right is more difficult than you might think.
When I looked at a lot of B&W webcomics, I can see that they'd look better in colour (especially the ones where the artist does occasionally do vibrant colour cells, but usually don't have time). This could change that though... want to see what your character would look like with a gold uniform... scribble a few colours within the borders. Want to see what that night-sky would like like with a red moon and rouged horizon, scribble a little red in and let the program do the work.
For cases where you want to preview colours, or just don't do colour well yourself, this would be a boon indeed!
How about something as simple as a search through an array of data.
You could have a CPU do a sort-based search, or a linear search. You could have two CPU's divide and conquer your list independantly and tackle it on a first-there basis.
For example, a list of names. If threaded became commonplace (if multi-CPU were common), a thread function might become:
Take list of 10000 clients where you are looking for client "Doug Ellis"
CPU #1 tags all items (assuming alphabetical sort by lastname) between 1 and 5000. CPU #2 takes 10000-5001.
The race begins, CPU #1 will hit the result and CPU #2's process can be terminated. OK, so this probably isn't much faster than your standard search.
But how about "Al Sanders"... a single CPU could would have more divides to reach that name, dividing names and finding if the target result would be more/less than the middle name. A linear search would take longer.
With either way, a second CPU starting from the list end would tag that name first, ending the search faster. Of course, a single CPU which was truely 2x faster than either of the duals would do nicely as well... but when we've reached a point where more MHZ aren't so easily forthcoming then dual CPU's handle the situation nicely indeed.
Actually, when you think about it an improved threading model would actually strongly benefit well-programmed games. Why? Because there are a lot of semi-related processes occuring. Sound, graphics, physics, etc etc... they're all part of the game but work in very different ways.
Now if you're working with a multithreaded CPU, one processor can be handling your CPU-bound graphics work (much of this is handed off to the video card anyhow), another can be doing sound/surround mixing, etc.
In an FPS with complicated AI, you could theoretically hand that off to CPU #2 while #1 is handling different things. Your graphics engine might not have ugly-mofo-alien #235 onscreen to render, but meanwhile he's watching you and looking for a boulder that will offer him good cover to snipe you from instead of just sitting like a drone waiting for a computer-acurate headshot.
Now let's say that PC's going multi-CPU. Maybe you don't need a single superpowerful processor, just a videocard and a few lower-powerful processors. Processor #1 is handing off the environmental data, #2 is prepping it for rendering and shovelling your GPU full of vertices, #3 is playing pinpoint surround for that cricket chirping behind the rock on your far left, and #4 is doing AI for ugly alien mofo #287.
When I think about how games are advancing a lot can come down to interprocess communications and/or bandwidth limitations. The GPU still handles much of the video stuff so your CPU isn't really a bottleneck there in many cases, but as internet connections speed up then you're going to have MMORPGs, FPS's, and more chock full of "actors" that make up sight, sound, physics, and AI that could very well benefit from more CPU's rather than extra ticks on your overclocked single processor.
After all, eye-candy is only a part of realism. True realism is also very much about a multitude of things happening at once.
For awhile, I noticed that SPAM in general seemed to be down on my various accounts. Then suddenly I've had a major surge of spam. The odd thing is that I'm getting it with on three different addresses from a particular sender.
To: A LUG email, and one I've used to post on slashdot (obfuscated)
CC: My primary email
Obviously somebody's got my number, so it's probably one main spammer... I'd love to figure out who that is any how he/she got my addresses.
Purchase Request
Item Name: Apple iPod
Description: To be used as an external bootable storage device for diagnosing and recovering PC's with failed hard-disks.
Hmmm, wonder if the boss would go for it...