Right now many ISPs are vague about upper limits. This is good. Here's why: consider the alternative. If an ISP needs to choose a hard limit then they need to choose a bandwidth that they can guarantee. If they make such a choice then they weill calculate based on the worst case scenario of many people using that bandwidth simultaneously and everyone will get throttled to a very low bandwidth cap. But when the ISP uses the vague approach you can use the bandwidth of other people who aren't saturating the cables. Another approach would be for customers to pay for bandwidth per bit - but that would make things expensive for the heavy users. By having things vague the low bandwidth users effectively subsidise the high bandwidth users. So if you're a heavy user it's in your interest not to complain about the status quo too loudly - you're the one who benefits.
Is this the x86 flavor of Linux? Then your question is really easy to answer. Shrink your disk partition to make room for a new partition and install some flavor of Windows. I've heard there are quite a few games that run under that OS. And when you've finished just reboot in Linux.
I didn't see any 160 proof booze when I was there
on
Home DNA Sequencing
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· Score: 1
Yup. I can see some specialist applications just as my doctor uses a database of drugs on his Palm. But I can't see them useful as general purpose machines. People spend much of their time writing email or Word documents and you can't do this well on a tablet. As you point out, it depends on good handwriting recognition but we don't have that yet! I guess any job that involves people walking around taking notes (e.g. doctors, surveyors, civil engineers) might benefit if the handwriting recognition were good. I just don't see them being a successful mass market item.
The problem is that people on Star Trek use tablets so everyone thinks they are the way of the future...
I can see some specialist applications but I can't imagine them be of general purpose interest.
The fact that by default most Palms and PocketPCs don't come with keyboards (unlike older Psions say) proves that they aren't really used for anything other than basic uses like address books (for which they were originally designed of course). Data entry is incredibly slow. So even though there are thousands of apps available they're mostly gimmicks masquerading as productivity tools or games. Tablet PCs seem to be the same thing. You can't even write an email on one at a reasonable speed. Even purely graphical applications go faster with keyboard shortcuts.
I think computing is in a mini-crisis. We can make tools so small that we don't have room to make a human usable user interface of a corresponding size. It seems to me that UI, not CPU power, or disk storage, or RAM, is the big bottleneck with computers. Simply discarding the keyboard doesn't seem like a good solution without a good alternative.
I miss the days when PDAs had semi-usable keyboards. I guess one day I'm going to miss the day when laptops did.
Everyone knows that it's barcodes, not RFID, that encode 666. For those who don't know, the barcode sequence for '6' is used at the beginning middle and end of every barcode so that in effect all standard barcodes contain '6-6-6'. These Christians should be interpreting this as meaning that RFID is OK.
Anyway, there's an espression known as having your cake and eating it too. These Christians may moan about the prophecy but the fact is they believe it. They believe the mark of the beast is inevitable and secretly welcome it knowing that it brings the apocalypse, and hence fulfillment of Revelations and the second coming, one step closer.
Now I think about it, it's damn weird. I live in Oakland, CA. I find it easier to understand English speakers from India than half the population of this city.
When I deal with SBC I'm often directed to Southern states and I have a really hard time understanding what is being said. I remember spending a minute or two just trying to figure out that the woman at the other end was saying 'modem'.
And just to terminate your PC hypothesis: sometimes if the person I'm dealing with is black I feel like we aren't speaking the same language at all. (And many linguists might argue that we're not.)
It's really anoying when people with very little english answer phones
That's just what I think. Except that more often than not it's when there are Americans at the other end of the phone. I find that Indians at least make an effort to enunciate all of the syllables in their words.
...enough my Mom just comes and tidies it up. I use the same method with dirty clothes. And if I'm hungry she just makes food. So why are you asking on SLashdot. Everyone has a mom don't they?
An product for a company to produce: bluetooth headphones but with a dial to allow you to switch between a small number of channels. Anyone could attach the transmitter to their iPod and just use it to listen and anyone else could listen in. By having multiple channels you could choose who to listen to. It'd require a tiny piece of hardware plugged into the iPod jack. The only catch is agreeing to a standard.
Years ago I wrote some code that could tell if a pair of instructions 'commuted' in the sense that they could be reordered without affecting the functionality. Eg. "mov eax,1" and "mov ebx,2" are likely to be swappable but "mov eax,2" and "add ebx,eax" almost certainly can't be. I then used simulated annealing to walk through the space of code segments equivalent under commutation in an attempt to find the reordering optimal for the CPU pipeline.
In other words I randomly swapped pairs of instructions that could be swapped, if it saw an improvement it kept it and if it saw a degradation it rejected it with a probability depending on how bad it made things.
After hours of running it would sometimes trim a clock cycle or two per loop off a short assembler routine.
Most of these must have been genuine surprises for people. I certainly expected to see a small lunar colony by now and far more supersonic airliners.
But the "breakthrough propulsion" project is surely one that didn't even fizzle. It didn't light in the first place. Surely nobody really believed that NASA was going to come up with the anti-gravity or warp drive? That space should have been reserved for household robots. Finally, in the 21st century, we are seeing some crude robots on the carpet or lawn, but they've been promised for years and are only being used for the most trivial of tasks - no surprise that lawn mowing and vacuuming both consist of nothing more than traversing an area.
And I'd add an eighth - fusion power. That really does fizzle out on a regular basis.
If you copy to a larger drive will the newly copied filesystem make full use of the entire new disk or will it just use a portion of the disk corresponding to the size of the filesystem you dd'ed over?
Go into the control panel and add the optional Windows component "Fly Around". You should at least RTFM or do some googling before you claim that Windows is missing a feature.
For example there was a fascinating pre-history of graphics cards from before they were released to the general public. Many developers on/. were surely involved in developing for these things even though they never finally made it to market. Many companies were involved before the appearance of the 3dfx chipset: Cirrus Logic, Yamaha, LSI, Oak, 3dlabs, Nvidia and so on.
Some of my favorite cards were the 'decelerators' such as the Yamaha device. They hadn't yet figured out how to do 'perfect scan' so if you rendered a pair of triangles with a common edge then the pixels on that edge would be rendered in both triangles. If you rendered a square tesselated as triangles in the obvious way then the corner pixels were rendered 6 times. I had arguments with the guys about performance. They told me my drivers sucked as I couldn't match their laboratory performance. It's astonishing that a company could bring a device as far as first silicon without knowing how to rasterize a triangle correctly! Even without such mistakes they were still slow as the PCI bus was no way to send 3D instructions, geometry and textures anywhere. It would often take longer to format the data and send it to the device than simply rasterize directly to screen memory in software - even on early Pentiums!
Then there was the first nvidia card that you may or may not know about. My God this thing was bad. Now I can't remember the exact details (this is many years ago) but it was very like the Sega Saturn's 3D system. (I don't think there's a coincidence here, the card came with a PC version of Virtua Fighter so I guess Sega and Nvidia were working together). Basically it was a sprite renderer. A square sprite renderer. But it had been hacked so the spans of the sprites could be lines that weren't raster aligned. So you could render twisted rectangles. With some deviousness you could render polygons with perspective and you had a 3D renderer. But it basically always 'pushed' an entire sprite. So it was pretty well impossible to do any kind of clipping. It was next to impossible to map the functionality to any kind of 3D API and so could only run applications dedicated to it. Again they complained that we were unable to write proper 3D drivers for their card. Admittedly their design did at least allow some games to run fast but I'm still amazed by the lack of understanding by the early nvidia guys. So when they eventually overtook 3dfx I was completely blown away.
And then there was the question of APIs. In the old days there was no Direct3D. There was OpenGL but most PCs were a long way from having the power for a full OpenGL implementation. Early on only one company was interested in OpenGL - 3dLabs. They were the only company who understood what they were doing on PCs in those early days. So there was a variety of APIs: Renderware, Rendermorphics, and BRender among others. Rendermorphics was eventually bought by MS and became Direct3D. The first few revisions were terrible but as they always do MS eventually 'got it'. Renderware is still going. They are part of Canon. Anyone who knows Canon will be aware that they patent everything. If you dig out the early Canon patents you'll find they patented fast rendering of speculars by a technique which meant they didn't actually move as the viewpoint move. (If you know 3D you should be laughing loudly right about now.) But Renderware did get their act together and now have a 3D API that runs on a few consoles. And some of the earliest and coolest 3D hacks were first patented by them. BRender just disappeared though Jez San, the guy behind it, recently received an OBE for his influence on the British computer games industry. (Gossip tidbit: at one point SGI were looking for a 3D API for PCs and chose BRender over OpenGL for their FireWalker game development system.) If you dig into the pre-pre-history of 3D accelerators you'll see that San's company, Argonaut, developed the first commercial 3D accelerator (though not PC card) - the FX chip for the SNES, used for Starfox.
And this is all from memory so please accept my apologies for errors and post corrections!
Any kind of labor saving device ultimately makes life harder which is why we all work crazy hours these days compared to the 9-5 of our forebears. Increased power availability probably just means people can keep the factories and offices open for even longer meaning we'll have even shorter evenings and weekends.
Here. Note the.9999999. This number is so close to being an exact integer it's astonishing that it's not.
See also here. I don't quite know why that guy is offering a prize. It's well understood as coming from the properties of the j-function.
Very briefly: you may have sketched the function y^2=P(x) in your life where P(x) is a cubic. If you allow x and y to be complex numbers you get a 2D surface. That 2D surface is basically a twisted up torus (minus a point at or two corresponding to when x and y go to infinity) and the j function gives a way of specifying exactly what torus. It also plays an important role in string theory. But the full explanation of why you get all these near integers is quite long and involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now many ISPs are vague about upper limits. This is good. Here's why: consider the alternative. If an ISP needs to choose a hard limit then they need to choose a bandwidth that they can guarantee. If they make such a choice then they weill calculate based on the worst case scenario of many people using that bandwidth simultaneously and everyone will get throttled to a very low bandwidth cap. But when the ISP uses the vague approach you can use the bandwidth of other people who aren't saturating the cables. Another approach would be for customers to pay for bandwidth per bit - but that would make things expensive for the heavy users. By having things vague the low bandwidth users effectively subsidise the high bandwidth users. So if you're a heavy user it's in your interest not to complain about the status quo too loudly - you're the one who benefits.
Is this the x86 flavor of Linux? Then your question is really easy to answer. Shrink your disk partition to make room for a new partition and install some flavor of Windows. I've heard there are quite a few games that run under that OS. And when you've finished just reboot in Linux.
You weren't hanging out with the right Poles.
...are used for image based rendering in the visual effects world. They're not gigapixel in size but pretty close.
The problem is that people on Star Trek use tablets so everyone thinks they are the way of the future...
The fact that by default most Palms and PocketPCs don't come with keyboards (unlike older Psions say) proves that they aren't really used for anything other than basic uses like address books (for which they were originally designed of course). Data entry is incredibly slow. So even though there are thousands of apps available they're mostly gimmicks masquerading as productivity tools or games. Tablet PCs seem to be the same thing. You can't even write an email on one at a reasonable speed. Even purely graphical applications go faster with keyboard shortcuts.
I think computing is in a mini-crisis. We can make tools so small that we don't have room to make a human usable user interface of a corresponding size. It seems to me that UI, not CPU power, or disk storage, or RAM, is the big bottleneck with computers. Simply discarding the keyboard doesn't seem like a good solution without a good alternative.
I miss the days when PDAs had semi-usable keyboards. I guess one day I'm going to miss the day when laptops did.
Anyway, there's an espression known as having your cake and eating it too. These Christians may moan about the prophecy but the fact is they believe it. They believe the mark of the beast is inevitable and secretly welcome it knowing that it brings the apocalypse, and hence fulfillment of Revelations and the second coming, one step closer.
Now I think about it, it's damn weird. I live in Oakland, CA. I find it easier to understand English speakers from India than half the population of this city.
And just to terminate your PC hypothesis: sometimes if the person I'm dealing with is black I feel like we aren't speaking the same language at all. (And many linguists might argue that we're not.)
You can easily make yourself feel better about dealing with Dell. Try dealing with Acer for a bit.
...enough my Mom just comes and tidies it up. I use the same method with dirty clothes. And if I'm hungry she just makes food. So why are you asking on SLashdot. Everyone has a mom don't they?
We should give them a few weeks to prove they have no weapons of mass destruction. If they fail to give us the proof I say we let the missiles fly.
An product for a company to produce: bluetooth headphones but with a dial to allow you to switch between a small number of channels. Anyone could attach the transmitter to their iPod and just use it to listen and anyone else could listen in. By having multiple channels you could choose who to listen to. It'd require a tiny piece of hardware plugged into the iPod jack. The only catch is agreeing to a standard.
Has anyone solved the Stonehenge puzzle? I bet most people don't even realise it's a puzzle.
In other words I randomly swapped pairs of instructions that could be swapped, if it saw an improvement it kept it and if it saw a degradation it rejected it with a probability depending on how bad it made things.
After hours of running it would sometimes trim a clock cycle or two per loop off a short assembler routine.
But the "breakthrough propulsion" project is surely one that didn't even fizzle. It didn't light in the first place. Surely nobody really believed that NASA was going to come up with the anti-gravity or warp drive? That space should have been reserved for household robots. Finally, in the 21st century, we are seeing some crude robots on the carpet or lawn, but they've been promised for years and are only being used for the most trivial of tasks - no surprise that lawn mowing and vacuuming both consist of nothing more than traversing an area.
And I'd add an eighth - fusion power. That really does fizzle out on a regular basis.
If you copy to a larger drive will the newly copied filesystem make full use of the entire new disk or will it just use a portion of the disk corresponding to the size of the filesystem you dd'ed over?
Go into the control panel and add the optional Windows component "Fly Around". You should at least RTFM or do some googling before you claim that Windows is missing a feature.
What if the drives have different sizes?
Not that you'll be reading this.
Some of my favorite cards were the 'decelerators' such as the Yamaha device. They hadn't yet figured out how to do 'perfect scan' so if you rendered a pair of triangles with a common edge then the pixels on that edge would be rendered in both triangles. If you rendered a square tesselated as triangles in the obvious way then the corner pixels were rendered 6 times. I had arguments with the guys about performance. They told me my drivers sucked as I couldn't match their laboratory performance. It's astonishing that a company could bring a device as far as first silicon without knowing how to rasterize a triangle correctly! Even without such mistakes they were still slow as the PCI bus was no way to send 3D instructions, geometry and textures anywhere. It would often take longer to format the data and send it to the device than simply rasterize directly to screen memory in software - even on early Pentiums!
Then there was the first nvidia card that you may or may not know about. My God this thing was bad. Now I can't remember the exact details (this is many years ago) but it was very like the Sega Saturn's 3D system. (I don't think there's a coincidence here, the card came with a PC version of Virtua Fighter so I guess Sega and Nvidia were working together). Basically it was a sprite renderer. A square sprite renderer. But it had been hacked so the spans of the sprites could be lines that weren't raster aligned. So you could render twisted rectangles. With some deviousness you could render polygons with perspective and you had a 3D renderer. But it basically always 'pushed' an entire sprite. So it was pretty well impossible to do any kind of clipping. It was next to impossible to map the functionality to any kind of 3D API and so could only run applications dedicated to it. Again they complained that we were unable to write proper 3D drivers for their card. Admittedly their design did at least allow some games to run fast but I'm still amazed by the lack of understanding by the early nvidia guys. So when they eventually overtook 3dfx I was completely blown away.
And then there was the question of APIs. In the old days there was no Direct3D. There was OpenGL but most PCs were a long way from having the power for a full OpenGL implementation. Early on only one company was interested in OpenGL - 3dLabs. They were the only company who understood what they were doing on PCs in those early days. So there was a variety of APIs: Renderware, Rendermorphics, and BRender among others. Rendermorphics was eventually bought by MS and became Direct3D. The first few revisions were terrible but as they always do MS eventually 'got it'. Renderware is still going. They are part of Canon. Anyone who knows Canon will be aware that they patent everything. If you dig out the early Canon patents you'll find they patented fast rendering of speculars by a technique which meant they didn't actually move as the viewpoint move. (If you know 3D you should be laughing loudly right about now.) But Renderware did get their act together and now have a 3D API that runs on a few consoles. And some of the earliest and coolest 3D hacks were first patented by them. BRender just disappeared though Jez San, the guy behind it, recently received an OBE for his influence on the British computer games industry. (Gossip tidbit: at one point SGI were looking for a 3D API for PCs and chose BRender over OpenGL for their FireWalker game development system.) If you dig into the pre-pre-history of 3D accelerators you'll see that San's company, Argonaut, developed the first commercial 3D accelerator (though not PC card) - the FX chip for the SNES, used for Starfox.
And this is all from memory so please accept my apologies for errors and post corrections!
Any kind of labor saving device ultimately makes life harder which is why we all work crazy hours these days compared to the 9-5 of our forebears. Increased power availability probably just means people can keep the factories and offices open for even longer meaning we'll have even shorter evenings and weekends.
See also here. I don't quite know why that guy is offering a prize. It's well understood as coming from the properties of the j-function.
Very briefly: you may have sketched the function y^2=P(x) in your life where P(x) is a cubic. If you allow x and y to be complex numbers you get a 2D surface. That 2D surface is basically a twisted up torus (minus a point at or two corresponding to when x and y go to infinity) and the j function gives a way of specifying exactly what torus. It also plays an important role in string theory. But the full explanation of why you get all these near integers is quite long and involved.