Um, that would be a "WinPrinter," and we don't want no stinking WinPrinters in Linux!
Uh, then buy a postscript printer, where they move the closed code to firmware.
I suppose that last can of worms was Open Source operating systems or applications? If you're not done with that one yet I can see why you have the opinion you do. Give it time, you may learn the benefits of OSS some day...
I quite intentionally refrained from expressing my opinion regarding open source, because I wasn't explaining why I don't write fully open source printer drivers.
The only ethical problem I see with this (assuming it works) is that they'll have created an animal that they don't really know how to care for very well.
Does this really affect anything? Maybe we'll learn more about mammoths. What harm could it do? Well, the worst thing that seems likely to happen is that we make a unhealthy and unhappy mammoth, which would be unfortunate, but doesn't seem inherently evil to RISK that fate.
For whatever reason mammoths died out, I don't think it makes a big difference. We're not restoring their species or anything - one specimen would hardly be adequate to repopulate anything, you need at least two (for mammals). I don't really think that matters though. If they died out because they're ill-adapted, it's going to be expensive to keep them alive. If they think it's worth it, I don't object to them expending their resources on this project.
Oops, you're right, though you're not using the proper terms.
/si/ vs./su/ - I haven't looked at any spectrograms for a while, but I'll take your word for it that the/s/ sounds differ in quality. You could say that they are different phones. However, they are definately not different phonemes, in a strictly linguistic sense. Even if you know the difference, I'll explain it to everyone who doesn't have a Linguistics (or related) degree.
Any sound made by a human can be called a phone. Many of these crop up in language. These sounds can be classified into groups. These categories of sounds are semantically the same - switching from one s to the other does not alter the meaning of a word. These are called phonemes.
Some phones within a phoneme can be chosen by the speaker, these are said to be in free variation. Others are determined by context (and sound funny otherwise) - these are called allophones. (Your/si/ &/su/ example illustrate this nicely).
Spanish does not distinguish between b and v, similarly to the way Japanese lumps r and l (two separate phones) together into what in Japanese is the same phoneme.
I omitted to mention this added layer of complexity - the sonic properties of a given phoneme (which is really what you want to extract, in order to build morphemes) can vary a lot, to a degree dependant upon the language, dialect, and accent.
Nice to see some other language geeks here - keep me on my toes.
Be aware that printer drivers (at least for non-PS printers) often are a lot more than the implementation of the specs of the printer, and contain a fair ammount of the printer's functionality within.
These companies invest a large ammount of money into software to make their output look as good as it does. This can potentially mean complex (and patented) dithering and colour matching algorithms. Medium end printers instead move this closed code to firmware, along with a PS interpreter and enough RAM and power to handle it, or even (on higher end printers) divide their proprietary code between a dedicated print server and the rest to firmware.
Rudimentary printing is easy, but getting the most out of medium-end (?) printers ends up almost working backwards - you kinda buy the drivers and they come with the hardware to support them.
My point is not that this is good or bad, just that saying that printer vendors must open-source their drivers is to open a whole nother can of worms - is it appropriate for a company to sell closed software that runs on an open platform? I'm still not done eating my last can of worms!
"throwing more neurons" into a neural network does not necessarily improve its capabilities. Well, it kind of does. It increases its capabilities to learn special cases, but can often reduce it's ability to learn generalities - if it can memorize that f(2) = 4 and f(3) = 9, it may have a harder time realize that f(x) = x^2.
The more neurons you have the more heterogeneous your training data must be.
Yeah the number of phonemes used in most languages is in the 'few dozen' range. And you generally don't have to listen very long to hear them all at least once.
But even when you've got the phonemes, you've still got a fair ammount of work cut out for you. A number of phonological processes take place. For instance 'in plain sight' in may be pronounced 'im'. These kind of transformations (and more complicated ones) are happening all over the place, in every spoken language.
Linguists generally describe this kind of thing by writing context-sensitive rules to enumerate the transformations. Similar syntactic translations are context-sensitive.
Computer programming languages' syntax (er, not counting types, and identifier agreement (which are special cased)) are not even typically generic context-free languages, but instead are almost always part of the LL(1) or LR(1) subsets, meaning that they have the special property that you can determine what's going on just by looking ahead one character. Otherwise you end up with N^3 parsing time, and that's for context-free languages. Parsing of context-sensitive languages is way more problematic (think halting problem).
Unless you can parse the syntax, you can't really resolve ambiguities (to/two/too, there/they're, or even things which merge because of phonology (bitter/bidder/bit her)). Note that humans don't do so great with these issues always either, so a partial solution will be still qutie amazing.
But the fact still stands that turing samples into phonemes is only the first step in a very complicated process towards even something as simple as taking dictation. In fact, I'd say that syntax->semantics may be a smaller step than phonemes->syntax.
Well, a 350 MHz RAMDAC can't DAC more than 350 Million RAMs a second, can it? Let's do some math. (yay!)
1600x1200x32/8 = 7 680 000 bytes/screen.
The G400 (as an example) has a 300 MHz RAMDAC. At this resolution, it can DAC all its RAMs 100 times a second.
768 000 000 bytes/second. Hmm. Since each pixel takes up 3 or 4 bytes, and each Hz of the RAMDAC would pretty much have to work on entire pixels, this is fine with a 300 MHz RAMDAC.
The memory speed on the g400 max is.. (well they haven't announced it, but it's somewhere around the 170 mhz range). They claim a 256 bit 'dual bus' (whatever that means). 32 bytes/clock * 170 m = 5 440 000 000
About 14% of the bus bandwidth is being used by the RAMDAC, unless I'm missing something. Since the RAMDAC only ever really needs to look at 24 bits per pixel, we could probably bring that down to 10%. My guess as to the g400's ram clock isn't off by more than 10% either way.
So, yes, if you're running at a rediculous refresh rate, at a VERY high resolution, then a kind of significant portion of your video memory bandwidth is going to just turning pixels into voltages.
But you've got a lot left over still. Never minding squeezing data through the AGP, video RAM runs at a higher clock than system RAM and often sits on a wider bus.
Good thing there wasn't anyone around there smoking a cigarette. What with all those loose bits sloshing around, the slightest spark could have set off that 'internet explosion' people keep telling me about.
Something like this seems to happen every 8 months or so. Is there any good way to stop this? Aside from moving to wireless, the only thing I can think of is not put four high-bandwidth cables under the same patch of street - but then laying cable (er, fibre) becomes expensive proportionately to how many baskets you're keeping your eggs in.
Since the article was slashdotted, I didn't read it and assumed they were talking about projection, rather than magnification. At least projection's a little cool. So that post is 40% off topic. So sue me.
You're not magnifying the screen with the lens, you're focusing the light coming out of it.
Have you noticed that during a partial eclipse, all the pinholes of sunlight are crescent shaped? (makes shadows of trees real funky) This is the same deal - a pinhole only lets light pointing the right direction through, a lens makes all the light point the right direction (to be focused). Instead of all the light being crescent shaped, now it's shaped like arbitrary images.
I've done just this - putting a letter-sized fresnel lens its focal length away from the monitor (for the lens I had, that was ~8 inches). I was able to project the image on to sheets hung across the room. It was kind of neat - I watched some display hacks on my ceiling.
* The image was backwards. This could be fixed in software, but instead I got a mirror and started projecting onto the ceiling.
* The brightness was low. Two reasons: If you make the picture twice as big, it's half as bright (assuming every single photon makes it to the right place). If you're projecting it, you need to be fairly far away to watch it without blocking the light. Secondly, not all of the light coming out of a monitor goes straight out. The bigger the lens, the more light you get...
* Fresnel lenses approximate real lenses. And for an infinately far away source (frying bugs with the sun) they work really good. However, as the angle of the light hitting the lens increases (you get farther from the center) the quality of this approximation decreases (since you're not necessarily hitting the lens part, but will now send light through the ridges). Thus the image was fuzzy around the edges (I assume that's why).
This would work a bunch better with a real lens, except that large lenses are hard to make and heavy and expensive. You could do it with a small lens, but it would be EXTREMELY dim.
Despite all these problems my fool roommate still has a setup like this in the basement. But this is the same guy who spent ~40 hours (and ruined one of my drill bits) rebuilding a crappy $10 avacado-green sofa he took apart months before.
> Hardware T&L greatly increases the amount of onboard memory needed.
No facts to back this claim up. How exactly does hardware T&L increase the amount of onboard framebuffer required? With AGP, there really is no need for local video memory at all, except to use for the actual visual screen, and maybe as a texture cache. Sure the geometry system will need somewhere to cache scenes, but to fill up 128MB with just _geometry_ information you'll need something as complicated as that huge landscape scene in the Matrix.
Certainly hardware T&L does not increase the size of the framebuffer needed. However, AGP is really not as fast as the RAM they're putting in these systems - hell, all bus issues aside, system RAM is only 100 MHz, while most video cards local memory is way faster, or on a wider bus or both.
When doing the geometry, you don't want to tie up your bus to read and write and read each vertex as you translate and light each frame. Sure, it is possible to do it with AGP, but is it efficient? Let's see, they say it can push 15 million polys a second? Say a poly takes up.. I dunno, between 64 and 128 bytes (you need your texture indices too, remember)), you're using between one and two GB/s of bus bandwidth if all you're doing is reading each polygon once.
If this is 60 fps, each of those frames is 16-32 MB. 128 MB will be more than most applications will need. But using an extra 32 for geometry information is not unwarranted, in their pushing-the-card-to-its-limits case.
Gasoline taxes don't cover the cost it takes to keep the roads in good condition, (especially here in Minnesota). You driving you car on public roads are highly subsidized - why shouldn't public transportation be also?
The better the public transportation system, the more people use it. The more people use it, the more efficient it is. And it cuts down on other costs as well.
If you're in the twin cities, you might be able to get DSL through Covad via Onvoy (formerly known as MR-Net). Though it took them a LONG time to hook me up (they were opening a new central office) their service has proven satisfactory so far.
I think that this is probably a result of you being taught (this part of) the language the way it is spoken rather than the way prescriptive grammarians think it should be spoken. This is good - one of the problems with learning a foreign language is mastering the way it's casually spoken and not sounding too formal or proper, just because that's the only way you know how to say things.
The second amendment is about keeping the general populace armed both to deter tyranny on the part of government and also to provide a pool of individuals to raise a militia from so as to provide for the common defence. Just because the government misclassifies crypto as a munition doesn't mean it actually is one or has anything to do with an armed citizenry.
Times have changed enough that crypto is as important (if not more so) than guns in terms of reducing the threat of tyranny. Is violence the only constitutionally sanctioned method of resisting a corrupt or overbearing government? I should hope not.
My experiences with recommenders such as Firefly's, and CDNOW's have been lackluster at best, and flat out lousy at worst. (This is of particular interest to me as I implemented a functionally similar (though interally VERY different) system as my senior thesis project last year.. (Now that I've graduated, it's offline while I wait for DSL (doh)))
Have you guys seen good results with these systems (or anybody else's for that matter)?
I have several theories as to what problems exist with the sorts of approaches that I've seen in commercial usage, but (before I open my big mouth) would like to hear whether their failure to offer me reasonable suggestions is just 'cause I'm some kinda freak, or in fact representitive of the rest of the system.
We're living in a world with a lot of different beliefs, many of them conflict. Sex is a beautiful thing, sex will corrupt the youth. Abortion is sometimes necessary, nobody should ever be aborted. Et cetera.
This kind of thing has always been going on.
However, technology brings people closer together, and in these cases this exaggerates the existing friction.
The cheapest / easiest way to reduce friction from conflicting beliefs is to limit interaction between people. However, I believe that this to be suboptimal. Another way is to limit or eliminate beleifs conflicting with the majority. I also feel that to be a poor solution. But there are people who feel that these solutions are acceptable or even desirable.
Any solution is going to have the same problem as the original conflict - meta-beliefs (ideals on how to mediate interactions between possibly conflicting beliefs) are a lot like beliefs, in the sense that there are lot of them and they don't all agree.
Any institutionalized resonpse to these issues must embrace one set of meta-beliefs, even if it is able to maintain neutrality on the beliefs which come into conflict.
The United States' official traditional meta-belief of choice is a live-and-let-live freedom-of-speech stance. However, once a law is passed it's a big deal to un-pass it, and with hundreds of legislators passing laws day in and day out, for two hundred years...
In theory the body of laws should sort of flutter around near the consititution, and the noise of the random legislation should cancel iself out, but if you're doing a random walk in which its easier to go one way than another, you're a lot less likely to stay put.
Whenever I hear of one of these acts (the CDA, PICS, whatever) I think "That's it, I'm outta here." but..
Does anyone know of any country that deals with this kind of thing well?
The reason 150 dpi just doesn't cut it is that you're thinking in terms of printers - dithered or halftoned. Resolution and pixel depth are (to a point) interchangable. 300dpi continuous tone colour (such as dye-sub printers can deliver) is WAY better quality than offset printing delivers (magazines use an offset printing process.)
If you want to include tiny little details that you can see from 2" from the screen, yeah, 300dpi will make a difference.
I tried to port a DOS/DJGPP app to Win32/GCC and it was hard enough that I eventually gave up and used Dev Studio even though MS's compiler doesn't agree with GCC about some semantic / syntactic elements of the C++ language. (Error: Too many errors - compile aborted)
I was surprised to find that Dev Studio also generated faster code.
I disagree with you all who say that it's okay that Qt is not free for windows, or that it's a good thing, or that open source has no place under windows or whatever. Free portable multiplatform toolkits bring developers from other platforms towards writing portable code, which is a Good Thing.
I use and develop under Windows. I just deleted two paragraphs of excuses as to why I do this. I imagine if you really need to see them they won't help.
I've been working on a project for a while - it's not useful or anything I could make a lot of money on, but it can be a lot of fun to use, and a lot of fun to hack on. (hint: realtime controllable abstract 2d graphics a la euro-demos (eg, second reality)). I think that other people would also have fun playing with it, and poking at the code too, so I would like to open up the source.
Though I do use and develop under windows, I am not a bad person - The basic rendering and display routines are portable. Platform specific code is localized in one module, everything else is generic enough C++ that it compiles under 3 or 4 compilers, on 3 or 4 platforms (Win32 (directdraw& dev studio | c++builder), linux (svgalib & gcc), MacOS (hell if I know & metroworks), and DOS (int10 & djgpp)).
This is important, since I don't feel I can reasonably expect a lot of positive results if I open up source code that's too closely tied to commercial development tools and Windows, and I'll definately be able to find a lot more interested geeks who tinker with open source projects if things work under linux.
However, another requirement for this to work is that the programme be usable by people other than me. Right now I've been forced to make an obscure interface which relies on memorizing a list of reasonably random keyboard commands, and it doesn't even work well for me. What it really needs is a GUI.
But how do I implement a GUI in a portable way? It's important that things still work on Windows, but if things are only usable under windows, it's probably not worth the bother of opening up the source.
If there were something such as the QT widget library available (I don't have $1000 to throw at this project.) it would be easier for me to open up my code which already runs under Windows. This is good for everybody.
I care enough about open source and portability that I think I'm going to end up making an entirely separate programme out of my UI (written in Java/Swing) which communicates with the "engine" (which needs to be faster - C++) through TCP/IP or something. This is not the simplest solution I can imagine.
I am aware that this solution does has some advantages, but it's enough of a pain in the ass that if I merely think open source is only a kind-of-good idea, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
I believe that the Microwave Oven was actually a byproduct of research into stealth warplane technology.
I seem to recall that velcro was a space programme advance, though. About a month ago, there was an article on the history of the super soaker, which at least came out of NASA's JPL (which I believe is only loosely tied to the space programme, though I could be wrong)
At the end of Robert A. Heinlein's Expanded Universe is a speech he gave to congress about why the space programme is a good place to put money. IIRC, he enumerates several other technologies which resulted from our space programme.
One of the properties of per-post moderation (rather than per-poster moderation) is that it understands that different people know different amounts about different things. There certainly is some element of eloquence which makes for 'good posts', but.. nobody knows everything about everything, and it's safer not to assume that some people do.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, that would be a "WinPrinter," and we don't want no stinking WinPrinters in Linux!
Uh, then buy a postscript printer, where they move the closed code to firmware.
I suppose that last can of worms was Open Source operating systems or applications? If you're not done with that one yet I can see why you have the opinion you do. Give it time, you may learn the benefits of OSS some day...
I quite intentionally refrained from expressing my opinion regarding open source, because I wasn't explaining why I don't write fully open source printer drivers.
The only ethical problem I see with this (assuming it works) is that they'll have created an animal that they don't really know how to care for very well.
Does this really affect anything? Maybe we'll learn more about mammoths. What harm could it do? Well, the worst thing that seems likely to happen is that we make a unhealthy and unhappy mammoth, which would be unfortunate, but doesn't seem inherently evil to RISK that fate.
For whatever reason mammoths died out, I don't think it makes a big difference. We're not restoring their species or anything - one specimen would hardly be adequate to repopulate anything, you need at least two (for mammals). I don't really think that matters though. If they died out because they're ill-adapted, it's going to be expensive to keep them alive. If they think it's worth it, I don't object to them expending their resources on this project.
Oops, you're right, though you're not using the proper terms.
/su/ - I haven't looked at any spectrograms for a while, but I'll take your word for it that the /s/ sounds differ in quality. You could say that they are different phones. However, they are definately not different phonemes, in a strictly linguistic sense. Even if you know the difference, I'll explain it to everyone who doesn't have a Linguistics (or related) degree.
/si/ & /su/ example illustrate this nicely).
/si/ vs.
Any sound made by a human can be called a phone. Many of these crop up in language. These sounds can be classified into groups. These categories of sounds are semantically the same - switching from one s to the other does not alter the meaning of a word. These are called phonemes.
Some phones within a phoneme can be chosen by the speaker, these are said to be in free variation. Others are determined by context (and sound funny otherwise) - these are called allophones. (Your
Spanish does not distinguish between b and v, similarly to the way Japanese lumps r and l (two separate phones) together into what in Japanese is the same phoneme.
I omitted to mention this added layer of complexity - the sonic properties of a given phoneme (which is really what you want to extract, in order to build morphemes) can vary a lot, to a degree dependant upon the language, dialect, and accent.
Nice to see some other language geeks here - keep me on my toes.
Be aware that printer drivers (at least for non-PS printers) often are a lot more than the implementation of the specs of the printer, and contain a fair ammount of the printer's functionality within.
These companies invest a large ammount of money into software to make their output look as good as it does. This can potentially mean complex (and patented) dithering and colour matching algorithms. Medium end printers instead move this closed code to firmware, along with a PS interpreter and enough RAM and power to handle it, or even (on higher end printers) divide their proprietary code between a dedicated print server and the rest to firmware.
Rudimentary printing is easy, but getting the most out of medium-end (?) printers ends up almost working backwards - you kinda buy the drivers and they come with the hardware to support them.
My point is not that this is good or bad, just that saying that printer vendors must open-source their drivers is to open a whole nother can of worms - is it appropriate for a company to sell closed software that runs on an open platform? I'm still not done eating my last can of worms!
"throwing more neurons" into a neural network does not necessarily improve its capabilities. Well, it kind of does. It increases its capabilities to learn special cases, but can often reduce it's ability to learn generalities - if it can memorize that f(2) = 4 and f(3) = 9, it may have a harder time realize that f(x) = x^2.
The more neurons you have the more heterogeneous your training data must be.
Yeah the number of phonemes used in most languages is in the 'few dozen' range. And you generally don't have to listen very long to hear them all at least once.
But even when you've got the phonemes, you've still got a fair ammount of work cut out for you. A number of phonological processes take place. For instance 'in plain sight' in may be pronounced 'im'. These kind of transformations (and more complicated ones) are happening all over the place, in every spoken language.
Linguists generally describe this kind of thing by writing context-sensitive rules to enumerate the transformations. Similar syntactic translations are context-sensitive.
Computer programming languages' syntax (er, not counting types, and identifier agreement (which are special cased)) are not even typically generic context-free languages, but instead are almost always part of the LL(1) or LR(1) subsets, meaning that they have the special property that you can determine what's going on just by looking ahead one character. Otherwise you end up with N^3 parsing time, and that's for context-free languages. Parsing of context-sensitive languages is way more problematic (think halting problem).
Unless you can parse the syntax, you can't really resolve ambiguities (to/two/too, there/they're, or even things which merge because of phonology (bitter/bidder/bit her)). Note that humans don't do so great with these issues always either, so a partial solution will be still qutie amazing.
But the fact still stands that turing samples into phonemes is only the first step in a very complicated process towards even something as simple as taking dictation. In fact, I'd say that syntax->semantics may be a smaller step than phonemes->syntax.
Well, a 350 MHz RAMDAC can't DAC more than 350 Million RAMs a second, can it? Let's do some math. (yay!)
.. (well they haven't announced it, but it's somewhere around the 170 mhz range). They claim a 256 bit 'dual bus' (whatever that means).
1600x1200x32/8 = 7 680 000 bytes/screen.
The G400 (as an example) has a 300 MHz RAMDAC. At this resolution, it can DAC all its RAMs 100 times a second.
768 000 000 bytes/second. Hmm. Since each pixel takes up 3 or 4 bytes, and each Hz of the RAMDAC would pretty much have to work on entire pixels, this is fine with a 300 MHz RAMDAC.
The memory speed on the g400 max is
32 bytes/clock * 170 m = 5 440 000 000
About 14% of the bus bandwidth is being used by the RAMDAC, unless I'm missing something. Since the RAMDAC only ever really needs to look at 24 bits per pixel, we could probably bring that down to 10%. My guess as to the g400's ram clock isn't off by more than 10% either way.
So, yes, if you're running at a rediculous refresh rate, at a VERY high resolution, then a kind of significant portion of your video memory bandwidth is going to just turning pixels into voltages.
But you've got a lot left over still. Never minding squeezing data through the AGP, video RAM runs at a higher clock than system RAM and often sits on a wider bus.
Good thing there wasn't anyone around there smoking a cigarette. What with all those loose bits sloshing around, the slightest spark could have set off that 'internet explosion' people keep telling me about.
Something like this seems to happen every 8 months or so. Is there any good way to stop this? Aside from moving to wireless, the only thing I can think of is not put four high-bandwidth cables under the same patch of street - but then laying cable (er, fibre) becomes expensive proportionately to how many baskets you're keeping your eggs in.
Since the article was slashdotted, I didn't read it and assumed they were talking about projection, rather than magnification. At least projection's a little cool. So that post is 40% off topic. So sue me.
You're not magnifying the screen with the lens, you're focusing the light coming out of it.
Have you noticed that during a partial eclipse, all the pinholes of sunlight are crescent shaped? (makes shadows of trees real funky) This is the same deal - a pinhole only lets light pointing the right direction through, a lens makes all the light point the right direction (to be focused). Instead of all the light being crescent shaped, now it's shaped like arbitrary images.
I've done just this - putting a letter-sized fresnel lens its focal length away from the monitor (for the lens I had, that was ~8 inches). I was able to project the image on to sheets hung across the room. It was kind of neat - I watched some display hacks on my ceiling.
* The image was backwards. This could be fixed in software, but instead I got a mirror and started projecting onto the ceiling.
* The brightness was low. Two reasons: If you make the picture twice as big, it's half as bright (assuming every single photon makes it to the right place). If you're projecting it, you need to be fairly far away to watch it without blocking the light. Secondly, not all of the light coming out of a monitor goes straight out. The bigger the lens, the more light you get...
* Fresnel lenses approximate real lenses. And for an infinately far away source (frying bugs with the sun) they work really good. However, as the angle of the light hitting the lens increases (you get farther from the center) the quality of this approximation decreases (since you're not necessarily hitting the lens part, but will now send light through the ridges). Thus the image was fuzzy around the edges (I assume that's why).
This would work a bunch better with a real lens, except that large lenses are hard to make and heavy and expensive. You could do it with a small lens, but it would be EXTREMELY dim.
Despite all these problems my fool roommate still has a setup like this in the basement. But this is the same guy who spent ~40 hours (and ruined one of my drill bits) rebuilding a crappy $10 avacado-green sofa he took apart months before.
-me
> Hardware T&L greatly increases the amount of onboard memory needed.
.. I dunno, between 64 and 128 bytes (you need your texture indices too, remember)), you're using between one and two GB/s of bus bandwidth if all you're doing is reading each polygon once.
No facts to back this claim up. How exactly does hardware T&L increase the amount of onboard framebuffer required? With AGP, there really is no need for local video memory at all, except to use for the actual visual screen, and maybe as a texture cache. Sure the geometry system will need somewhere to cache scenes, but to fill up 128MB with just _geometry_ information you'll need something as complicated as that huge landscape scene in the Matrix.
Certainly hardware T&L does not increase the size of the framebuffer needed. However, AGP is really not as fast as the RAM they're putting in these systems - hell, all bus issues aside, system RAM is only 100 MHz, while most video cards local memory is way faster, or on a wider bus or both.
When doing the geometry, you don't want to tie up your bus to read and write and read each vertex as you translate and light each frame. Sure, it is possible to do it with AGP, but is it efficient? Let's see, they say it can push 15 million polys a second? Say a poly takes up
If this is 60 fps, each of those frames is 16-32 MB. 128 MB will be more than most applications will need. But using an extra 32 for geometry information is not unwarranted, in their pushing-the-card-to-its-limits case.
Disclaimer: I'm not as smart as I think.
Gasoline taxes don't cover the cost it takes to keep the roads in good condition, (especially here in Minnesota). You driving you car on public roads are highly subsidized - why shouldn't public transportation be also?
The better the public transportation system, the more people use it. The more people use it, the more efficient it is. And it cuts down on other costs as well.
If you're in the twin cities, you might be able to get DSL through Covad via Onvoy (formerly known as MR-Net). Though it took them a LONG time to hook me up (they were opening a new central office) their service has proven satisfactory so far.
I think that this is probably a result of you being taught (this part of) the language the way it is spoken rather than the way prescriptive grammarians think it should be spoken. This is good - one of the problems with learning a foreign language is mastering the way it's casually spoken and not sounding too formal or proper, just because that's the only way you know how to say things.
The second amendment is about keeping the general populace armed both to deter tyranny on the part of government and also to provide a pool of individuals to raise a militia from so as to provide for the common defence. Just because the government misclassifies crypto as a munition doesn't mean it actually is one or has anything to do with an armed citizenry.
Times have changed enough that crypto is as important (if not more so) than guns in terms of reducing the threat of tyranny. Is violence the only constitutionally sanctioned method of resisting a corrupt or overbearing government? I should hope not.
-me
Does anyone know how crypto's classification as a munition interacts with our constitutional granted right to bear arms?
My experiences with recommenders such as Firefly's, and CDNOW's have been lackluster at best, and flat out lousy at worst. (This is of particular interest to me as I implemented a functionally similar (though interally VERY different) system as my senior thesis project last year.. (Now that I've graduated, it's offline while I wait for DSL (doh)))
Have you guys seen good results with these systems (or anybody else's for that matter)?
I have several theories as to what problems exist with the sorts of approaches that I've seen in commercial usage, but (before I open my big mouth) would like to hear whether their failure to offer me reasonable suggestions is just 'cause I'm some kinda freak, or in fact representitive of the rest of the system.
-me
We're living in a world with a lot of different beliefs, many of them conflict. Sex is a beautiful thing, sex will corrupt the youth. Abortion is sometimes necessary, nobody should ever be aborted. Et cetera.
..
This kind of thing has always been going on.
However, technology brings people closer together, and in these cases this exaggerates the existing friction.
The cheapest / easiest way to reduce friction from conflicting beliefs is to limit interaction between people. However, I believe that this to be suboptimal. Another way is to limit or eliminate beleifs conflicting with the majority. I also feel that to be a poor solution. But there are people who feel that these solutions are acceptable or even desirable.
Any solution is going to have the same problem as the original conflict - meta-beliefs (ideals on how to mediate interactions between possibly conflicting beliefs) are a lot like beliefs, in the sense that there are lot of them and they don't all agree.
Any institutionalized resonpse to these issues must embrace one set of meta-beliefs, even if it is able to maintain neutrality on the beliefs which come into conflict.
The United States' official traditional meta-belief of choice is a live-and-let-live freedom-of-speech stance. However, once a law is passed it's a big deal to un-pass it, and with hundreds of legislators passing laws day in and day out, for two hundred years...
In theory the body of laws should sort of flutter around near the consititution, and the noise of the random legislation should cancel iself out, but if you're doing a random walk in which its easier to go one way than another, you're a lot less likely to stay put.
Whenever I hear of one of these acts (the CDA, PICS, whatever) I think "That's it, I'm outta here." but
Does anyone know of any country that deals with this kind of thing well?
The reason 150 dpi just doesn't cut it is that you're thinking in terms of printers - dithered or halftoned. Resolution and pixel depth are (to a point) interchangable. 300dpi continuous tone colour (such as dye-sub printers can deliver) is WAY better quality than offset printing delivers (magazines use an offset printing process.)
If you want to include tiny little details that you can see from 2" from the screen, yeah, 300dpi will make a difference.
I tried to port a DOS/DJGPP app to Win32/GCC and it was hard enough that I eventually gave up and used Dev Studio even though MS's compiler doesn't agree with GCC about some semantic / syntactic elements of the C++ language. (Error: Too many errors - compile aborted)
I was surprised to find that Dev Studio also generated faster code.
I disagree with you all who say that it's okay that Qt is not free for windows, or that it's a good thing, or that open source has no place under windows or whatever. Free portable multiplatform toolkits bring developers from other platforms towards writing portable code, which is a Good Thing.
I use and develop under Windows. I just deleted two paragraphs of excuses as to why I do this. I imagine if you really need to see them they won't help.
I've been working on a project for a while - it's not useful or anything I could make a lot of money on, but it can be a lot of fun to use, and a lot of fun to hack on. (hint: realtime controllable abstract 2d graphics a la euro-demos (eg, second reality)). I think that other people would also have fun playing with it, and poking at the code too, so I would like to open up the source.
Though I do use and develop under windows, I am not a bad person - The basic rendering and display routines are portable. Platform specific code is localized in one module, everything else is generic enough C++ that it compiles under 3 or 4 compilers, on 3 or 4 platforms (Win32 (directdraw& dev studio | c++builder), linux (svgalib & gcc), MacOS (hell if I know & metroworks), and DOS (int10 & djgpp)).
This is important, since I don't feel I can reasonably expect a lot of positive results if I open up source code that's too closely tied to commercial development tools and Windows, and I'll definately be able to find a lot more interested geeks who tinker with open source projects if things work under linux.
However, another requirement for this to work is that the programme be usable by people other than me. Right now I've been forced to make an obscure interface which relies on memorizing a list of reasonably random keyboard commands, and it doesn't even work well for me. What it really needs is a GUI.
But how do I implement a GUI in a portable way? It's important that things still work on Windows, but if things are only usable under windows, it's probably not worth the bother of opening up the source.
If there were something such as the QT widget library available (I don't have $1000 to throw at this project.) it would be easier for me to open up my code which already runs under Windows. This is good for everybody.
I care enough about open source and portability that I think I'm going to end up making an entirely separate programme out of my UI (written in Java/Swing) which communicates with the "engine" (which needs to be faster - C++) through TCP/IP or something. This is not the simplest solution I can imagine.
I am aware that this solution does has some advantages, but it's enough of a pain in the ass that if I merely think open source is only a kind-of-good idea, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
-me
I believe that the Microwave Oven was actually a byproduct of research into stealth warplane technology.
I seem to recall that velcro was a space programme advance, though. About a month ago, there was an article on the history of the super soaker, which at least came out of NASA's JPL (which I believe is only loosely tied to the space programme, though I could be wrong)
At the end of Robert A. Heinlein's Expanded Universe is a speech he gave to congress about why the space programme is a good place to put money. IIRC, he enumerates several other technologies which resulted from our space programme.
-me
One of the properties of per-post moderation (rather than per-poster moderation) is that it understands that different people know different amounts about different things. There certainly is some element of eloquence which makes for 'good posts', but.. nobody knows everything about everything, and it's safer not to assume that some people do.