He. Here in Sweden, which has a pretty high penetration of cell phones, the proliferation of hands-free kits (which typically consist of a single head phone with a wire to the phone in your pocket, and the mike attached to that wire) has made it a lot more difficult to identify drunks and mentally unstable people. It used to be easy: people who talk loud and clear into empty space are best left alone. These days, however, they might just as well be talking into their phone, which you can't see. Oh, and the combination of hands-free telephony and urban bicycling is also amusing; people zip past on their bikes, while yelling wildly...
Ah. That's just me being stuck in the old mind set of doing things, I guess. Nowadays, it's all done by proxy.;^) Hm... I still think "my" way of doing it is cool, though.
Hm... Yeah, perhaps. But this quote from the first link: Once installed on a single PC or across a network, the antiporn software known as eyeguard is activated each time an image is displayed Makes me speculate that eyeguard actually hooks into the operating system itself, so that it sits somewhere in the code that displays bitmaps on screen (on Win32, that'd be inside GDI, right?). If so, then most of the above techniques won't work very well, unless you can "counter-hook" those API calls, so that eyeguard sees an altered version of the image, then calls the original OS entry to display that, but actually ends up in your anti-blocker which turns the image back to normal and displays it. I suspect that it would be fairly easy for eyeguard to protect itself from calling a "false" original entrypoint, though... Hm, this is pretty close to some serious cyberwarfare. The lengths some people go to control each other... *Shrug*:( On the off chance that eyeguard does not work like the above, consider it a free business idea and start hacking. You might get rich!;^)
Re:Does this mean the end of the BIOS as we know i
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
·
· Score: 1
Parse, parse, parse. Ah, this dude actually uses "ko" (and "Ko", of course) as a unit for size, probably meaning kilooctet. Innovative!!;^)
One interesting thing here is that "using" a CPU architecture is such a fuzzy concept these days. I mean, on a good day, I might write a couple of hundred lines of C code, thereby implementing new functionality in my current project, perhaps making new demos possible or whatever. But, that code was C code, which almost by definition is more or less independent of the fact that I use AMD's take on the x86 ISA to run it. The code would be the same on a PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, MIPS, or any other reasonable processor. So, am I really using the ISA itself? I spent the money (um, no, my employer did), and I run the system for 10 hours a day, but I still don't feel like I'm primarily using an instruction set architecture.
Perhaps the largest group of people who make sense as a "target audience" for a new ISA is the various compiler writers out there?
Back in the old days of the Amiga, most programs were written in assembler, and they would only run on MC600x0-based Amiga machines, of course. Then it made a lot more sense to think about programming as actively using an ISA - in higher level languages, it doesn't. Of course, things such as the POSIX standards for operating system interfaces also helps make the code less tied to specific machines.
But then again, as long as Intel keep introducing three or four (or is it more?) new implementations of their architecture every year, each time with new refinements (artificial life support?), it doesn't make sense to talk about is as being "dead", either... Although I think I must add myself to the camp of people waiting for something else to take over. Once, we had this dream that it would be the PowerPC, but seems to have failed.
Um, end rant. I guess I just confused everybody else, now.;^)
Heh. If, for some reason, one were into difficult, yet incredibly geeky T-shirts, I like this for a quote: "... I am not a supporter of the open source movement"/Richard M. Stallman If your brain isn't completely turned on, and loaded with the difference between merely open source and truly free software, that one can really confuse things completely!;^)
Re:Sorry, but I don't see that this is very useful
on
Berlin 0.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
How do you define a "bog-standard consumer PC"? I just checked Gateway's cheap boxes (I've never bought anything from Gateway, it was just the first mainstream consumer box vendor that popped into my head). It turns out that these machines, which retail from $799, include integrated Intel 3D graphics hardware. Without a doubt, that hardware doesn't exactly compete with the big guys' stuff, but it might be able to handle the probably rather modest fillrate requirements of a GUI. Then again, it's a completely different question when we can expect to actually find this kind of hardware in the homes of the consumers... Hm.
Eh heh. Not that I want to try and compete with stuff made by Rob Pike, but if X is okay, and you want a file manager with at least some focus on textual information display, you might want to check out the program linked to in my URL above. </PLUG>
No, that sounds about correct. But the author is definitely somewhat confused, as this quote illustrates: GLX: This is SGI's OpenGL extension. [...] Um, using the term "extension" in the same sentence as OpenGL really makes people assume that you're talking about an actual API extension, but here this is not the case. GLX is simply the platform-specific glue that connects OpenGL to a platform's particular resources. In the case of GLX, the platform is the X Window System, of course. On Windows there is WGL (pronounced "wiggle"), and on Macs they use something called agl (no link, sorry). GLX also provides network transparancy, since that is a feature of X.
Nope. The current generation is the NV15 (aka GeForce2 256 GTS). The next generation for ordinary desktop use will be the NV20. Depending on who you ask, the Xbox uses a design based on either the NV20 or the NV25, which would be the next-next generation. So, it's not between the current and the next; you need to add at least one generation more. Then again, the Xbox is scheduled for release during fall 2001, and NVIDIA might be able to squeeze out three generations on the PC side until then. Swell!
It's simple: Microsoft (and their graphics processor supplier, NVIDIA) is simply awaiting the onslaught of HDTV. That's why they make such a fuss over building a console that can handle resolutions which'd make an ordinary TV catch fire.;^)
Um, I haven't really looked at their balls closely (um, that sounded strange...), but one thing is certain: if it's done with sprites, you don't need to store different sizes of them, since the hardware can texture a polygon with a single texture, regardless of how large that polygon is on-screen. If the polygon occupies more pixels than there are texels in the texture, the texture will be magnified. If it occupies less, it will be minified.
He. I like (and share) that attitude, but you do realize that RMS (who developed the license) does not agree, right? In fact, the official GNU party line is that the Lesser GPL should only be used for non-exclusive functionality, since it doesn't coerce other developers to use free licenses. It's interesting to note that people seem to use the license for quite different kinds of libraries -- SDL, for example, provides a rather "unique capability", but is still LGPL... Well, just food for thought, or something.
Re:AtheOS FAQ and mirrored screenshots
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 2
Thanks! Just because someone mentioned it above: the fonts do seem to be antialiased; open up the tabview one (which contains the font prefs), and zoom. Nice.
Just in case anyone got interested, before you dive into the muddy hell that is www.ericsson.se, here's a quick link to a tiny picture of the MP3 player accessory for the T18. To complete that, here's a link to some information about the device itself. Don't expect any hard info (such as memory capacity, battery life, price, or availability) though...;(
Pretty soon we're going to have chips that can crank out millions of calculations per second... Um, hello? I think we've had that for quite some time, really: ~> cat/proc/cpuinfo [...] bogomips : 552.14 Those are bogus, sure, but in this case, the number is closely related to the clock speed of the processor, which is 550 MHz. It's not difficult to imagine that the CPU then actually does "millions of calculations per second", is it? Also, I somehow doubt that you're really Yu Suzuki (of Sega fame, in case someone wondered)...
I assume you mean "Distraction". I enjoyed it pretty much; it's not everyday you read a SF novel whose "hero" is a... political campaign organizer.;^) Also, I enjoyed some of the technology described, such as the self-organizing distributed-labor auto-building houses (sounds weird, but is cool), and of course the throw-away cell phones. Ah, a link to Amazon, perhaps: right here. Remember: you don't have to buy it there...
Ah, a good trick. Once one knows that, right-clicking and reading the image name in the menu is even easier. Thanks!;^) Oh, just to clear up the reasons for my confusion: I'm Swedish, and in Sweden, the check mark is often used to mean "error, wrong" and similar negative things. Also, the color red has a negative feeling attached to it. So, the icon of a red check mark is easy to parse as something negative, whereas I guess for most Americans, to whom the check mark is positive (right?), things get easier. Looking at the W3's page, trying to interpret these icons, I invariably get confused and give up.;^)
One of my favorite test pages for PNGs is this page (over at w3.org). Unfortunately, the page itself is so weirdly designed, that I can't really determine if Mozilla renders it correctly or not. I even emailed the page's author once, since I suspect there's something wrong with the correct/incorrect demo pictures, but that didn't make me smarter... Is it only me who has problems parsing a red check mark and a green cross into "correct"/"incorrect"? It just makes my brain hurt.
Also, on modern PC graphics hardware, 16-bit is often R5G6B5, i.e. there's five bits of red and blue, but 6 bits of green. This is done because the human eye is supposedly more sensitive to green, so it's worth giving the extra bit to it. Hmmm, this discussion sort of reminds me of the Amiga's HAM (for hold and modify) mode, which with the help of some hardware magic squeezed 4,096 colors out of a 6-bits-per-pixel framebuffer. Aahh, those were the days!;^)
That has to be a Japanese import model, then, since there are no US (or European) PS2:s out yet. Here in Sweden, some cool stores have Japanese import machines, but I don't know if they actually sell them... I think they do, though. Of course, since (AFAIK) noone has yet cracked the PS2's regional lock-out crap, you'll need Japanese games for these machines, too. A (Japanese) PS2 machine imported from Hong Kong's Lik Sang goes for $609...
I would like to object to that, if I may... Noone uses ReadPixels(), because it is typically not accelerated well on consumer hardware. Observations:
The performance on typical hardware can often be improved by giving it more attention in the driver. However, there is a fundamental problem here: the framebuffer resides across a slow bus (PCI or AGP), so you really don't want to push pixels one by one across it.
Using e.g. textured quads and OpenGL's wonderful blending, alpha testing, and stenciling modes to express operations is not a nasty trick. If you want to blend two images together, being able to express that at polygon level rather than through tight CPU loops is elegant, not nasty! Also, it conserves bus traffic like crazy, and makes better use of the hardware on your graphics card.
Doing graphics operations pixel-by-pixel using the host CPU is simply not what today's graphics boards (and machines) are optimized for. This might change in the future, but currently you have tens of millions of transistors in your graphic card's "GPU", so why not use them?
The last point above, that graphics operations today are best performed in very close vicinity to the actual graphics board, is basically what the linked article was about: moving functionality into the X display server makes it possible to execute it on the display hardware directly. This, in my opinion, is a very good thing.
Um, if I didn't misread the article, use of floating-point coordinates was actually not suggested, since such coordinates would suffer from loss of precision when objects are translated. What was proposed was a fixed-point format, with 24 bits of integer and 8 bits of fraction.
Slashdot Mirror
He. Here in Sweden, which has a pretty high penetration of cell phones, the proliferation of hands-free kits (which typically consist of a single head phone with a wire to the phone in your pocket, and the mike attached to that wire) has made it a lot more difficult to identify drunks and mentally unstable people. It used to be easy: people who talk loud and clear into empty space are best left alone. These days, however, they might just as well be talking into their phone, which you can't see. Oh, and the combination of hands-free telephony and urban bicycling is also amusing; people zip past on their bikes, while yelling wildly...
Ah. That's just me being stuck in the old mind set of doing things, I guess. Nowadays, it's all done by proxy. ;^) Hm... I still think "my" way of doing it is cool, though.
Hm... Yeah, perhaps. But this quote from the first link: :( On the off chance that eyeguard does not work like the above, consider it a free business idea and start hacking. You might get rich! ;^)
Once installed on a single PC or across a network, the antiporn software known as eyeguard is activated each time an image is displayed
Makes me speculate that eyeguard actually hooks into the operating system itself, so that it sits somewhere in the code that displays bitmaps on screen (on Win32, that'd be inside GDI, right?). If so, then most of the above techniques won't work very well, unless you can "counter-hook" those API calls, so that eyeguard sees an altered version of the image, then calls the original OS entry to display that, but actually ends up in your anti-blocker which turns the image back to normal and displays it. I suspect that it would be fairly easy for eyeguard to protect itself from calling a "false" original entrypoint, though... Hm, this is pretty close to some serious cyberwarfare. The lengths some people go to control each other... *Shrug*
Parse, parse, parse. Ah, this dude actually uses "ko" (and "Ko", of course) as a unit for size, probably meaning kilooctet. Innovative!! ;^)
One interesting thing here is that "using" a CPU architecture is such a fuzzy concept these days. I mean, on a good day, I might write a couple of hundred lines of C code, thereby implementing new functionality in my current project, perhaps making new demos possible or whatever. But, that code was C code, which almost by definition is more or less independent of the fact that I use AMD's take on the x86 ISA to run it. The code would be the same on a PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, MIPS, or any other reasonable processor. So, am I really using the ISA itself? I spent the money (um, no, my employer did), and I run the system for 10 hours a day, but I still don't feel like I'm primarily using an instruction set architecture.
Perhaps the largest group of people who make sense as a "target audience" for a new ISA is the various compiler writers out there?
Back in the old days of the Amiga, most programs were written in assembler, and they would only run on MC600x0-based Amiga machines, of course. Then it made a lot more sense to think about programming as actively using an ISA - in higher level languages, it doesn't. Of course, things such as the POSIX standards for operating system interfaces also helps make the code less tied to specific machines.
But then again, as long as Intel keep introducing three or four (or is it more?) new implementations of their architecture every year, each time with new refinements (artificial life support?), it doesn't make sense to talk about is as being "dead", either... Although I think I must add myself to the camp of people waiting for something else to take over. Once, we had this dream that it would be the PowerPC, but seems to have failed.
Um, end rant. I guess I just confused everybody else, now.Heh. If, for some reason, one were into difficult, yet incredibly geeky T-shirts, I like this for a quote: ;^)
"... I am not a supporter of the open source movement"/Richard M. Stallman
If your brain isn't completely turned on, and loaded with the difference between merely open source and truly free software, that one can really confuse things completely!
How do you define a "bog-standard consumer PC"? I just checked Gateway's cheap boxes (I've never bought anything from Gateway, it was just the first mainstream consumer box vendor that popped into my head). It turns out that these machines, which retail from $799, include integrated Intel 3D graphics hardware. Without a doubt, that hardware doesn't exactly compete with the big guys' stuff, but it might be able to handle the probably rather modest fillrate requirements of a GUI. Then again, it's a completely different question when we can expect to actually find this kind of hardware in the homes of the consumers... Hm.
Eh heh. Not that I want to try and compete with stuff made by Rob Pike, but if X is okay, and you want a file manager with at least some focus on textual information display, you might want to check out the program linked to in my URL above.
</PLUG>
No, that sounds about correct. But the author is definitely somewhat confused, as this quote illustrates:
GLX: This is SGI's OpenGL extension. [...]
Um, using the term "extension" in the same sentence as OpenGL really makes people assume that you're talking about an actual API extension, but here this is not the case. GLX is simply the platform-specific glue that connects OpenGL to a platform's particular resources. In the case of GLX, the platform is the X Window System, of course. On Windows there is WGL (pronounced "wiggle"), and on Macs they use something called agl (no link, sorry). GLX also provides network transparancy, since that is a feature of X.
Nope. The current generation is the NV15 (aka GeForce2 256 GTS). The next generation for ordinary desktop use will be the NV20. Depending on who you ask, the Xbox uses a design based on either the NV20 or the NV25, which would be the next-next generation. So, it's not between the current and the next; you need to add at least one generation more. Then again, the Xbox is scheduled for release during fall 2001, and NVIDIA might be able to squeeze out three generations on the PC side until then. Swell!
It's simple: Microsoft (and their graphics processor supplier, NVIDIA) is simply awaiting the onslaught of HDTV. That's why they make such a fuss over building a console that can handle resolutions which'd make an ordinary TV catch fire. ;^)
Um, I haven't really looked at their balls closely (um, that sounded strange...), but one thing is certain: if it's done with sprites, you don't need to store different sizes of them, since the hardware can texture a polygon with a single texture, regardless of how large that polygon is on-screen. If the polygon occupies more pixels than there are texels in the texture, the texture will be magnified. If it occupies less, it will be minified.
Linus' note ends: ;)
;^)
Have fun. And let's see how many people find this without it even being announced
Linus
Um, yeah, let's see, really. Once it's on Slashdot, it is more or less announced, I'd say.
He. I like (and share) that attitude, but you do realize that RMS (who developed the license) does not agree, right? In fact, the official GNU party line is that the Lesser GPL should only be used for non-exclusive functionality, since it doesn't coerce other developers to use free licenses. It's interesting to note that people seem to use the license for quite different kinds of libraries -- SDL, for example, provides a rather "unique capability", but is still LGPL... Well, just food for thought, or something.
Thanks! Just because someone mentioned it above: the fonts do seem to be antialiased; open up the tabview one (which contains the font prefs), and zoom. Nice.
Just in case anyone got interested, before you dive into the muddy hell that is www.ericsson.se, here's a quick link to a tiny picture of the MP3 player accessory for the T18. To complete that, here's a link to some information about the device itself. Don't expect any hard info (such as memory capacity, battery life, price, or availability) though... ;(
Pretty soon we're going to have chips that can crank out millions of calculations per second... /proc/cpuinfo
Um, hello? I think we've had that for quite some time, really:
~> cat
[...]
bogomips : 552.14
Those are bogus, sure, but in this case, the number is closely related to the clock speed of the processor, which is 550 MHz. It's not difficult to imagine that the CPU then actually does "millions of calculations per second", is it? Also, I somehow doubt that you're really Yu Suzuki (of Sega fame, in case someone wondered)...
I assume you mean "Distraction". I enjoyed it pretty much; it's not everyday you read a SF novel whose "hero" is a ... political campaign organizer. ;^) Also, I enjoyed some of the technology described, such as the self-organizing distributed-labor auto-building houses (sounds weird, but is cool), and of course the throw-away cell phones. Ah, a link to Amazon, perhaps: right here. Remember: you don't have to buy it there...
Ah, a good trick. Once one knows that, right-clicking and reading the image name in the menu is even easier. Thanks! ;^) Oh, just to clear up the reasons for my confusion: I'm Swedish, and in Sweden, the check mark is often used to mean "error, wrong" and similar negative things. Also, the color red has a negative feeling attached to it. So, the icon of a red check mark is easy to parse as something negative, whereas I guess for most Americans, to whom the check mark is positive (right?), things get easier. Looking at the W3's page, trying to interpret these icons, I invariably get confused and give up. ;^)
One of my favorite test pages for PNGs is this page (over at w3.org). Unfortunately, the page itself is so weirdly designed, that I can't really determine if Mozilla renders it correctly or not. I even emailed the page's author once, since I suspect there's something wrong with the correct/incorrect demo pictures, but that didn't make me smarter... Is it only me who has problems parsing a red check mark and a green cross into "correct"/"incorrect"? It just makes my brain hurt.
Also, on modern PC graphics hardware, 16-bit is often R5G6B5, i.e. there's five bits of red and blue, but 6 bits of green. This is done because the human eye is supposedly more sensitive to green, so it's worth giving the extra bit to it. Hmmm, this discussion sort of reminds me of the Amiga's HAM (for hold and modify) mode, which with the help of some hardware magic squeezed 4,096 colors out of a 6-bits-per-pixel framebuffer. Aahh, those were the days! ;^)
Of course, not everyone can even write a perfect Hello World implementation. *Sigh*
That has to be a Japanese import model, then, since there are no US (or European) PS2:s out yet. Here in Sweden, some cool stores have Japanese import machines, but I don't know if they actually sell them... I think they do, though. Of course, since (AFAIK) noone has yet cracked the PS2's regional lock-out crap, you'll need Japanese games for these machines, too. A (Japanese) PS2 machine imported from Hong Kong's Lik Sang goes for $609...
- The performance on typical hardware can often be improved by giving it more attention in the driver. However, there is a fundamental problem here: the framebuffer resides across a slow bus (PCI or AGP), so you really don't want to push pixels one by one across it.
- Using e.g. textured quads and OpenGL's wonderful blending, alpha testing, and stenciling modes to express operations is not a nasty trick. If you want to blend two images together, being able to express that at polygon level rather than through tight CPU loops is elegant, not nasty! Also, it conserves bus traffic like crazy, and makes better use of the hardware on your graphics card.
- Doing graphics operations pixel-by-pixel using the host CPU is simply not what today's graphics boards (and machines) are optimized for. This might change in the future, but currently you have tens of millions of transistors in your graphic card's "GPU", so why not use them?
The last point above, that graphics operations today are best performed in very close vicinity to the actual graphics board, is basically what the linked article was about: moving functionality into the X display server makes it possible to execute it on the display hardware directly. This, in my opinion, is a very good thing.Um, if I didn't misread the article, use of floating-point coordinates was actually not suggested, since such coordinates would suffer from loss of precision when objects are translated. What was proposed was a fixed-point format, with 24 bits of integer and 8 bits of fraction.