Quartz Extreme only 3D accelerates Quartz Compositor.
You've got to walk before you can run. When Mac OS X 10.2 shipped in 2002, Quartz Extreme was introduced. This used OpenGL hardware to accelerate the assembly of the display from window buffers.
The most interesting thing here from a technical point of view wasn't the accelerated compositing, but something a bit more subtle. With the introduction of Quartz Extreme, the window buffers were being made visible to the GL hardware acceleration system, and could be directly addressed by the hardware DMA engine.
This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, which I'm sure you will be hearing more about in the near future.
The overall concept behind Keith's X proposal, the planned Longhorn graphics system, and the Mac OS X graphics system is to 'jack up' the window system and slide a higher level driver abstraction under it.
I first spotted an interesting trend in graphics chip sets in the early 1990s. The 2D acceleration units were all aimed at simple GDI acceleration, doing on-screen drawing of simple Bresenham lines (and sometimes circles), rectangle fills, and rect moves. The 3D needs of games, on the other hand, were driving polygon rendering and texturing, and future roadmaps from the chip vendors were calling for alpha (coverage) generation, pixel combining (compositing) and ATI was even contemplating filtering!
In window system work I've been involved in since then, we've aimed to always be able to 'jack up' the system and slide a higher level rendering abstraction in place, so as to be able to take advantage of things like this.
With the latest generations of hardware and GL ARB extensions, I think there will be some very interesting products shipped within the next year. Combinations of precise antialiased rendering and very fast shading units allow hardware accelerated rendering that is almost a pixel-perfect match for sophisticated software algorithms.
More than 2,000 observed supernovae disagree with you.
Good point. We should pass a law prohibiting the construction of fusion reactors containing more than two solar masses of fuel (just to leave a good safety margin) on the Earth.
The revenues of the anti-virus companies have grown significantly. Symantec (SYMC) has FY2004 revenue of US$1,870 million. Just 5 years ago they had revenue of US$632.2 million.
A triple in revenue, above the billion dollar mark, is enough to get even Microsoft interested. They are not inclined to leave money on the table. Selling an anti-virus program, particularly with the now-popular subscription model, is an easy way to add revenue.
This patch and a vast collection of 'white papers' is all that we'll ever see from this NASA initiative.
The papers will be the result of spending several billion dollars on studies with NASA aerospace industry contractors.
No hardware beyond conceptual models will be produced.
Sorry folks, but if you want to actually GO somewhere, NASA is no longer the most effective way to spend money to get there. In a few more years, NASA won't be able to get people to LEO any more. That makes getting to the moon or Mars difficult.
Delta Clipper series - 3 successful scale model flights of DC-X, project terminated for DC-XA after crash on 4th landing. It worked, though. Defunded in 1996 for the X-33 and following projects.
X-33 started 1996, ended 2001. Concrete was poured for a launch facility. Lots of parts moved in (and out) of an assembly hanger. NASA discovers that when in contact with liquid hydrogen, lots of materials turn brittle and fail under load. (This bit actually develops some good materials science.) Two completed aerospike rocket engines were built and operated in a test stand for 1.12 seconds.
X-37 orbital flight demonstrator. X40A scale model for free flight built in 1998. Fabrication of first X-37 started in 2001, with an orbital test planned for 2003. AIr Force withdrew support in 2002. Project defunded in 2003.
CEV - Announced 2003. NASA Request for Information sent to contractors in April 2004. "Spiral development" plan call for launching a stripped down prototype in 2008, containing only about 30 percent of the systems of a fully developed craft, unpiloted test flights in 2011, and a manned mission in 2014.
whinge PPronunciation Key(hwnj, wnj) intr.v. Chiefly British whinged, whinging, whinges To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.
Want to know what really happened with the problem?
First, the DVD player back then didn't know much about wide aspect ratio or high-resolution displays. So...
First it switched your display to a lower resolution it could handle. The lower resolution modes have a 4:3 aspect ratio. Without 'stretching', or widening the pixels in the horizontal direction, which would look odd, this results in a display mode of operation in which the display produces black bands on the left and right of the display.
Next, now that it had a display resolution it knew about, the player looked at the aspect ratio of the movie, and determined that when it filled the active display width (which was matted, but it didn't know that), that there wouldn't be enough pixels of height to fill the display vertically. The program then generated a set of horizontal matte bars.
The vertical matte bars came from the display mode of operation. The horizontal bars came from the program's need to generate a matte.
Since then, the player has been substantially rewritten, and now knows much more about display hardware. I'd have been very surprised if the support tech understood details of display hardware and the DVD player internals.
based on reading just the title, Microsoft has applied for a few.
My favorite title is "Universal Computing Device".
20040093593 Software componentization 20040093568 Handwritten file names 20040093515 Cross platform network authentication and authorization model 20040093393 System and method for selecting a media file for a mobile device 20040093389 Light weight file I/O over system area networks 20040093372 Challenge and response interaction between client and server computing devices 20040093371 Memory bound functions for spam deterrence and the like 20040092297 Personal mobile computing device having antenna microphone and speech detection for improved speech recognition 20040090457 System and apparatus for sending complete responses to truncated electronic mail messages on a mobile device 20040088657 Method for selecting a font 20040088589 System and method for preserving state data of a personal computer in a standby state in the event of an AC power failure 20040088537 Method and apparatus for traversing a translation device with a security protocol 20040088394 On-line wizard entry point management computer system and method 20040088390 Method and levels of ping notification 20040088335 Method and system for ghosting a property during synchronization 20040088321 Method and system for modifying schema definitions 20040086191 Passive embedded interaction code 20040086181 Active embedded interaction code 20040085523 Pen projection display 20040085468 Photo-sensor array with pixel-level signal comparison 20040085370 Input mode selector on a mobile device 20040085364 Page bar control 20040085358 Glow highlighting as an ink attribute 20040085302 Statistical model for global localization 20040085287 Decoding and error correction in 2-D arrays 20040085286 Universal computing device 20040083460 Forward walking through binary code to determine offsets for stack walking 20040080499 Adaptive input pen mode selection 20040080482 Display controller permitting connection of multiple displays with a single video cable 20040078792 System and method for selectively deactivating auto-deploy functionality of a software input panel 20040078597 Automatic client authentication for a wireless network protected by PEAP, EAP-TLS, or other extensible authentication protocols 20040078581 Installation of black box for trusted component for digital rights management (DRM) on computing device 20040078565 Method for prompting a user to install and execute an unauthenticated computer application 20040078460 Network connection setup procedure for traffic admission control and implicit network bandwidth reservation 20040078383 Navigating media content via groups within a playlist 20040078382 Adaptive menu system for media players 20040078357 Optimizing media player memory during rendering 20040078356 Method for selecting terms from vocabularies in a category-based system 20040077314 Bluetooth smart mode switching for security and privacy 20040076069 System and method for initializing a memory device from block oriented NAND flash 20040075696 System and method for automatic mnemonic assignment 20040075695 Method and apparatus for providing context menus on a hand-held device 20040075687 System and method for managing a message view 20040075673 System and method for scaling data according to an optimal width for display on a mobile device 20040075672 System and method for block scaling data to fit a screen on a mobile device 20040075671 System and method for scaling images to fit a screen on a mobile device according to a non-linear scale factor 20040075648 System and method for inputting special characters 20040075623 Method and system for displaying images on multiple monitors 20040073873 Adaptive image formatting control 20040073872 System and method for converting between text format and outline format
The clever executives have managed to move manufacturing and testing offshore, along with much of operations (order entry, customer support, etc). Now they're moving product design and engineering offshore.
That leaves the sales forces, executive teams, and their security guards as the in-country staff when taken to a reasonable conclusion. All the technical smarts to develop and produce the product wind up off-shore. Executives get a 'productivity spike', possibly reduced costs, and profit goes up.
For a little while...
All this makes the assumption that there aren't any talented potential corporate executives overseas, or pools of investment capital. Bad assumption. Here's what happens next.
Overseas there will be a pool of skilled technical and manufacturing staff, managed by outsourcing companies. Some of those companies have smart executives. Deals will be cut to obtain capital, and entire staffs of outsourcing firms will 'quit' and go to work for shiny new local companies that will produce competing products. (There aren't protectionist laws on employee 'poaching' in many places outside the 'land of the free'.)
In around 7 to 10 years...
Craig! You've got competition. Competition that you trained. Competition that's hiring away your sales force. Competition that's more competitive because they don't have your high executive compensation costs.
Oops.
I suggest the board yank those golden parachutes off these bozos now, so they can better feel the pain later.
You might admire the work of Doctors Gerhard Wagner and Hermann Pfannmuller, conducted at the Eglfing-Haar Hospital. They successfully 'treated' disabled chidren, and later applied the same techniques to the elderly and other undesirables.
Dr. Karl Brandt and Dr. Leonardo Conti, the successor to Dr. Wagner, made great strides in improving the cost efficiency of the treatments and the applicationm to large populations. The treatment of the 10,000th patient was celebrated with a small ceremony and a bottle of beer for each of the hospital staff.
While I can feel for you in that situation, to me, that is exactly why we have copyrights.
This turns out not to be the case. Copyright law applies to the copying of a specific exact work. If a Microsoft implementation of the software I described eventually appears, and it is an exact copy of the preexisting implementation at the instruction level, then a copyright infringement could be demonstrated. If, however, the implementations were for differing machine architectures, for example, then a strict copyright infringement case is extremely difficult to prove.
Similarly, copyright protection for the 'look and feel' of a program fails unless the artwork (bitmaps and such) can be shown to be exact copied of the originals. In the 1992 ruling of Judge Walker in Apple vs Microsoft, the court found that the appropriate standard to apply was whether the two GUI presentations were "virtually identical," whereas Apple had argued that the appropriate standard was "substantial similarity." The decision of the lower court was upheld by the 9th Circuit in 1994.
Copyright protection for computer programs derives from the treatment of source code as a literary work. For purposes of copyright law, the object code is not a reproduction of the source code, even though it is derived from the source code. Object code such as is found in ROM is often formally registered for copyright, as a measure for use in piracy or illegal copying cases. Even recompiling source code for a different architecture results in a different 'work' of object code for copyright law purposes.
I'll stick with patents to protect my inventions, thank you.
Do you think that all this software is written solely to the patentable aspect of it?
Sorry, good software is written to do the job at hand...
Yes, but...
If I spend years developing something really unique for a company a bit smaller than Microsoft, then the last thing I and my employers want to see is Microsoft announcing the same unique software and mechanism for their product, based on, oh, seeing it at a trade show and reverse engineering the beta release, a day or two before we deliver the software. (Please note, we are delivering, they are announcing, and may not have an implementation yet.)
Patents allow me to profit (horrors! evil profit!) from my years of work without needing to be quite so concerned about being ripped off. Design patents allow me to protect the appearance, or 'look and feel' of the software, and invention patents allow me to profit from, well, busting my ass for years to develop what in hindsight looks like a reasonably obvious algorithm.
I was driving a 2000 Miata. (The '76 Charger guys are now laughing...) Only add-ons were the roll bar, stiffened suspension, and the supercharger, which was off.
Speed limit in that stretch is 55, but your average sedan or SUV won't be safe at much over 30. I was doing about 50.
I tend to drive not just in a straight line, but also around curves. I'll take a well balanced and properly set up Miata over a muscle car or FWD 'ricer' any day. Say, from Fort Ross to Jenner on Highway 1...
I was cruising through that stretch, top down and enjoying the ride, when a Honda with a huge wing bolted on puled onto the road behind me. I thought it looked a bit silly, but otherwise wasn't paying much attention.
I rolled onto a short straight section after the first set of curves, and this guy apparently decided he was racing me. I figured I'd pull over after the set of S curves I had just entered, and let Speed Racer pass and do his thing. But no, this guy decides he wants to pace me through the curves. Mind you, I wasn't pushing my car hard. This was quite literally a Sunday drive.
First swing left, and suddenly he's swapping ends and sliding the wrong way down the road. The road runs along a cliff face at this point, with rock on the left, and a 200 foot drop to the Pacific on the right. He managed to come to a stop, turn around, and make it to a turnout, where presumably he changed his shorts.
Big wings on a FWD car, Type-R stickers and coffee can sized exhaust tips don't improve handling all that much. Muscle cars may be OK on a straight line, but the real world has curves.
The combined frame buffer and display gamma is targeted to be 1.8 on Macs. This is done primarily through careful measurement and generation of calibration profiles for various displays.
The LCD panels have a non-gamma transfer function that's roughly linear (gamma 1.0). The actual transfer curve is S-shaped, something like a lazy integral symbol. Calibration for LCD panels is done through a compensating table lookup, rather than through a simple gamma equation.
The Mac OS X System Preferences Displays panel includes a Color tab, which in turn offers a Calibrate... option. Try running through the Calibrate sequence in your video viewing environment.
To obtain the best results for video viewing, which is often done under different environmental conditions than interactive computer use, use this Calibrate option in conjunction with a good video standards DVD in the desired viewing environment.
Even the THX Video Adjustment offered on 'THX Certified' DVDs is sufficient, when used with ColorSync Calibration, to produce reasonable results on Apple Macintosh displays.
Most solid fuel propellent leaves a fair amount of particulate matter behind. In direct sunlight, against a dark sky, that would show up pretty well.
It's quite possible to get a curved trajectory from a missile. Vanes in the exhaust stream can change the thrust vector slightly so it no longer goes through the center of mass, causing the missile's trajectory to curve. No atmosphere or wings are needed.
...good old fashioned radiation induced mutations. With this genetic engineering, how can one possibly take the idea of developing a race of atomic mutant supermen seriously?
When the Herlem Globetrotters reach Earth, we're doomed!
> From what I can see, I don't really understand how the firing was justified*.
Justified? Washington is not a 'right to work' state. Firings don't have to be justified. They have to meet federal guidelines against age and gender discrimination, but beyond that, it's pretty much:
"Smithers, I don't like the cut of that man's jib. Dispose of him."
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Hey, you should like, write a short article on this, and submit it to /. I bet lots of people would be interested.
Welcome to Short Attention Span Theater!
You've got to walk before you can run. When Mac OS X 10.2 shipped in 2002, Quartz Extreme was introduced. This used OpenGL hardware to accelerate the assembly of the display from window buffers.
The most interesting thing here from a technical point of view wasn't the accelerated compositing, but something a bit more subtle. With the introduction of Quartz Extreme, the window buffers were being made visible to the GL hardware acceleration system, and could be directly addressed by the hardware DMA engine.
This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, which I'm sure you will be hearing more about in the near future.
Correct. Keith Packard has the right idea here.
The overall concept behind Keith's X proposal, the planned Longhorn graphics system, and the Mac OS X graphics system is to 'jack up' the window system and slide a higher level driver abstraction under it.
I first spotted an interesting trend in graphics chip sets in the early 1990s. The 2D acceleration units were all aimed at simple GDI acceleration, doing on-screen drawing of simple Bresenham lines (and sometimes circles), rectangle fills, and rect moves. The 3D needs of games, on the other hand, were driving polygon rendering and texturing, and future roadmaps from the chip vendors were calling for alpha (coverage) generation, pixel combining (compositing) and ATI was even contemplating filtering!
In window system work I've been involved in since then, we've aimed to always be able to 'jack up' the system and slide a higher level rendering abstraction in place, so as to be able to take advantage of things like this.
With the latest generations of hardware and GL ARB extensions, I think there will be some very interesting products shipped within the next year. Combinations of precise antialiased rendering and very fast shading units allow hardware accelerated rendering that is almost a pixel-perfect match for sophisticated software algorithms.
Learn to read a balance sheet. Really. Profits are reported AFTER the R&D expense is taken out.
Good point. We should pass a law prohibiting the construction of fusion reactors containing more than two solar masses of fuel (just to leave a good safety margin) on the Earth.
It's a two-man rig. Ome man carries the zap gun, and the other carries the power pack. They rush into the needed location, set up, and open fire...
Sort of like the two cops in Sleeper...
What's changed?
The revenues of the anti-virus companies have grown significantly. Symantec (SYMC) has FY2004 revenue of US$1,870 million. Just 5 years ago they had revenue of US$632.2 million.
A triple in revenue, above the billion dollar mark, is enough to get even Microsoft interested. They are not inclined to leave money on the table. Selling an anti-virus program, particularly with the now-popular subscription model, is an easy way to add revenue.
This patch and a vast collection of 'white papers' is all that we'll ever see from this NASA initiative.
The papers will be the result of spending several billion dollars on studies with NASA aerospace industry contractors.
No hardware beyond conceptual models will be produced.
Sorry folks, but if you want to actually GO somewhere, NASA is no longer the most effective way to spend money to get there. In a few more years, NASA won't be able to get people to LEO any more. That makes getting to the moon or Mars difficult.
Delta Clipper series - 3 successful scale model flights of DC-X, project terminated for DC-XA after crash on 4th landing. It worked, though. Defunded in 1996 for the X-33 and following projects.
X-33 started 1996, ended 2001. Concrete was poured for a launch facility. Lots of parts moved in (and out) of an assembly hanger. NASA discovers that when in contact with liquid hydrogen, lots of materials turn brittle and fail under load. (This bit actually develops some good materials science.) Two completed aerospike rocket engines were built and operated in a test stand for 1.12 seconds.
X-37 orbital flight demonstrator. X40A scale model for free flight built in 1998. Fabrication of first X-37 started in 2001, with an orbital test planned for 2003. AIr Force withdrew support in 2002. Project defunded in 2003.
CEV - Announced 2003. NASA Request for Information sent to contractors in April 2004. "Spiral development" plan call for launching a stripped down prototype in 2008, containing only about 30 percent of the systems of a fully developed craft, unpiloted test flights in 2011, and a manned mission in 2014.
whinge PPronunciation Key(hwnj, wnj)
:-)
intr.v. Chiefly British whinged, whinging, whinges
To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.
I types what I means and I means what I types.
Want to know what really happened with the problem?
First, the DVD player back then didn't know much about wide aspect ratio or high-resolution displays. So...
First it switched your display to a lower resolution it could handle. The lower resolution modes have a 4:3 aspect ratio. Without 'stretching', or widening the pixels in the horizontal direction, which would look odd, this results in a display mode of operation in which the display produces black bands on the left and right of the display.
Next, now that it had a display resolution it knew about, the player looked at the aspect ratio of the movie, and determined that when it filled the active display width (which was matted, but it didn't know that), that there wouldn't be enough pixels of height to fill the display vertically. The program then generated a set of horizontal matte bars.
The vertical matte bars came from the display mode of operation. The horizontal bars came from the program's need to generate a matte.
Since then, the player has been substantially rewritten, and now knows much more about display hardware. I'd have been very surprised if the support tech understood details of display hardware and the DVD player internals.
based on reading just the title, Microsoft has applied for a few.
My favorite title is "Universal Computing Device".
20040093593 Software componentization
20040093568 Handwritten file names
20040093515 Cross platform network authentication and authorization model
20040093393 System and method for selecting a media file for a mobile device
20040093389 Light weight file I/O over system area networks
20040093372 Challenge and response interaction between client and server computing devices
20040093371 Memory bound functions for spam deterrence and the like
20040092297 Personal mobile computing device having antenna microphone and speech detection for improved speech recognition
20040090457 System and apparatus for sending complete responses to truncated electronic mail messages on a mobile device
20040088657 Method for selecting a font
20040088589 System and method for preserving state data of a personal computer in a standby state in the event of an AC power failure
20040088537 Method and apparatus for traversing a translation device with a security protocol
20040088394 On-line wizard entry point management computer system and method
20040088390 Method and levels of ping notification
20040088335 Method and system for ghosting a property during synchronization
20040088321 Method and system for modifying schema definitions
20040086191 Passive embedded interaction code
20040086181 Active embedded interaction code
20040085523 Pen projection display
20040085468 Photo-sensor array with pixel-level signal comparison
20040085370 Input mode selector on a mobile device
20040085364 Page bar control
20040085358 Glow highlighting as an ink attribute
20040085302 Statistical model for global localization
20040085287 Decoding and error correction in 2-D arrays
20040085286 Universal computing device
20040083460 Forward walking through binary code to determine offsets for stack walking
20040080499 Adaptive input pen mode selection
20040080482 Display controller permitting connection of multiple displays with a single video cable
20040078792 System and method for selectively deactivating auto-deploy functionality of a software input panel
20040078597 Automatic client authentication for a wireless network protected by PEAP, EAP-TLS, or other extensible authentication protocols
20040078581 Installation of black box for trusted component for digital rights management (DRM) on computing device
20040078565 Method for prompting a user to install and execute an unauthenticated computer application
20040078460 Network connection setup procedure for traffic admission control and implicit network bandwidth reservation
20040078383 Navigating media content via groups within a playlist
20040078382 Adaptive menu system for media players
20040078357 Optimizing media player memory during rendering
20040078356 Method for selecting terms from vocabularies in a category-based system
20040077314 Bluetooth smart mode switching for security and privacy
20040076069 System and method for initializing a memory device from block oriented NAND flash
20040075696 System and method for automatic mnemonic assignment
20040075695 Method and apparatus for providing context menus on a hand-held device
20040075687 System and method for managing a message view
20040075673 System and method for scaling data according to an optimal width for display on a mobile device
20040075672 System and method for block scaling data to fit a screen on a mobile device
20040075671 System and method for scaling images to fit a screen on a mobile device according to a non-linear scale factor
20040075648 System and method for inputting special characters
20040075623 Method and system for displaying images on multiple monitors
20040073873 Adaptive image formatting control
20040073872 System and method for converting between text format and outline format
> The method to decrypt the keyring was reverse engineered, giving you the key
Because of course calling SecKeychainOpen() and SeckeychainCopySettings() is just too darn obscure and difficult to do.
The clever executives have managed to move manufacturing and testing offshore, along with much of operations (order entry, customer support, etc). Now they're moving product design and engineering offshore.
That leaves the sales forces, executive teams, and their security guards as the in-country staff when taken to a reasonable conclusion. All the technical smarts to develop and produce the product wind up off-shore. Executives get a 'productivity spike', possibly reduced costs, and profit goes up.
For a little while...
All this makes the assumption that there aren't any talented potential corporate executives overseas, or pools of investment capital. Bad assumption. Here's what happens next.
Overseas there will be a pool of skilled technical and manufacturing staff, managed by outsourcing companies. Some of those companies have smart executives. Deals will be cut to obtain capital, and entire staffs of outsourcing firms will 'quit' and go to work for shiny new local companies that will produce competing products. (There aren't protectionist laws on employee 'poaching' in many places outside the 'land of the free'.)
In around 7 to 10 years...
Craig! You've got competition. Competition that you trained. Competition that's hiring away your sales force. Competition that's more competitive because they don't have your high executive compensation costs.
Oops.
I suggest the board yank those golden parachutes off these bozos now, so they can better feel the pain later.
You might admire the work of Doctors Gerhard Wagner and Hermann Pfannmuller, conducted at the Eglfing-Haar Hospital. They successfully 'treated' disabled chidren, and later applied the same techniques to the elderly and other undesirables.
Dr. Karl Brandt and Dr. Leonardo Conti, the successor to Dr. Wagner, made great strides in improving the cost efficiency of the treatments and the applicationm to large populations. The treatment of the 10,000th patient was celebrated with a small ceremony and a bottle of beer for each of the hospital staff.
This turns out not to be the case. Copyright law applies to the copying of a specific exact work. If a Microsoft implementation of the software I described eventually appears, and it is an exact copy of the preexisting implementation at the instruction level, then a copyright infringement could be demonstrated. If, however, the implementations were for differing machine architectures, for example, then a strict copyright infringement case is extremely difficult to prove.
Similarly, copyright protection for the 'look and feel' of a program fails unless the artwork (bitmaps and such) can be shown to be exact copied of the originals. In the 1992 ruling of Judge Walker in Apple vs Microsoft, the court found that the appropriate standard to apply was whether the two GUI presentations were "virtually identical," whereas Apple had argued that the appropriate standard was "substantial similarity." The decision of the lower court was upheld by the 9th Circuit in 1994.
Copyright protection for computer programs derives from the treatment of source code as a literary work. For purposes of copyright law, the object code is not a reproduction of the source code, even though it is derived from the source code. Object code such as is found in ROM is often formally registered for copyright, as a measure for use in piracy or illegal copying cases. Even recompiling source code for a different architecture results in a different 'work' of object code for copyright law purposes.
I'll stick with patents to protect my inventions, thank you.
Yes, but...
If I spend years developing something really unique for a company a bit smaller than Microsoft, then the last thing I and my employers want to see is Microsoft announcing the same unique software and mechanism for their product, based on, oh, seeing it at a trade show and reverse engineering the beta release, a day or two before we deliver the software. (Please note, we are delivering, they are announcing, and may not have an implementation yet.)
Patents allow me to profit (horrors! evil profit!) from my years of work without needing to be quite so concerned about being ripped off. Design patents allow me to protect the appearance, or 'look and feel' of the software, and invention patents allow me to profit from, well, busting my ass for years to develop what in hindsight looks like a reasonably obvious algorithm.
I was driving a 2000 Miata. (The '76 Charger guys are now laughing...) Only add-ons were the roll bar, stiffened suspension, and the supercharger, which was off.
Speed limit in that stretch is 55, but your average sedan or SUV won't be safe at much over 30. I was doing about 50.
Sure. Just install a good software firewall like Black Ice, and you're good to put that Windows box on the Internet.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8291
Heh. Excellent...
I tend to drive not just in a straight line, but also around curves. I'll take a well balanced and properly set up Miata over a muscle car or FWD 'ricer' any day. Say, from Fort Ross to Jenner on Highway 1...
I was cruising through that stretch, top down and enjoying the ride, when a Honda with a huge wing bolted on puled onto the road behind me. I thought it looked a bit silly, but otherwise wasn't paying much attention.
I rolled onto a short straight section after the first set of curves, and this guy apparently decided he was racing me. I figured I'd pull over after the set of S curves I had just entered, and let Speed Racer pass and do his thing. But no, this guy decides he wants to pace me through the curves. Mind you, I wasn't pushing my car hard. This was quite literally a Sunday drive.
First swing left, and suddenly he's swapping ends and sliding the wrong way down the road. The road runs along a cliff face at this point, with rock on the left, and a 200 foot drop to the Pacific on the right. He managed to come to a stop, turn around, and make it to a turnout, where presumably he changed his shorts.
Big wings on a FWD car, Type-R stickers and coffee can sized exhaust tips don't improve handling all that much. Muscle cars may be OK on a straight line, but the real world has curves.
The combined frame buffer and display gamma is targeted to be 1.8 on Macs. This is done primarily through careful measurement and generation of calibration profiles for various displays.
The LCD panels have a non-gamma transfer function that's roughly linear (gamma 1.0). The actual transfer curve is S-shaped, something like a lazy integral symbol. Calibration for LCD panels is done through a compensating table lookup, rather than through a simple gamma equation.
The Mac OS X System Preferences Displays panel includes a Color tab, which in turn offers a Calibrate... option. Try running through the Calibrate sequence in your video viewing environment.
To obtain the best results for video viewing, which is often done under different environmental conditions than interactive computer use, use this Calibrate option in conjunction with a good video standards DVD in the desired viewing environment.
Even the THX Video Adjustment offered on 'THX Certified' DVDs is sufficient, when used with ColorSync Calibration, to produce reasonable results on Apple Macintosh displays.
He's managed to get a patent for RFC 1034.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1034.html
Hmmm. That RFC is from 1987. Could it be... prior art?
I think we can safely ignore this USPTO faux pas.
Most solid fuel propellent leaves a fair amount of particulate matter behind. In direct sunlight, against a dark sky, that would show up pretty well.
It's quite possible to get a curved trajectory from a missile. Vanes in the exhaust stream can change the thrust vector slightly so it no longer goes through the center of mass, causing the missile's trajectory to curve. No atmosphere or wings are needed.
...good old fashioned radiation induced mutations. With this genetic engineering, how can one possibly take the idea of developing a race of atomic mutant supermen seriously?
When the Herlem Globetrotters reach Earth, we're doomed!
That memory load, seen via ps or top, includes the memory mapped video memory, possibly through multiple aperature ports for some hardware.
> From what I can see, I don't really understand how the firing was justified*.
Justified? Washington is not a 'right to work' state. Firings don't have to be justified. They have to meet federal guidelines against age and gender discrimination, but beyond that, it's pretty much:
"Smithers, I don't like the cut of that man's jib. Dispose of him."