Hyperthreading and MMX were arguably new additions at the time they came out. They might be shitty, but MMX was one thing which helped dedicated sound cards become obsolete. Intel is also a leader in semiconductor manufacturing processes. Which is part of the reason for their insane profits.
Your are assuming the people who forked once won't fork twice, if they do not get progress. Doubtful. Unless if in the merger process the WHATWG subsumed the W3C (like NeXT actually subsumed Apple).
Building a factory for lithography is really expensive. The cost of the manufacturing tools is very high and you need to have a sustained large production to be able to payback the investment.
So today for the people who manufacture in smaller volumes usually a chip can be, say, designed in the USA using chip design software. Then the design is sent to Taiwan to TSMC (fab company) who make the masks and fabricate the chips using their lithography machines. Packaging can be done elsewhere. NVIDIA, ATI, VIA, for example, do their business this way AFAIK.
If you want more leading edge manufacturing processes you can ask IBM to manufacture your product at East Fishkill, NY.
Intel has their own chip fabrication plants because they have enough volume to afford it. But this is getting increasingly hard to do for the smaller players. Even AMD had to spin off their fabrication to GlobalFoundries not a long time ago.
The problem is when it is a customer requirement (seriously!) to write it using J2EE and EJBs. Nevermind the thing could have been written more easily as a Servlet with less layers of software thickness in it.
Actually it is bloody easy to create and parse simple XML files in C#. I was dumbfounded first time I saw it. Only thing more convenient is probably Pickle in Python.
The parent is actually sorta right. Usually the place where a chip is manufactured and assembled are different. By manufacturing I mean actually doing lithography on the silicon and creating the chip. This is mostly automated and you do not need a lot of people to do it. There are also bans against exporting high-end lithography machine tools to non-allied countries (including China). Assembly usually consists of lining up the package with the chip so the pins match. Lining up is IIRC a highly labor intensive process, done by hand, and is usually done in countries where salaries are low. e.g. AMD does their assembly in Malaysia. Even China is probably too expensive.
Actually you can do raytracing with shadows in real time. On some scenes you can do reflections in real time as well. Refraction slows things down, as when you have transparency you cannot do a lot of optimizations in your code. There are some fake so called instant global illumination methods and ambient occlusion that are nearly real time, not very realistic, but ok.
Try the PC World article. FWIW RT Fact is a 3D ray tracing engine. I guess they integrated it into the browser somehow. But saying it does not require a plugin? Eh seems strange to me. I thought RT Fact was written in C++ with x86 assembler intrinsics.
Code reusability. You can use an MPEG-4, MPEG-2, or MPEG video codec with the same MP3 audio codec. The integration parts of the code can be reused as well. Forward compatibility: you can easily make a library so programs can use the same API to decode a variety of codecs. This means a program can support file formats which did not exist when it was written.
Of course this is mostly true for player software. Editing software sometimes wants to do more low level bit twiddling (e.g. to minimize recompression) and accesses the files in a more direct fashion, bypassing the standard OS APIs. It is also likely your programs use different OS media APIs. Windows has like two different APIs: VfW, DirectShow. There are also some apps that use the Quicktime API.
The thing is it seems SSDs and HDDs will never be close in cost, at least if you consider $/GB to be important. HDD manufacturers keep increasing the data density as fast, or faster, than the SDD manufacturers can.
The question is when will SSDs get cheap enough, or good enough, for most people. Honestly I have a bigger problem getting cheap (and large) enough backup storage. DVD-Rs are laughable and Bluray is still too expensive. Considering buying a backup HDD, but HDDs are not exactly small and portable.
Apple is being stupid. Nokia has more patents than merely GSM patents. Nokia had smartphones when they launched their Communicator series in 1996. The iPhone was launched in 2007.
A lot of cellphones had touchscreens before the iPhone was announced. They usually used a stylus because that was the kind of touchscreen tecnology available at the time. There is not a lot in the form factor that was not pioneered by PDAs years before. Symbian itself is based on the Psion PDA EPOC32 C++ OS.
I bought Creative. I really hate Creative but they have done several things right with their MP3 devices: no DRM standard, you can access it like a regular filesystem, so it works on Linux or any other OS as well. The bundled headphones did not suck, etc.
No, a meltdown is still possible in a reactor with a negative void coefficient. It happened at TMI which was a LWR for example. It may still happen again, and probably will. Negative void coefficient just makes it less likely. The meltdown does not get so hot either. Neither does a LWR have combustible graphite in it.
The safeguard in case of meltdown is the containment building, which consists of steel and concrete barriers. Chernobyl did not have such a barrier.
Current Generation III designs also usually store emergency cooling water in tanks above the reactor, so in an emergency you just open a valve, instead of having to power mechanical pumps to cool the core. The number of parts is reduced to decrease the chance of system failure. Control systems have also been automated and simplified so operator error is less likely.
As for long term low level emissions, coal power plants emit lots of radioactive material all the time, unfiltered, and no one bothers about it. Thorium, uranium, etc.
Did you ever wonder why, if nuclear waste storage is such a problem, even with Yucca Mountain not being allowed as a final storage place we are not up to our ears in waste already? I mean for how many decades was it in discussion? The answer is the volume of waste is remarkably small and would be like 90% smaller if fuel recycling was done, or the reactor burned the fuel more. Presently nuclear fuel is recycled using chemical methods such as PUREX, but it should be possible to separate the usable plutonium and uranium from the burned fuel using other processes such as AVLIS. This is not researched, because any success in the area of separating plutonium from used fuel would be a proliferation concern, and uranium for fuel is cheap.
As for billions of years waste storage, Google "oklo nuclear reactor".
Java is pretty nice for network programming. It has good socket support (after they rewrote the API a couple of times). It also has some decent built-in datastructures (after they rewrote them), and concurrency support. This is most of what you need for 'big enterprise' apps. Enterprises also often have less manpower resources and the code can last a long time (decades) so you want something portable.
C# is a better language for writing client side apps (Java GUI API sucks). It is also pretty easy to add inline SQL to it.
Ken Thompson also developed Plan 9, and Inferno, and Limbo (what?). Yes, Limbo was a programming language. With concurrency support. While all of these were kinda neat, they never took off.
I looked at Go when it was released, but was underwhelmed. Seemed like another Java wannabe to me. The news article is just plain wrong. How can Go have the same productivity of Python when it is a statically typed language? I mean, try reading some actual Go code, and Python code, and then tell me which one is easier to read, and write.
Uranium and plutonium are toxic, but botox is more toxic and people inject themselves with it on purpose to have less wrinkles. Caffeine is more toxic as well, but people drink it in large amounts. Google the LD50 levels if you do not believe me.
Radioactive materials with long half-lives are not necessarily more dangerous. Usually it works the other way around, since materials with short half-lives tend to release energy faster, so it takes less exposure time to get sick. The danger depends on the kind of radiation emitted (alpha, beta, gamma) and the intensity of it. The worst are intense gamma emitters like Iodine-131. Uranium-238 for example is a pretty mild alpha emitter.
Nuclear reactors do not explode like a weapon. Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was a meltdown. The reactor got into a positive feedback loop and entered into a rampant meltdown. The meltdown caused steam explosions as pipe pressure went up and the graphite ignited. Depending on reactor design, a nuclear reactor will not have a rampant (positive feedback loop) meltdown if coolant escapes the core. Such reactors are said to have a negative void coefficient. PWR and BWR reactors, as used in the US, are usually safer like this. Chernobyl was an RMBK reactor with a positive void coefficient. Such reactor models are not used in the West.
A nuclear power plant has a high EROEI ratio. Especially when the uranium is enriched using now commonplace gas centrifuge technology. Estimated energy payback period is between 3 and 5 months. Not years, let alone decades.
If it is the original SimCity, it was done for 68k based Macs There are emulators for old Mac hardware (e.g. Sheepshaver and Basilisk II). However you are probably talking about SimCity 4 Deluxe.
IIRC Windows 7 removed the DOS mode emulation, so you need an emulator to play DOS games as well. Either you run Windows XP inside a VM, or you use something like DOSBox.
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Hyperthreading and MMX were arguably new additions at the time they came out. They might be shitty, but MMX was one thing which helped dedicated sound cards become obsolete. Intel is also a leader in semiconductor manufacturing processes. Which is part of the reason for their insane profits.
Depends on how you make the money. A lot of people used to get rich at one time doing slave trade.
Aren't a lot of TV shows made in Canada?
Freeciv has had hexagonal tiles and maps (optional) for yonks as well. Still most people prefer to use overhead isometric.
Your are assuming the people who forked once won't fork twice, if they do not get progress. Doubtful. Unless if in the merger process the WHATWG subsumed the W3C (like NeXT actually subsumed Apple).
Oh dear. Not OOXML again.
There is a way to fix that. You make standard a power outlet configuration that no one uses.
That should work fine. Until Algeria gets into a civil war and guerrillas start blowing up gas pipelines.
Building a factory for lithography is really expensive. The cost of the manufacturing tools is very high and you need to have a sustained large production to be able to payback the investment.
So today for the people who manufacture in smaller volumes usually a chip can be, say, designed in the USA using chip design software. Then the design is sent to Taiwan to TSMC (fab company) who make the masks and fabricate the chips using their lithography machines. Packaging can be done elsewhere. NVIDIA, ATI, VIA, for example, do their business this way AFAIK.
If you want more leading edge manufacturing processes you can ask IBM to manufacture your product at East Fishkill, NY.
Intel has their own chip fabrication plants because they have enough volume to afford it. But this is getting increasingly hard to do for the smaller players. Even AMD had to spin off their fabrication to GlobalFoundries not a long time ago.
The problem is when it is a customer requirement (seriously!) to write it using J2EE and EJBs. Nevermind the thing could have been written more easily as a Servlet with less layers of software thickness in it.
Actually it is bloody easy to create and parse simple XML files in C#. I was dumbfounded first time I saw it. Only thing more convenient is probably Pickle in Python.
The parent is actually sorta right. Usually the place where a chip is manufactured and assembled are different. By manufacturing I mean actually doing lithography on the silicon and creating the chip. This is mostly automated and you do not need a lot of people to do it. There are also bans against exporting high-end lithography machine tools to non-allied countries (including China). Assembly usually consists of lining up the package with the chip so the pins match. Lining up is IIRC a highly labor intensive process, done by hand, and is usually done in countries where salaries are low. e.g. AMD does their assembly in Malaysia. Even China is probably too expensive.
Actually you can do raytracing with shadows in real time. On some scenes you can do reflections in real time as well. Refraction slows things down, as when you have transparency you cannot do a lot of optimizations in your code. There are some fake so called instant global illumination methods and ambient occlusion that are nearly real time, not very realistic, but ok.
Try the PC World article. FWIW RT Fact is a 3D ray tracing engine. I guess they integrated it into the browser somehow. But saying it does not require a plugin? Eh seems strange to me. I thought RT Fact was written in C++ with x86 assembler intrinsics.
Of course this is mostly true for player software. Editing software sometimes wants to do more low level bit twiddling (e.g. to minimize recompression) and accesses the files in a more direct fashion, bypassing the standard OS APIs. It is also likely your programs use different OS media APIs. Windows has like two different APIs: VfW, DirectShow. There are also some apps that use the Quicktime API.
The question is when will SSDs get cheap enough, or good enough, for most people. Honestly I have a bigger problem getting cheap (and large) enough backup storage. DVD-Rs are laughable and Bluray is still too expensive. Considering buying a backup HDD, but HDDs are not exactly small and portable.
Apple is being stupid. Nokia has more patents than merely GSM patents. Nokia had smartphones when they launched their Communicator series in 1996. The iPhone was launched in 2007.
A lot of cellphones had touchscreens before the iPhone was announced. They usually used a stylus because that was the kind of touchscreen tecnology available at the time. There is not a lot in the form factor that was not pioneered by PDAs years before. Symbian itself is based on the Psion PDA EPOC32 C++ OS.
I bought Creative. I really hate Creative but they have done several things right with their MP3 devices: no DRM standard, you can access it like a regular filesystem, so it works on Linux or any other OS as well. The bundled headphones did not suck, etc.
The safeguard in case of meltdown is the containment building, which consists of steel and concrete barriers. Chernobyl did not have such a barrier.
Current Generation III designs also usually store emergency cooling water in tanks above the reactor, so in an emergency you just open a valve, instead of having to power mechanical pumps to cool the core. The number of parts is reduced to decrease the chance of system failure. Control systems have also been automated and simplified so operator error is less likely.
As for long term low level emissions, coal power plants emit lots of radioactive material all the time, unfiltered, and no one bothers about it. Thorium, uranium, etc.
Did you ever wonder why, if nuclear waste storage is such a problem, even with Yucca Mountain not being allowed as a final storage place we are not up to our ears in waste already? I mean for how many decades was it in discussion? The answer is the volume of waste is remarkably small and would be like 90% smaller if fuel recycling was done, or the reactor burned the fuel more. Presently nuclear fuel is recycled using chemical methods such as PUREX, but it should be possible to separate the usable plutonium and uranium from the burned fuel using other processes such as AVLIS. This is not researched, because any success in the area of separating plutonium from used fuel would be a proliferation concern, and uranium for fuel is cheap.
As for billions of years waste storage, Google "oklo nuclear reactor".
CPAN is the whole point behind using Perl though.
C# is a better language for writing client side apps (Java GUI API sucks). It is also pretty easy to add inline SQL to it.
Ken Thompson also developed Plan 9, and Inferno, and Limbo (what?). Yes, Limbo was a programming language. With concurrency support. While all of these were kinda neat, they never took off.
I looked at Go when it was released, but was underwhelmed. Seemed like another Java wannabe to me. The news article is just plain wrong. How can Go have the same productivity of Python when it is a statically typed language? I mean, try reading some actual Go code, and Python code, and then tell me which one is easier to read, and write.
Uranium and plutonium are toxic, but botox is more toxic and people inject themselves with it on purpose to have less wrinkles. Caffeine is more toxic as well, but people drink it in large amounts. Google the LD50 levels if you do not believe me.
Radioactive materials with long half-lives are not necessarily more dangerous. Usually it works the other way around, since materials with short half-lives tend to release energy faster, so it takes less exposure time to get sick. The danger depends on the kind of radiation emitted (alpha, beta, gamma) and the intensity of it. The worst are intense gamma emitters like Iodine-131. Uranium-238 for example is a pretty mild alpha emitter.
Nuclear reactors do not explode like a weapon. Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was a meltdown. The reactor got into a positive feedback loop and entered into a rampant meltdown. The meltdown caused steam explosions as pipe pressure went up and the graphite ignited. Depending on reactor design, a nuclear reactor will not have a rampant (positive feedback loop) meltdown if coolant escapes the core. Such reactors are said to have a negative void coefficient. PWR and BWR reactors, as used in the US, are usually safer like this. Chernobyl was an RMBK reactor with a positive void coefficient. Such reactor models are not used in the West.
A nuclear power plant has a high EROEI ratio. Especially when the uranium is enriched using now commonplace gas centrifuge technology. Estimated energy payback period is between 3 and 5 months. Not years, let alone decades.
He has been working on it.
If it is the original SimCity, it was done for 68k based Macs There are emulators for old Mac hardware (e.g. Sheepshaver and Basilisk II). However you are probably talking about SimCity 4 Deluxe.
IIRC Windows 7 removed the DOS mode emulation, so you need an emulator to play DOS games as well. Either you run Windows XP inside a VM, or you use something like DOSBox.