well, I know people who have diabetes, as well as people who had (multiple) organ transplants.
Taking those tough medication after organ transplants does not exactly cheer one up, but the dose gets reduced, over time. Eventuelly you can live without the medication.
For diabetes, that isn't the case, afaik.
am I the only one that thought about the freelance mode in NFS:U2 ?
In related news: google also announced a new service, called "google date finder", to ease chances for _challenged_ people (read: geeks). In conjunction with google maps, google local, google ride finder and datefinder.com, the service is expected to be a huge breakthu success....
yes I did.
I even lived in a 100+ year old house made of bricks and stones.
Im not saying one is more advanced than the other, but they are most certainly nice to live in, and the amount of manpower involved in building either is certainly beyond comparision.
I agree though, that comparing brick houses and pre-fabs is like comparing apples and peas.
Pre-Fab houses are made of wood, mostly. So they should imho be compared to wood houses.
in good old europe, most houses are made of bricks. yes, that clay stuff.
And, yes, comparing a pre-fab or semi-pre-fab house to a brick house makes sense. But not to a "rough framed wooden structure".
Besides, preparing the site and assembling the parts took 5 people a single day. Not for a huge house, granted, but a 2 storey house that can nicely accomodate 4 people.
Not to offend anyone's craftmanship, but I highly doubt anyone with similiar manpower can "roughly frame" that anywhere within that timeframe.
Within the next 10 years or so, we're going to have so many transistors available that filling an entire chip just using VHDL will be an awful lot of work.
Yeah, right.
As long as the hardware is WAY more expensive than manpower, your point is invalid.
Secondly, FPGAs are being used for prototyping, as in "rapid" prototyping, mostly. Some in very high-performance DSP applications, too.
Have you ever seen a sophisticated DSP application 's source code ?
Many of them still use assembler (yeah duh) for core loops.
Why ? Because the compiler just cant take it to a level a tricky engineer can.
And probably because the code isnt as stable.
Besides, theres no use to pay license fees for an insane bleeding edge optimizing compiler, too.
I could go on....
The point that something has been around for 10 years isnt really a strong one either. just take a look at what VHDL was like 10 years ago....
Interesting noone has looked into the hardware/software of this thing yet. (maybe I just blatantly overread it)
First thing: I noticed they used / are using JHDL. (java hardware description language) Now am I the only one that goes WTF there ?
I've been working with VHDL and some Virtex chips amongst others, and I only heard about some attempts of C-HDL's (or C-like at least), and they all are in their kinda early steps.
Verilog and VHDL are the way to go. Therefore I ask the question: why the hell do these folks use Java ?
I recognize these people are not amateurs, nor stupid (heh), but I just think its very very awkward.
Granted, it may be the reference implementation, and it may be too complicated, but from the hardware-developer-point-of-view it makes no sense, really.
There are modules, and even cross-compiler compatibility and the whatnot, so please write at least some modules in proper HDL.
Next thing that amazed me: they use one (maybe 2 somewhen) Virtex II 6000-4 units. These are not really up to date any more. So the tech demos they pull, are low-end, in fact.
The particuilar Virtex II unit they use supports up to ~70.000 logic cells. Nowadays, a Virtex 4 unit can hold up to ~200.000.
So, talk of parallelism, eh ?;)
I generally think this is a great approach for improving performance on less silicon. And smart improvements. Enough of simd units aka mmx,sse, 3dnow! and the whatnot. pull one of these cards in, attach loads of bandwidth.
Want to game ? upload ur openRT cores. need video acceleration ? use another core. repeat et al:)
Windows-XP has a "feature" (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the "Scroll Lock" key twice. This feature can be turned on by the following steps:
1. Start regedit. (If you are unfamiliar with regedit, please refer to this FAQ) 2. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\S ervic es\i8042prt\Parameters 3. Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll 4. Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify 5. Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK. 6. Close regedit and reboot your system. 7. Now you can blue screen (crash) your system by holding the right CTRL key and pressing "Scroll Lock" twice.
Note:
Your system may reboot or show a blue screen whenever this crash is initiated. If your system reboots after initiating the crash, and you want to see the blue screen, follow these steps:
1. Go to Control Panel > System 2. Click on the Advanced tab 3. Under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button. 4. Under System failure, uncheck the option Automatically restart.
I don't mean to belittle those who have made a carreer of QA
It is not my intention to do so, either.
Maybe consistency was indeed the wrong expression, of course persistency is important too.
Evidentally quality is something they bestow upon others, without actually taking part in its processes by themselves... Why is that, one wonders?
Well, if you are reffering to one of them "quality bozos" then, well.... this word speaks for itself, dont you think ?
Documentation and tracking numbers is a key part in ISO9000:2000, eg (wow how I hate the name), so I dont think you got the whole idea right. Maybe he didnt explain it thoroughly, who knows.
The point I am trying to make is that, in the end, it does not just come down to check wether procedures are being followed. This is known as Taylorism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylorism and was abandoned long ago.
Get real.
testing can only prove the presence of an error, not its absence.
On another note, QA and QM methodes may sound incredibly dull and based upon "duh - how else should I do this, dumbass?", but are in fact highly sophisticated.
Not because they are not readical new, but because they are radically in their consistency. Think of something, and its error and faults, then of their causes, and their effects and impacts. Prefferably add fault probabilities, too. Then start over again.
It is constant feedback throughout the whole design process that is most important.
I've seen lots of FPGA related software being used on Solaris, as well as EDA programs like Mentor Graphics.
It is actually a big and vital part these products play for an electronic engineer.
Of course, some may say, these programs run on x86 and probably Windows OS as well. If you want quality, go for the Solaris version on a Sun, prefferably.
I have seen Mentor Graphics on an rather old Sun workstation behaving 10 times as fast as on a Dual Xeon opening/drawing the exact same layout.
So I guess thats kinda a nice use for Solaris. (and your (old) Sun, too)
Ok, the goggles and stuff might be fun. ok.
but building a tesla coil ?
Pardonnez moi ?
This is not only highly dangerous, but also incredibly stupid. While he DOES notice that the very strong electromagnetic field does turn on and off other devices nearby, he still keeps fiddling with it. There is no clue about the frequency his coil effectively produces, but simply the fact that there are at least some 50.000 volts wouldnt want me to have this device active, unless in a controller environment. (read: laboratory)
And, whats more, he also puts it on the net for other whackos to attempt, too. Great.
Quotes from other "projects" from this dude:
" Also you'll need to drill a hole in the microwave cover to get the hose out the back because you WILL *IMPORTANT* put the panel back on the microwave before operation or you will get cooked with RF radiation."
wohoo, at least he is aware that the panel is vital.
For those people who aint really into tech: a microwave oven heats up water molecules. and a human body consists of mostly water....
go figure.
I for one, wouldnt be surprised if this man dies a young death from cancerial deseases.....
I am not kidding. There are lots of templates available, but why is it so hard to make the M$ Office templates look like they do in M$ Office, just in OO ?
I dont have the nerves nor resources to convert all my templates. These are special templates for special course reports, or even corporate stuff at times.
If you can show me where I can get mine.....;)
well, seriously, I know its possible to convert them, its just way too much hazzle. And, like I said, if the my boss wants his dept's reports to look all the same, thats just not an option.
case closed.
I like OpenOffice.
But (there is always a but) i can only really use it for simple word processing.
Anything like interoperability with powerful programs like Matlab just isnt possible, because there is no official support. (and maybe the lack of extensive macros).
Anything far less important than that is the simple use of templates. For course work and higher level reports, documents, paperwork there is always some kind of a template. (Im talking of technical university stuff here)
And in Word, these actually do look nice, and ease up work a lot. Whats more, lets say all students do have similiar looks and style. Which is good. Think of a corporate design.
I can be as w00t 1337 as I want, if my documents look way different, then it isnt good.
Let alone the higher effort I have to put in to get, lets say, simply similiar looking headers and footers on every other page.
Sorry, OO, but until at least the template and layout issues are fixed, you are just not a serious option for my uses.
the cpu in my nokia cell phone can do similiar tasks, and the little cpu in my mp3 player is able to decode Xvid videos (yeah its an iRiver), so I dont actually think that cpu horsepower is that much of an issue here.
Such errors seem common. I believe it was the F-16 which had a similiar problem with the artificial horizon, causing it to rotate 180 when crossing the aequator. It has (luckily) been found and fixed.
Well, in the US, this may be the case. Here in good ol' europe, the vast majority of kids attend public schools.
The more priviledged your parents are, the more advantages children have. Now why doesnt this sound nice to me....
When I went to school, people were missing classes on purpose, and were fulyl backed up by their parents in most cases, so this RFID or whatever fancy technology wouldnt help anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for highly specialised tasks, take a look at Analog Devices http://www.analog.com/ or Texas Instruments http://www.ti.com/.
;)
They have been producing highly sophisticated cores that left a P4 bite the dust in a lot of cases.
I have worked on test-bed equipment that used a DSP PCI card that produced more test-data than a dual Xeon system could handle. JFYI.
GPUs like those from nVidia or ATI are still a lot less sophisticated than those DSPs, or hybrid DSP/uCs.
Still, in a few years FPGAs or CPLDs will surely be a so called "bigger threat" to (your favorite CPU company's) domination....
well, while we should "check those links" and really _use_ that preview button, CmdrTaco doesnt have to do so, apparently ;)
It should read "AMD Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Intel" of course. JFYI.
well, I know people who have diabetes, as well as people who had (multiple) organ transplants.
Taking those tough medication after organ transplants does not exactly cheer one up, but the dose gets reduced, over time. Eventuelly you can live without the medication.
For diabetes, that isn't the case, afaik.
who knows, if it uses compressed air, maybe it also uses compressed time ;)
am I the only one that thought about the freelance mode in NFS:U2 ?
In related news:
google also announced a new service, called "google date finder", to ease chances for _challenged_ people (read: geeks). In conjunction with google maps, google local, google ride finder and datefinder.com, the service is expected to be a huge breakthu success....
yes I did.
I even lived in a 100+ year old house made of bricks and stones.
Im not saying one is more advanced than the other, but they are most certainly nice to live in, and the amount of manpower involved in building either is certainly beyond comparision.
I agree though, that comparing brick houses and pre-fabs is like comparing apples and peas.
Pre-Fab houses are made of wood, mostly. So they should imho be compared to wood houses.
haha :)
in good old europe, most houses are made of bricks. yes, that clay stuff.
And, yes, comparing a pre-fab or semi-pre-fab house to a brick house makes sense. But not to a "rough framed wooden structure".
Besides, preparing the site and assembling the parts took 5 people a single day. Not for a huge house, granted, but a 2 storey house that can nicely accomodate 4 people.
Not to offend anyone's craftmanship, but I highly doubt anyone with similiar manpower can "roughly frame" that anywhere within that timeframe.
As long as the hardware is WAY more expensive than manpower, your point is invalid.
Secondly, FPGAs are being used for prototyping, as in "rapid" prototyping, mostly. Some in very high-performance DSP applications, too.
Have you ever seen a sophisticated DSP application 's source code ?
Many of them still use assembler (yeah duh) for core loops.
Why ? Because the compiler just cant take it to a level a tricky engineer can.
And probably because the code isnt as stable.
Besides, theres no use to pay license fees for an insane bleeding edge optimizing compiler, too.
I could go on....
The point that something has been around for 10 years isnt really a strong one either. just take a look at what VHDL was like 10 years ago....
haha, now its been years since i heard that name. rings lots of bells though. oy!
:)
But i dont consider that OpenRT as vaporware, mere as a POC or tech-demo. Xilinx will be thankful (and Altera prolly too)
Any news from our finnish Oy's there, btw ?
also view: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142507 &cid=11941863
it's a virtex II 6000-4
from some pdf at http://www.saarcor.de/pubs.html
Interesting noone has looked into the hardware/software of this thing yet. (maybe I just blatantly overread it)
;)
:)
First thing: I noticed they used / are using JHDL. (java hardware description language) Now am I the only one that goes WTF there ?
I've been working with VHDL and some Virtex chips amongst others, and I only heard about some attempts of C-HDL's (or C-like at least), and they all are in their kinda early steps.
Verilog and VHDL are the way to go. Therefore I ask the question: why the hell do these folks use Java ?
I recognize these people are not amateurs, nor stupid (heh), but I just think its very very awkward.
Granted, it may be the reference implementation, and it may be too complicated, but from the hardware-developer-point-of-view it makes no sense, really.
There are modules, and even cross-compiler compatibility and the whatnot, so please write at least some modules in proper HDL.
Next thing that amazed me: they use one (maybe 2 somewhen) Virtex II 6000-4 units. These are not really up to date any more. So the tech demos they pull, are low-end, in fact.
The particuilar Virtex II unit they use supports up to ~70.000 logic cells. Nowadays, a Virtex 4 unit can hold up to ~200.000. So, talk of parallelism, eh ?
I generally think this is a great approach for improving performance on less silicon. And smart improvements. Enough of simd units aka mmx,sse, 3dnow! and the whatnot. pull one of these cards in, attach loads of bandwidth.
Want to game ? upload ur openRT cores. need video acceleration ? use another core. repeat et al
Windows-XP has a "feature" (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the "Scroll Lock" key twice. This feature can be turned on by the following steps:
S ervic es\i8042prt\Parameters
1. Start regedit. (If you are unfamiliar with regedit, please refer to this FAQ)
2. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\
3. Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll
4. Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify
5. Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK.
6. Close regedit and reboot your system.
7. Now you can blue screen (crash) your system by holding the right CTRL key and pressing "Scroll Lock" twice.
Note:
Your system may reboot or show a blue screen whenever this crash is initiated. If your system reboots after initiating the crash, and you want to see the blue screen, follow these steps:
1. Go to Control Panel > System
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button.
4. Under System failure, uncheck the option Automatically restart.
Happy crashing...
cudos to http://www.tweakxp.com/article140073.aspx
I don't mean to belittle those who have made a carreer of QA
It is not my intention to do so, either.
Maybe consistency was indeed the wrong expression, of course persistency is important too.
Evidentally quality is something they bestow upon others, without actually taking part in its processes by themselves... Why is that, one wonders?
Well, if you are reffering to one of them "quality bozos" then, well.... this word speaks for itself, dont you think ?
Documentation and tracking numbers is a key part in ISO9000:2000, eg (wow how I hate the name), so I dont think you got the whole idea right. Maybe he didnt explain it thoroughly, who knows.
The point I am trying to make is that, in the end, it does not just come down to check wether procedures are being followed. This is known as Taylorism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylorism and was abandoned long ago.
Get real.
testing can only prove the presence of an error, not its absence.
On another note, QA and QM methodes may sound incredibly dull and based upon "duh - how else should I do this, dumbass?", but are in fact highly sophisticated.
Not because they are not readical new, but because they are radically in their consistency. Think of something, and its error and faults, then of their causes, and their effects and impacts. Prefferably add fault probabilities, too. Then start over again.
It is constant feedback throughout the whole design process that is most important.
I've seen lots of FPGA related software being used on Solaris, as well as EDA programs like Mentor Graphics.
It is actually a big and vital part these products play for an electronic engineer.
Of course, some may say, these programs run on x86 and probably Windows OS as well. If you want quality, go for the Solaris version on a Sun, prefferably.
I have seen Mentor Graphics on an rather old Sun workstation behaving 10 times as fast as on a Dual Xeon opening/drawing the exact same layout.
So I guess thats kinda a nice use for Solaris. (and your (old) Sun, too)
Ok, the goggles and stuff might be fun. ok. but building a tesla coil ?
Pardonnez moi ?
This is not only highly dangerous, but also incredibly stupid. While he DOES notice that the very strong electromagnetic field does turn on and off other devices nearby, he still keeps fiddling with it.
There is no clue about the frequency his coil effectively produces, but simply the fact that there are at least some 50.000 volts wouldnt want me to have this device active, unless in a controller environment. (read: laboratory)
And, whats more, he also puts it on the net for other whackos to attempt, too.
Great.
Quotes from other "projects" from this dude:
" Also you'll need to drill a hole in the microwave cover to get the hose out the back because you WILL *IMPORTANT* put the panel back on the microwave before operation or you will get cooked with RF radiation."
wohoo, at least he is aware that the panel is vital.
For those people who aint really into tech: a microwave oven heats up water molecules. and a human body consists of mostly water....
go figure.
I for one, wouldnt be surprised if this man dies a young death from cancerial deseases.....
I am not kidding. There are lots of templates available, but why is it so hard to make the M$ Office templates look like they do in M$ Office, just in OO ?
;)
I dont have the nerves nor resources to convert all my templates. These are special templates for special course reports, or even corporate stuff at times.
If you can show me where I can get mine.....
well, seriously, I know its possible to convert them, its just way too much hazzle. And, like I said, if the my boss wants his dept's reports to look all the same, thats just not an option.
case closed.
I like OpenOffice.
But (there is always a but) i can only really use it for simple word processing.
Anything like interoperability with powerful programs like Matlab just isnt possible, because there is no official support. (and maybe the lack of extensive macros).
Anything far less important than that is the simple use of templates. For course work and higher level reports, documents, paperwork there is always some kind of a template. (Im talking of technical university stuff here)
And in Word, these actually do look nice, and ease up work a lot. Whats more, lets say all students do have similiar looks and style. Which is good. Think of a corporate design.
I can be as w00t 1337 as I want, if my documents look way different, then it isnt good.
Let alone the higher effort I have to put in to get, lets say, simply similiar looking headers and footers on every other page.
Sorry, OO, but until at least the template and layout issues are fixed, you are just not a serious option for my uses.
the cpu in my nokia cell phone can do similiar tasks, and the little cpu in my mp3 player is able to decode Xvid videos (yeah its an iRiver), so I dont actually think that cpu horsepower is that much of an issue here.
....those location tracks together with a alcohol-breath track and statistics of your bank account could prove indeed useful.....
....the next day. ;)
Such errors seem common. I believe it was the F-16 which had a similiar problem with the artificial horizon, causing it to rotate 180 when crossing the aequator. It has (luckily) been found and fixed.
Well, in the US, this may be the case. Here in good ol' europe, the vast majority of kids attend public schools.
The more priviledged your parents are, the more advantages children have. Now why doesnt this sound nice to me....
When I went to school, people were missing classes on purpose, and were fulyl backed up by their parents in most cases, so this RFID or whatever fancy technology wouldnt help anyway.
omg Im so glad that I dont have to attend a school. *sigh*
Curious though how/when/if this will be adpoted in Europe....
omg true, ctrl + / ctrl - works like a dream. I had to click reload like a thousand times.
:)
thanks a lot