To fully support all languages, including Asian, there really is no alternative - the UNICODE format. That, and sticking to the use of tables for strings, menus etc.
One of the major correct things Microsoft did some time ago was realize this - hence for most of their products a different resource file is all that's needed to support another language (I'm ignoring help files etc.). IMHO, it's a great pity that the Linux system didn't realize this earlier (especially as it was written in a non English language country).
Since I'm currently working in China, this has become a very important issue, more so to me because I am designing a natural language scripting tool that has to understand both Chinese characters and syntax. Whilst we may find some translations by the Chinese into English funny, it's just because English (to them) is as foreign as Chinese is to us. All of us English speakers should realize that just because C/C++/Python etc. make sense to us, they don't to others. It's just not reasonable to say, well, if you want to learn programming, then you must learn English first.
As I'm in China working for an online entertainment company, I see every day the sort of long term thinking and planning that they use here (e.g. look at the latest maglev trial run - 8 minutes for 18 miles from city centre to airport). It might be connected to their respect for older and wiser people.
China has one of (if not the) highest growth rates in the world. And it's doing this against a background of a poor global economy - imagine what it could do with a good one. For a good analysis, read this.
Given the West's incredibly short term view (IMHO badly wrong), I expect their growth rate to continue. Their internal market is so large they can afford to look at the long term.
The basic point is that, although pregnancy termination (IMHO, a much better description) has been going on for countless centuries, breast cancer seems to have jumped in recent times.
Since the number of terminations in any given set of women is MUCH lower than the rate of breast cancer, it would be very difficult to deem it a cause.
As stated before, it's very tough to justify the change in opinion on political issues alone. I'd be quite happy to accept a change based on a new study that showed a connection - just not one as a result of a pro-life house members complaint.
Did you read the study done on 1.5 million women? Is that not enough 'evidence' for you? Or perhaps you would prefer the average American study, on 1000 people with massive uncertanties.
How about women who don't breast feed? Wouldn't that make just as much difference. And what about miscarriages, as someone else pointed out.
As someone who also posted this very same article earlier (but was rejected), I have to say that the point here is they are CHANGING the sites to further political agendas. A very bad thing, IMHO.
Sadly, the only thing surprising about it (to me) was that the media kept this so quiet. Wonder what's next (and I really don't want to think about that)?
'UNBIASED Knowledge is Good' - any other kind is Bad.
My earliest memory is of my 2nd birthday, which was spent in hospital having my tonsils removed. I can even remember the scale of the place - it seemed huge, as did my parents. Probably natural for a small 2 year old. Remember the birthday cake and the presents my parents brought.
Next was around the age of 3, not long after my sister was born - my mother tried to dry a blanket too close to the fire, and it caught fire. Not surprisingly, I remember it very well.Shortly after this happened, we moved, so it remains my only memory of that place.
Whole mass of memories after that point, nearly all trauma related (not the happiest of childhoods).
If you read the article, it talks about a server installation - not very useful for playing online games (although some sys admins might correct me on that).
It was probably a RAID set of SCSI drives, which AFAIK aren't that easy to sell to your average stolen property fence.
That, and given the fact that this was not a random theft (planning etc.), leads me to think that the SSNs were the target. And that whoever was responsible knows how to extract the data.
500,000 SSNs must be worth a lot of money to some criminal(s) out there.
There may not be in the USA, but such laws are common in Europe.
In the UK, the Data Privacy Act requires you to keep the information in a secure manner, and the fines for not doing so can be pretty high.
Of course, the EU in general makes it much harder for companies to share information in general on their customers. Hence the problems between the EU and US over online shopping etc. For some reason the EU treats it's citizens privacy as a higher priority than the US does.
It might have been worth pointing out that the linked article is in Spanish, for those slashdotters who actually read the articles but can't speak Spanish.
The 128 bit precision you mentions is really a marketing trick.
If you look at the pixel shader architecture, you'll find that each instruction operates on a vector of 4 values (corresponding to RGBA). Four 32 bit floats don't really equate to 128 bit precision (more like 24*4, or 96).
In reality, of course, the output resolution (or frame buffer format) is what counts.
As of now, DirectX (including 9.0) supports a maximum total of 32 bits per pixel in the output buffer. Although that will certainly change in the future.
Dons flameproof suit - I am so sick of hearing this crap about open source video drivers. If you had invested countless millions of dollars in a video processor (note the word), would you want to give it to your competitors? Which is precisely what you would do if you gave away the source. Video processors (that word again) are NOT x86 compatible, and are not ever expected to be user programmable. They are entirely proprietary, and unlike software can't be produced in someones basement. Give the source away, and the next thing is you'll see clones of the hardware everywhere. The next thing you'll see is no more improvements in quality or rendering speed, because it won't be worth it. Sorry for being abrupt, but get a clue, guys. You don't design and produce 100 million transistor chips without serious money.
Seconded - I'm working in Guangzhou at the moment, and have to concur with everything you say. The local major cinema is showing Tomb Raider!!. People here cannot afford anything, even though a lot of stuff is incredibly cheap. The people here pirate stuff for a reason - they can't afford to buy it. I was shocked at the CD prices in a local store - western CD's are on sale at the same price as the US. Needless to say they don't sell many. And Gunagzhou is one of those places that have a higher standard of living (haven't got to Shenzhen yet).
I can't blame them - opening a merchant account is not only very expensive, but opens you up to serious hacking attempts.
Not only that, but if a stolen card is used, YOU (the merchant) are liable. All that stuff about you (the card owner) getting your money back may be true, but eventually it is the seller who pays, NOT the card company.
At $1000 per unit, it wouldn't take too many fraudulent uses to almost kill a small company.
Well said - how many other companies do you know that can spend $billions on something without having to make a profit (Xbox etc.). The fact that MS does not have to reward shareholders allows them enormous advantages compared with other compaines. Hell, they can even afford to pay for the cellphones, in the way of negative costs, until they are profitable (if ever). I wonder how much money MS had made for the various CE initiatives - it's probably nothing, but their market penetration has improved, undoubtedly.
An excellent article I read recently showed (by mathematical and statisical proof) that any security system that isn't entirely random can be bypassed (I'm afraid I don't have the reference - the/. guys will help here I'm sure). .Although it takes more planning, the guys who wrote it proved that once you have a deterministic way of vetting passengers it actually becomes easier for a prospective terrorist to bypass security. Very good read, and proves that a 'frequent flyer ID card' is, if anything, a way to make a terrorists life easier.
I may be wrong, but I thought that the whole idea of democracy was that if a majority of people decided they wanted something, then that had to be accepted.
Your so called 'stupid laws', that you obviously didn't agree with, are then 'struck down' by some irrelevant 200 year old rule that said 'well, democracy may be fine, but we get to choose what it can do, even 200 years from now'.
Sorry, but to generalize and believe that the 'constitution' supports democracy is just plain wrong. Of course the process is broken, since it is relying on judgements made in the distant past.
The whole problem with a 'written constitution' is that it does not evolve over time. Guess we're just stuck with 18th century values (slavery, no rights for women etc.) for ever. They were so much smarter than us, weren't they? Better that everything is legal, unless a law says otherwise, than a system where the apparent view is that you can only do what is written in some 200 year old text.
Many years ago (now), I worked on D3D at Microsoft. The constrasting APIs are quite different in their approach, but both have the same aim - that is, to enable 3D rendering on hardware devices. A few comments...
Extensibilty. The only reason why D3D is not extendable is a decision made within MS. The underlying DDI (Device Driver Interface) supports extensions (I should know, since I designed it originally), but MS decided a long time ago not to expose them to the user. From the OpenGL perspective, you have to watch for 'proprietary' extensions that are, for licensing reasons, unlikey to be generally supported.This leads to a lot of vendor specific code.
Philosophy.
OpenGL, except for extensions, is very hardware transparent. You don't have to worry about capabilities, at least as far as the basic code goes. The driver (or more commonly library) emulates those things it does not do natively - as a result, OpenGL is more portable to new hardware than D3D is - in theory, an OpenGL implementation could be entirely software driven, and you wouldn't know it. D3D, on the other hand, was designed originally to expose as much of the hardware as possible. In theory, this would allow software writers to only use those things that were really accelerated. But as hardware has become more complex, the OpenGL model (with it's assumption that everything is fast) becomes more compelling.
User level code.
OpenGL runs at user level, and that gives it a significant advantage over D3D, which is a mix of user and kernel. Due to the lack of context switches, OpenGL can almost always beat an equivalent D3D implementation, no matter what batching of primitives D3D tries to do. In thoery, there is no reason why D3D could not run in the same way, but in practice the powers that be at MS have decided otherwise. I happen to believe this is a loss for MS, but who am I to decide.
Shaders.
This is the area of most contention between D3D and OpenGL. The D3D model is based (almost certainly) on the nVidia model, whereas the current OpenGL model is purely based on extensions. We get into awkward territory here, since the ATI and nVidia extensions are markedly different. This is exposed most obviously in the D3D pixel shader versioning, where PS 1.4 is ATI,and 1.3 and below are nVidia. Pixel shaders prior to 1.4 are awkward, t say the least.
Support.
Microsoft supports OpenGL beacaue it has to, not because it wants to. Back in the early days, there was a possibility that support would be dropped, but sensible (i.e. a few) people in MS knew that it was a requirement for those areas MS was most keen to be in - for example, Workstations.
The Future. I have no doubt that both APIs will continue to be expanded, with D3D lagging slightly because of the afore mentioned differences. OpenGL 2.0 may resolve some of the conflicts, but given it's heritage (3Dlabs), it's possible that it may be further from the real major hardware (ATI and nVidia)than the extensions. As they say, it's impossible to please all the people all of the time.
When I started work in the UK, the company I worked for had a requirement that I had to be an 'apprentice', and in my case that was as a computer operator. It lasted about 3 weeks - at 17, I had already taught myself Algol, Fortran and Cobol, so being an operator was a bit below me. Having said that, I won't forget the experience - I could probably still load tapes as good as anyone 8-). Needless to say I soon 'graduated' to programming. Ah - those were the days - NOT.
Still, it gave you some respect to see the computer was run via a motor generator to keep the power supply constant. Disks - what are they?
Of course, the average calculator has far more power than the machine I was programming/operating - 1 instruction took about 5 microseconds, IIRC. Still, a company of 2,000 people relied on it (gasp!).
I guess it has nothing to do with the fact that cereal prices are at an all time low, but consumers are paying upwards of $3 for a box of breakfast cereal? Maybe I'm just stupid, but it seems that the money from agriculture is now firmly in the hands of the corporations. The fact that the average farmer is broke has little to do with his productivity, and much more to do with the shift of power to the mega corps.
The original article points to the value of this new train as being partly that current tracks need not be electrified.
Surely the point is that existng tracks cannot handle anything other than the painfully slow vehicles of yester year - take a look at Acela, that barely manages an average of 60MPH for all its hype.
The sad truth is that existing tracks and trains have a lot of derailments; unless the track is replaced there will only be more of the same.
Sorry, but the idea of being in a train pulled by a super fast turbine on ancient tracks is not appealing to me. Does crash, burn seem familiar to anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
To fully support all languages, including Asian, there really is no alternative - the UNICODE format. That, and sticking to the use of tables for strings, menus etc.
One of the major correct things Microsoft did some time ago was realize this - hence for most of their products a different resource file is all that's needed to support another language (I'm ignoring help files etc.). IMHO, it's a great pity that the Linux system didn't realize this earlier (especially as it was written in a non English language country).
Since I'm currently working in China, this has become a very important issue, more so to me because I am designing a natural language scripting tool that has to understand both Chinese characters and syntax. Whilst we may find some translations by the Chinese into English funny, it's just because English (to them) is as foreign as Chinese is to us. All of us English speakers should realize that just because C/C++/Python etc. make sense to us, they don't to others. It's just not reasonable to say, well, if you want to learn programming, then you must learn English first.
Seconded - you make some very valid points.
.
As I'm in China working for an online entertainment company, I see every day the sort of long term thinking and planning that they use here (e.g. look at the latest maglev trial run - 8 minutes for 18 miles from city centre to airport). It might be connected to their respect for older and wiser people.
China has one of (if not the) highest growth rates in the world. And it's doing this against a background of a poor global economy - imagine what it could do with a good one. For a good analysis, read this
Given the West's incredibly short term view (IMHO badly wrong), I expect their growth rate to continue. Their internal market is so large they can afford to look at the long term.
The basic point is that, although pregnancy termination (IMHO, a much better description) has been going on for countless centuries, breast cancer seems to have jumped in recent times.
Since the number of terminations in any given set of women is MUCH lower than the rate of breast cancer, it would be very difficult to deem it a cause.
As stated before, it's very tough to justify the change in opinion on political issues alone. I'd be quite happy to accept a change based on a new study that showed a connection - just not one as a result of a pro-life house members complaint.
Did you read the study done on 1.5 million women? Is that not enough 'evidence' for you? Or perhaps you would prefer the average American study, on 1000 people with massive uncertanties.
How about women who don't breast feed? Wouldn't that make just as much difference. And what about miscarriages, as someone else pointed out.
As someone who also posted this very same article earlier (but was rejected), I have to say that the point here is they are CHANGING the sites to further political agendas. A very bad thing, IMHO.
Sadly, the only thing surprising about it (to me) was that the media kept this so quiet. Wonder what's next (and I really don't want to think about that)?
'UNBIASED Knowledge is Good' - any other kind is Bad.
My earliest memory is of my 2nd birthday, which was spent in hospital having my tonsils removed. I can even remember the scale of the place - it seemed huge, as did my parents. Probably natural for a small 2 year old. Remember the birthday cake and the presents my parents brought.
Next was around the age of 3, not long after my sister was born - my mother tried to dry a blanket too close to the fire, and it caught fire. Not surprisingly, I remember it very well.Shortly after this happened, we moved, so it remains my only memory of that place.
Whole mass of memories after that point, nearly all trauma related (not the happiest of childhoods).
If this is on one DVD, either you're divorced and the kids only come over weekends or you must have one hell of an understanding wife!
Anyone agree the new Hooters airline might need one of these?
Of course, if they do get one, how many guys are going to fake it in order to be examined?
Thank you - best laugh all day.
If you read the article, it talks about a server installation - not very useful for playing online games (although some sys admins might correct me on that).
It was probably a RAID set of SCSI drives, which AFAIK aren't that easy to sell to your average stolen property fence.
That, and given the fact that this was not a random theft (planning etc.), leads me to think that the SSNs were the target. And that whoever was responsible knows how to extract the data.
500,000 SSNs must be worth a lot of money to some criminal(s) out there.
Really wish I had kept some mod points from yesterday - someone, please, mod this right up to the limit.
There may not be in the USA, but such laws are common in Europe.
In the UK, the Data Privacy Act requires you to keep the information in a secure manner, and the fines for not doing so can be pretty high.
Of course, the EU in general makes it much harder for companies to share information in general on their customers. Hence the problems between the EU and US over online shopping etc. For some reason the EU treats it's citizens privacy as a higher priority than the US does.
It might have been worth pointing out that the linked article is in Spanish, for those slashdotters who actually read the articles but can't speak Spanish.
The 128 bit precision you mentions is really a marketing trick.
If you look at the pixel shader architecture, you'll find that each instruction operates on a vector of 4 values (corresponding to RGBA). Four 32 bit floats don't really equate to 128 bit precision (more like 24*4, or 96).
In reality, of course, the output resolution (or frame buffer format) is what counts.
As of now, DirectX (including 9.0) supports a maximum total of 32 bits per pixel in the output buffer. Although that will certainly change in the future.
One of the reasons is that under the USA's export limits, China is not yet permitted to buy fab technology smaller than 0.25 micron.
However, this might change soon, given the low labor costs in China - I'm sure Intel would love to build a fab there.
Thanks for the information - for those slashdot readers in China (here on a contract), the Bochs site is blocked since it is part of sourceforge.
Dons flameproof suit - I am so sick of hearing this crap about open source video drivers. If you had invested countless millions of dollars in a video processor (note the word), would you want to give it to your competitors?
Which is precisely what you would do if you gave away the source. Video processors (that word again) are NOT x86 compatible, and are not ever expected to be user programmable. They are entirely proprietary, and unlike software can't be produced in someones basement.
Give the source away, and the next thing is you'll see clones of the hardware everywhere. The next thing you'll see is no more improvements in quality or rendering speed, because it won't be worth it.
Sorry for being abrupt, but get a clue, guys. You don't design and produce 100 million transistor chips without serious money.
Seconded - I'm working in Guangzhou at the moment, and have to concur with everything you say. The local major cinema is showing Tomb Raider!!. People here cannot afford anything, even though a lot of stuff is incredibly cheap. The people here pirate stuff for a reason - they can't afford to buy it. I was shocked at the CD prices in a local store - western CD's are on sale at the same price as the US. Needless to say they don't sell many. And Gunagzhou is one of those places that have a higher standard of living (haven't got to Shenzhen yet).
I can't blame them - opening a merchant account is not only very expensive, but opens you up to serious hacking attempts.
Not only that, but if a stolen card is used, YOU (the merchant) are liable. All that stuff about you (the card owner) getting your money back may be true, but eventually it is the seller who pays, NOT the card company.
At $1000 per unit, it wouldn't take too many fraudulent uses to almost kill a small company.
Well said - how many other companies do you know that can spend $billions on something without having to make a profit (Xbox etc.).
The fact that MS does not have to reward shareholders allows them enormous advantages compared with other compaines.
Hell, they can even afford to pay for the cellphones, in the way of negative costs, until they are profitable (if ever).
I wonder how much money MS had made for the various CE initiatives - it's probably nothing, but their market penetration has improved, undoubtedly.
An excellent article I read recently showed (by mathematical and statisical proof) that any security system that isn't entirely random can be bypassed (I'm afraid I don't have the reference - the /. guys will help here I'm sure).
.Although it takes more planning, the guys who wrote it proved that once you have a deterministic way of vetting passengers it actually becomes easier for a prospective terrorist to bypass security.
Very good read, and proves that a 'frequent flyer ID card' is, if anything, a way to make a terrorists life easier.
I may be wrong, but I thought that the whole idea of democracy was that if a majority of people decided they wanted something, then that had to be accepted.
Your so called 'stupid laws', that you obviously didn't agree with, are then 'struck down' by some irrelevant 200 year old rule that said 'well, democracy may be fine, but we get to choose what it can do, even 200 years from now'.
Sorry, but to generalize and believe that the 'constitution' supports democracy is just plain wrong. Of course the process is broken, since it is relying on judgements made in the distant past.
The whole problem with a 'written constitution' is that it does not evolve over time. Guess we're just stuck with 18th century values (slavery, no rights for women etc.) for ever. They were so much smarter than us, weren't they? Better that everything is legal, unless a law says otherwise, than a system where the apparent view is that you can only do what is written in some 200 year old text.
Many years ago (now), I worked on D3D at Microsoft. ,and 1.3 and below are nVidia. Pixel shaders prior to 1.4 are awkward, t say the least.
The constrasting APIs are quite different in their approach, but both have the same aim - that is, to enable 3D rendering on hardware devices. A few comments...
Extensibilty.
The only reason why D3D is not extendable is a decision made within MS. The underlying DDI (Device Driver Interface) supports extensions (I should know, since I designed it originally), but MS decided a long time ago not to expose them to the user. From the OpenGL perspective, you have to watch for 'proprietary' extensions that are, for licensing reasons, unlikey to be generally supported.This leads to a lot of vendor specific code.
Philosophy.
OpenGL, except for extensions, is very hardware transparent. You don't have to worry about capabilities, at least as far as the basic code goes. The driver (or more commonly library) emulates those things it does not do natively - as a result, OpenGL is more portable to new hardware than D3D is - in theory, an OpenGL implementation could be entirely software driven, and you wouldn't know it.
D3D, on the other hand, was designed originally to expose as much of the hardware as possible. In theory, this would allow software writers to only use those things that were really accelerated.
But as hardware has become more complex, the OpenGL model (with it's assumption that everything is fast) becomes more compelling.
User level code.
OpenGL runs at user level, and that gives it a significant advantage over D3D, which is a mix of user and kernel. Due to the lack of context switches, OpenGL can almost always beat an equivalent D3D implementation, no matter what batching of primitives D3D tries to do. In thoery, there is no reason why D3D could not run in the same way, but in practice the powers that be at MS have decided otherwise. I happen to believe this is a loss for MS, but who am I to decide.
Shaders.
This is the area of most contention between D3D and OpenGL. The D3D model is based (almost certainly) on the nVidia model, whereas the current OpenGL model is purely based on extensions. We get into awkward territory here, since the ATI and nVidia extensions are markedly different. This is exposed most obviously in the D3D pixel shader versioning, where PS 1.4 is ATI
Support.
Microsoft supports OpenGL beacaue it has to, not because it wants to. Back in the early days, there was a possibility that support would be dropped, but sensible (i.e. a few) people in MS knew that it was a requirement for those areas MS was most keen to be in - for example, Workstations.
The Future.
I have no doubt that both APIs will continue to be expanded, with D3D lagging slightly because of the afore mentioned differences. OpenGL 2.0 may resolve some of the conflicts, but given it's heritage (3Dlabs), it's possible that it may be further from the real major hardware (ATI and nVidia)than the extensions. As they say, it's impossible to please all the people all of the time.
When I started work in the UK, the company I worked for had a requirement that I had to be an 'apprentice', and in my case that was as a computer operator. It lasted about 3 weeks - at 17, I had already taught myself Algol, Fortran and Cobol, so being an operator was a bit below me. Having said that, I won't forget the experience - I could probably still load tapes as good as anyone 8-). Needless to say I soon 'graduated' to programming. Ah - those were the days - NOT.
Still, it gave you some respect to see the computer was run via a motor generator to keep the power supply constant. Disks - what are they?
Of course, the average calculator has far more power than the machine I was programming/operating - 1 instruction took about 5 microseconds, IIRC. Still, a company of 2,000 people relied on it (gasp!).
I guess it has nothing to do with the fact that cereal prices are at an all time low, but consumers are paying upwards of $3 for a box of breakfast cereal?
Maybe I'm just stupid, but it seems that the money from agriculture is now firmly in the hands of the corporations.
The fact that the average farmer is broke has little to do with his productivity, and much more to do with the shift of power to the mega corps.
The original article points to the value of this new train as being partly that current tracks need not be electrified.
Surely the point is that existng tracks cannot handle anything other than the painfully slow vehicles of yester year - take a look at Acela, that barely manages an average of 60MPH for all its hype.
The sad truth is that existing tracks and trains have a lot of derailments; unless the track is replaced there will only be more of the same.
Sorry, but the idea of being in a train pulled by a super fast turbine on ancient tracks is not appealing to me. Does crash, burn seem familiar to anyone?