A close runner-up for most requested feature is proper audio/video sync. And Linux users will get that this time around, thanks largely to the purging of the OSS audio API in favor of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).
Cairo has been rendering GNOME for over a year. The software renderer is a bit slow on linux, but it works fine. I was hoping there might br some way to ue the Xara renderer to speed it up, but it doesn't look like that's possible yet.
X does have a vector API, just not a very good one:)
The UK's ID card regulations include a £1,000 fine if you know your card to be defective but do not report it:-(
You will be required to attend an enrolment centre with some form of identifying material - bank statements, credit cards, driving licence or birth certificate, who knows what. Then you will be fingerprinted, photographed and the iris in your eye will be measured. You will give the authorities 49 pieces of information about yourself. If you don't, you may be fined up to £2,500. Additional fines of up to £2,500 may be levied every time you fail to comply.
If you fail to inform the police or Home Office when you lose your card, or if it becomes defective, you face a fine of up to £1,000. If you find someone else's card and do not immediately hand it in, you may have committed a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment for up to two years, or a fine, or both. And you will be fined £1,000 if you fail to inform the NIR of any change of address. You will also be expected to tell the authorities your previous addresses. Truly the government will be able to say with all the menace of the underworld enforcer: "We know where you live."
If you don't inform the register of significant changes to your personal life, or any errors they have made, you will face a fine of up to £1,000. Astonishingly, you may also face a fine if you fail to submit to being reinterviewed, rephotographed, refingerprinted and rescanned.
The UK (and now the EU, thanks T. Blair!) have data retention already in law (though not yet implemented AFAIK).
They don't retain the data: the volume would be far too high (as you say). They just (!!) track who mails who, who IMs with whom, and the websites you visit. Just liike an itemised phone bill, but covering the internet. The websites thing is unclear: I don't know if they're planning to just keep www.mybank.com, or whether the whole mybank.com/transaction.php?cardno=2345876349583498 will be retained.
Anyway, data volume isn't a particular problem, and I imagine the US is planning the same idea.
but I can't see how they are going to add PostScript's user/device coordinate space abstraction to X without creating a completely new API.
This has been done for a few years now. Take a look at Cairo. It's (approximately) the PDF imaging model, like Quartz. It has a variety of backends, including win32 (with GDI+), vanilla X11, XRender, Quartz and hardware-acccelerated OpenGL (via GLitz).
GTK stable has been using Cairo for drawing for almost a year now. The Xlib API (wrapped up as gdk_*) is deprecated. I imagine KDE will have a cairo backend at some point too.
They are making an accelerator card for numerical work. They claim they can get a sustained 50 GFlops in a BLAS matrix multiply. They hope to put several cards into a PC, make a farm of them, and sell the thing as a supercomputer.
Their card is much, much more expensive than PhysX, but they still cant get (in my opinion) the kind of performance advantage that'd you'd need to really make a compelling case for the thing.
Blu-ray allows this too. But note that the word "free" isn't anywhere there:-( the owner of the content rights is required to allow a managed copy, but they can charge you extra.
On the other hand, people still make Uranus jokes 225 years later:-(
I sometimes wonder WTF Herschel was thinking. Either he thought it was a funny name, in which case naming a planet as a smutty joke seems a little childish, or he didn't think of it, which makes him seem pretty stupid.
That's thanks to their object format, mach-o, which is rather odd if you come from elf. The standard libtool didn't support mach-o for ages (maybe it does now?) so apple provide their own patched version.
I still find mach-o the most annoying thing about mac os:-(
#2, the color rendering sucks. You know how old fluorescents used to made you look undead? LED's suck even more.
You can make LED sources with high CRI (colour rendering index) if you combine six or seven LED colours together. An ex-colleage of mine made one with a 95+ cri.
Another reassuring point is that IQ is, in many ways, like that other statistic men love to boast about.
Of course it means almost nothing in practice. Who cares if you are good at silly logic puzzles if all you do all day is sit around and feel pleased. People who actually do something useful or interesting are much more important. In other words: it's not the meat, it's the motion.
Namedrop: I knew Philip at college and he's got a paper in Nature before me. Bastard.
There are several reasons. Check the gnome bugzilla discussion on this, but from memory:
Less memory use than malloc()... when you free a slab you specify the length as well as the start. This can save quite a lot of space for small objects like linked list nodes
Less heap fragmentation
Free groups of objects... you can create a slab allocator, allocate off it, then free all objects in that allocator with a single, O(1) call.
Twice as fast as malloc(), more in highly threaded applications
Climate skeptics point to the buildup of snow and ice in Greenland's interior as evidence that the ice sheet is not thawing out. But Rignot and others said that the buildup is taken into account in the computerized climate models, as a meteorological side effect of the global warming trend.
When all the effects are considered, the Greenland Ice Sheet's annual loss has risen from 21.6 cubic miles (90 cubic kilometers) in 1996 to 36 cubic miles (150 cubic kilometers) in 2005, according to Rignot and his co-author, Pannir Kanagaratnam of the University of Kansas. Their conclusions are based on nearly a decade's worth of radar data from the Radarsat-1, ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat satellites, as well as radio echo sounding experiments.
Re:The jokes keep on coming.
on
Buy Vista or Else
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· Score: 5, Funny
Upgrade to Windows Vista because, thanks to XP product activation, we know where you live.
Or I can wreck a nice beach versus I can recognise speech.
Sometimes you need rather a large context to disambiguate: is this sentence part of a discussion on shore-front management, or spoken language understanding?
Re:Pics are nice, but what about battery life?
on
New iMac disassembled
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· Score: 2, Informative
Someone (sorry, forgotten who) said they'd played with one at the show and if you moused over the battery thing the popup said "3:03 minutes".
Of course that could change for the final production models.
vs. win32: GTK+ is a cross-platform toolkit. If you need to run on more platforms than just win32, then it's worth looking into.
Performance and download size: you're right, it does feel a little slower, but win32 performance is improving. The gtk+ runtime is a 3.5MB download.
Programming language: you can use C, C++, C#, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Haskel, etc. There are many language bindings.
UI guidelines: The GNOME HIG has been around for years and projects really do try to conform to it. The GNOME desktop is pretty consistent. The HIG was developed with usability studies from Sun and others. Novel are doing some now I think.
vs. wxWidgets: The usual argument here is that wrappers which attempt to put many toolkits into a single API force you to a lowest common denominator. For example, GTK has a very nice text widget (derived from the Tk one) which lets you embed any other widget. Of course wxWidgets does not suport this useful feature on all platforms, so you can't use it.
Documentation: there are comprehensive API references, a good tutorial and many excellent published books.
Re:Tempting....
on
Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 5, Informative
The official docs are OK, I think. There's a tutorial too. There's also an excellent book: The Official GNOME2 Developers Guide, but sadly it's not available as a free download.
People do rave about the Qt docs I know.
No, 3.5 MB
on
Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, the current stable win32 GTK+ runtime is 3.5 MB. Here's the download page.
Slashdot Mirror
A close runner-up for most requested feature is proper audio/video sync. And Linux users will get that this time around, thanks largely to the purging of the OSS audio API in favor of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).
Cairo has been rendering GNOME for over a year. The software renderer is a bit slow on linux, but it works fine. I was hoping there might br some way to ue the Xara renderer to speed it up, but it doesn't look like that's possible yet.
:)
X does have a vector API, just not a very good one
Orwell was writing about conditions in Britain during WW2: rather a specific time and place and not a comment on pacifisim in general.
But you're right, if it's just sat too near your microwave and gone pop, you won't know until you next try to use it.
The US has access to our logs. I wonder if we'll get access to theirs?
They don't retain the data: the volume would be far too high (as you say). They just (!!) track who mails who, who IMs with whom, and the websites you visit. Just liike an itemised phone bill, but covering the internet. The websites thing is unclear: I don't know if they're planning to just keep www.mybank.com, or whether the whole mybank.com/transaction.php?cardno=2345876349583498 will be retained.
Anyway, data volume isn't a particular problem, and I imagine the US is planning the same idea.
That's interesting, thanks. I don't follow Qt development :-/ but it's good to hear Cairo has competition.
This has been done for a few years now. Take a look at Cairo. It's (approximately) the PDF imaging model, like Quartz. It has a variety of backends, including win32 (with GDI+), vanilla X11, XRender, Quartz and hardware-acccelerated OpenGL (via GLitz).
GTK stable has been using Cairo for drawing for almost a year now. The Xlib API (wrapped up as gdk_*) is deprecated. I imagine KDE will have a cairo backend at some point too.
A friend had an interview for a job as a maths person with these people:
http://www.clearspeed.com/
They are making an accelerator card for numerical work. They claim they can get a sustained 50 GFlops in a BLAS matrix multiply. They hope to put several cards into a PC, make a farm of them, and sell the thing as a supercomputer.
Their card is much, much more expensive than PhysX, but they still cant get (in my opinion) the kind of performance advantage that'd you'd need to really make a compelling case for the thing.
Blu-ray allows this too. But note that the word "free" isn't anywhere there :-( the owner of the content rights is required to allow a managed copy, but they can charge you extra.
I sometimes wonder WTF Herschel was thinking. Either he thought it was a funny name, in which case naming a planet as a smutty joke seems a little childish, or he didn't think of it, which makes him seem pretty stupid.
I still find mach-o the most annoying thing about mac os :-(
You can make LED sources with high CRI (colour rendering index) if you combine six or seven LED colours together. An ex-colleage of mine made one with a 95+ cri.
Another few months and they should have Office and HL2 (crosses fingers). I'm not sure how much X11 dependency will remain though :-/
Of course it means almost nothing in practice. Who cares if you are good at silly logic puzzles if all you do all day is sit around and feel pleased. People who actually do something useful or interesting are much more important. In other words: it's not the meat, it's the motion.
Namedrop: I knew Philip at college and he's got a paper in Nature before me. Bastard.
What you're seeing here is a slashdot-only feature: a dupe.
Upgrade to Windows Vista because, thanks to XP product activation, we know where you live.
Sometimes you need rather a large context to disambiguate: is this sentence part of a discussion on shore-front management, or spoken language understanding?
Of course that could change for the final production models.
vs. win32: GTK+ is a cross-platform toolkit. If you need to run on more platforms than just win32, then it's worth looking into.
Performance and download size: you're right, it does feel a little slower, but win32 performance is improving. The gtk+ runtime is a 3.5MB download.
Programming language: you can use C, C++, C#, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Haskel, etc. There are many language bindings.
UI guidelines: The GNOME HIG has been around for years and projects really do try to conform to it. The GNOME desktop is pretty consistent. The HIG was developed with usability studies from Sun and others. Novel are doing some now I think.
vs. wxWidgets: The usual argument here is that wrappers which attempt to put many toolkits into a single API force you to a lowest common denominator. For example, GTK has a very nice text widget (derived from the Tk one) which lets you embed any other widget. Of course wxWidgets does not suport this useful feature on all platforms, so you can't use it.
Documentation: there are comprehensive API references, a good tutorial and many excellent published books.
People do rave about the Qt docs I know.
No, the current stable win32 GTK+ runtime is 3.5 MB. Here's the download page.