Seconded, preferably loudly and with at least one fist in the air. That "feature" of IE generally causes me to grumble, or even yell. It's incredibly annoying, and feels just plain wrong when you're used to Firefox. Or any decent browser, I guess. I really didn't follow the logic here at all, and instead found it borderline arrogant, with the "Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch." wording. As if IE is the norm or something. Aargh, even reading it quoted there gets to me. I guess I'll go do something calming.
1UP.com referred to it as a "chip", but I can't imagine what it could be other than an gyroscope.
Do those have to be mutually exclusive? I don't think so, and people like Analog Devices seem to agree. I quote the linked-to page, one of several such products:
The ADXRS150 is a 150 deg./sec. angular rate sensor (gyroscope) on a single chip, complete with all of the required electronics.
Perhaps that is what Nintendo stuck in there?
It probably contains one ore more accelerometers, too. I guess we won't know until Lik Sang or someone with similiar low respect for newly released hardware and high competence in the application of screwdrivers get their hands on it, though.:)
Then perhaps this sample code for a GTK+ "hello world" can help give you an idea of how it at least looks to code with GTK+.
Note that the example is (a bit counter-productively, IMO) fairly verbose and overly detailed; it looks a bit more complicated than it has to be.
Not trying to convert you or anything here, just illustrating the flavor of modern X GUI programming with a (again, IMO) nice toolkit.
I bet it's based on technology from Anoto. The whole thing sounds very much like what their technology is said to be capable of, and the "special paper" is very much in line as well. Cool application, but it does sound rather annoying, heh.
I know I'm being silly, but it was actually explained like this in... the article:
A 1960 federal law and related state laws bar record companies from offering undisclosed financial incentives in exchange for airplay. The practice was called "payola," a contraction of "pay" and "Victrola," the old wind-up record player.
Not being from an English-speaking country myself either, I thought I'd eye the article hoping they would be internally consistent and define the term. They were, and they did. I bet this could be used to try and teach some kind of lesson, but let's not go there.:)
A dozen? Don't be so conservative.:) I couldn't find any transistor count number for the MC68030, but this page says the MC68040 had 1.2 million transistors (quite a jump up from the 68,000 of the original MC68000).
A Pentium 4 seems to have either 55 million or 125 million, depending on the core generation (those are "Northwood" and "Prescott" cores, respectively), all according to this page. There might be newer generations still, I'm not 100% up to speed on Intel CPUs.
Thus, you can fit either 55/1.2 = ~45 or 125/1.2 = ~104 MC68040s in the transistor budget of a single Pentium 4. Of course, this is just back-of-the-envelope numbers, and I'm not enough of a silicon geek to know how much "glue" would be needed. Plus, trading cache transistors for gate transistors as this calculation does is probably not OK. Not to think about memory bandwidth requirements to feed 55 cores... But still--one can dream!
Good point. Although I'm living in a country where firearms are way less common than in the US, so that I have zero personal experience with handguns, I have some gun-geeky streaks. Enough to recognize the unit "Gr" above as "grains", which seems to be commonly used for some reason to measure the mass of bullets. Thing is, you simply converted 240 Gr into 0.24 kg, as if 1 Grain == 1 gram. This, I found dubious enough to ask Google about. The reply, for the click-lazy, was that 240 grains is about 15 grams.
This makes sense too, since if a single bullet (not to mention cartridge and powder) of.44 Magnum weighed 240 grams (about half a pound), then a full magazine of 6 (I guess?) would weigh almost 1.5 kg, which seems like quite a lot for just part of the ammunition in a handgun. Or perhaps all users of such guns are also body-builders?:)
With the corrected value for the mass of the bullet, the energy beecomes: 0.015/2 * 259^2 = 0.0075 * 67081 ~= 503 J, which is at least closer to your value for the softball. I'm not sure, but I think this perhaps brings them into the same ballpark. If a factor of ~3 is not too much, I'm not sure, expressions like that are vague.
I can't answer for Blender in any detail, as I'm not actually part of the developer pool for it. I work solely on Verse, so far.
But I do know that there is a developer who is working on getting Blender to use Verse, allowing real-time collaborative modelling across a network. I've seen him demo early versions of the code, so I know it's happening. I can easily imagine that being useful for a project such as this, where (I guess) many artists will be working on the same scenes. Also, other developments within the Uni-Verse project might help, too...
I don't think anyone knows what Verse does for a project such as this yet, but I think Ton intends to find out.:)
If you or anyone else has further questions, please don't hesitate to drop by on IRC for instance. It's a bit quicker than Slashdot.
Heh. As a full-time developer of the related technology, I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!
Verse is a low-level data model, network protocol and programming API for dealing with distributed applications involving 3D graphics and audio. It is completely open and distributed under a BSD license so you can use it in any kind of application.
For details, see the top-level Uni-Verse site (toplevel page about the current research project). If you're a developer, perhaps heading directly to the Verse
pages is more interesting. You could also check out the specification
for the Verse core technology. Or why not just surf the CVS and read some code?:)
If you have questions, you could drop by #verse on FreeNode, or use the mailing list. More developers would certainly not hurt.
Not to shoot you down or anything, but it makes me giggle a bit that you say "I know what a GFlop is and all that", heh. As you then know, the basic abbreviation means "floating point operations per second". So, the last 's' is not to make it plural, it's part of the acronym. You can't say "a GFLOP", it's "a GFLOPS". The difference between 1 GFLOPS and 2 GFLOPS is 1 GFLOPS, not 1 GFLOP. And so on. This is one of my big zoo of pet peeves, not meant as a personal attack at all.:)
Um, had you actually followed your own links, you'd perhaps have realized that Cinepaint is the program formerly known as Film Gimp. Still, there seems to be some content that has not yet been moved, so I guess the link does serve some purpose.
Excellent, that makes more space for the rest of us here out in the rest of the world. Perhaps you've heard of it, it's that little area that Google Maps seems to ignore for now. Sometime in the future, perhaps you can use the service to plan a visit.:^)
Probably the magic of GSM repeaters. That's how the subways of Stockholm get their (imo excellent) GSM coverage, at least. I seem to recall that people back in the day said "we're about to enter a tunnel, I might disappear", but nowadays there's no need to care. It just works, and would probably work just as well in a Polish salt mine too, if there is general coverage in the area surrounding the mine...
Regarding the spelling, it's Bahnhof. Two 'h':s in there. This is actually a German word, meaning "railroad station". Not sure why a Swedish company would name themselves in German, but there you go. Btw, it looks as if the submitter could have done with an "(sp?)" marker as well, heh.
I didn't check on your math per se, but I think your assumptions are wrong. The "substrate" the blurb talks about is most likely something that is processed, then cut into multiple actual screens. At least that is how the term is used in e.g. IC production, I think. Anyway, if you compute the diagonal of a 2.2 by 1.87 meter rectangle, it comes out to 2.9 meters. This is about 113", which is why I think you're using the wrong numbers (113" IsNot 82").
Shouldn't that be |? Consider for instance x = 42 = 0x0000002a. Now, x << 8 is simply 0x00002a00, but x >> 24 is 0. And since x & 0 == 0 for all x, the result becomes 0 rather than the expected 0x00002a00. Just my two bits of Friday night debugging. Enjoyed the trick though.
In Sweden, which is part of Europe, caller ID is available on plain old analog telephone lines. It costs an additional 20 SEK/month from the major provider, Telia. Personally I don't have it, since my presenter (tiny box with LCD hooked to a phone jack, cheaper than getting a phone with built-in display) broke and I the novelty wore off.
Sorry, just knee-jerking from one of my pet peeves here. The name of the company is very likely PHILIPS. Please go ahead and count the number of Ls in there. Yes, there can be only one! Now we continue with our scheduled comments.
Uh, so how exactly do you think Apple engineers implement those features, if they don't use a "chipset"? By asking Jobs to wave his magic wand over the blueprints for the boards, then stand all along the production lines, closing their eyes and wishing really hard? I think not.
I would wager that x86 technology as found in e.g. laptops could integrate to a size this small or thereabouts. There's nothing magical with the Mac Mini, it is "just" some really good engineering work done towards a target that still (efter how many years of Shuttles and other small form-factor PCs?) hasn't occured to the x86/PC industry.
Standard (PC) floppy drives cannot read Amiga-formatted disks; they are incompatible on a very low level. It is not software-fixable, you will need to find someone who has an actual working "classic" Amiga, and hope your old disks have stood the test of time. Most disks don't, it seems.:/
The Amiga Workbench always listed available memory in the screen's title bar like that. I was happy to see it remained in OS4.:) It's interesting that the two numbers are the same, on "classic" Amiga hardware that was never the case since the two memory types were physically different on the motherboard, and used for different purposes by the system. I sure hope your assumption that they will be removed is wrong, although displaying in mega- or kilobytes might make them a bit more readable.
Interesting. I'd argue a command line shines brighter when several files need to be manipulated at the same time, i.e. in parallel. As long as there is an easy way to identify all the files from the command line, doing something like rm *.jpg is much faster than the equivalent in most GUIs.
Certainly, this is the much talked-about "Start Menu caching driver", by R.U. Inseign. If you built your kernel to include it, you will have a device node (major 666, minor 257) at/dev/startmenu through which the desktop's panel can access the functionality. I think the driver was merged in kernel 2.6.5 or there abouts, so you might have it.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconded, preferably loudly and with at least one fist in the air. That "feature" of IE generally causes me to grumble, or even yell. It's incredibly annoying, and feels just plain wrong when you're used to Firefox. Or any decent browser, I guess. I really didn't follow the logic here at all, and instead found it borderline arrogant, with the "Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch." wording. As if IE is the norm or something. Aargh, even reading it quoted there gets to me. I guess I'll go do something calming.
Then perhaps this sample code for a GTK+ "hello world" can help give you an idea of how it at least looks to code with GTK+. Note that the example is (a bit counter-productively, IMO) fairly verbose and overly detailed; it looks a bit more complicated than it has to be. Not trying to convert you or anything here, just illustrating the flavor of modern X GUI programming with a (again, IMO) nice toolkit.
I bet it's based on technology from Anoto. The whole thing sounds very much like what their technology is said to be capable of, and the "special paper" is very much in line as well. Cool application, but it does sound rather annoying, heh.
Not being from an English-speaking country myself either, I thought I'd eye the article hoping they would be internally consistent and define the term. They were, and they did. I bet this could be used to try and teach some kind of lesson, but let's not go there.
A dozen? Don't be so conservative. :) I couldn't find any transistor count number for the MC68030, but this page says the MC68040 had 1.2 million transistors (quite a jump up from the 68,000 of the original MC68000).
A Pentium 4 seems to have either 55 million or 125 million, depending on the core generation (those are "Northwood" and "Prescott" cores, respectively), all according to this page. There might be newer generations still, I'm not 100% up to speed on Intel CPUs.
Thus, you can fit either 55/1.2 = ~45 or 125/1.2 = ~104 MC68040s in the transistor budget of a single Pentium 4. Of course, this is just back-of-the-envelope numbers, and I'm not enough of a silicon geek to know how much "glue" would be needed. Plus, trading cache transistors for gate transistors as this calculation does is probably not OK. Not to think about memory bandwidth requirements to feed 55 cores ... But still--one can dream!
Good point. Although I'm living in a country where firearms are way less common than in the US, so that I have zero personal experience with handguns, I have some gun-geeky streaks. Enough to recognize the unit "Gr" above as "grains", which seems to be commonly used for some reason to measure the mass of bullets. Thing is, you simply converted 240 Gr into 0.24 kg, as if 1 Grain == 1 gram. This, I found dubious enough to ask Google about. The reply, for the click-lazy, was that 240 grains is about 15 grams.
.44 Magnum weighed 240 grams (about half a pound), then a full magazine of 6 (I guess?) would weigh almost 1.5 kg, which seems like quite a lot for just part of the ammunition in a handgun. Or perhaps all users of such guns are also body-builders? :)
This makes sense too, since if a single bullet (not to mention cartridge and powder) of
With the corrected value for the mass of the bullet, the energy beecomes: 0.015/2 * 259^2 = 0.0075 * 67081 ~= 503 J, which is at least closer to your value for the softball. I'm not sure, but I think this perhaps brings them into the same ballpark. If a factor of ~3 is not too much, I'm not sure, expressions like that are vague.
Cool, I'm glad to be dragged!
...
:)
I can't answer for Blender in any detail, as I'm not actually part of the developer pool for it. I work solely on Verse, so far.
But I do know that there is a developer who is working on getting Blender to use Verse, allowing real-time collaborative modelling across a network. I've seen him demo early versions of the code, so I know it's happening. I can easily imagine that being useful for a project such as this, where (I guess) many artists will be working on the same scenes. Also, other developments within the Uni-Verse project might help, too
I don't think anyone knows what Verse does for a project such as this yet, but I think Ton intends to find out.
If you or anyone else has further questions, please don't hesitate to drop by on IRC for instance. It's a bit quicker than Slashdot.
Heh. As a full-time developer of the related technology, I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!
Verse is a low-level data model, network protocol and programming API for dealing with distributed applications involving 3D graphics and audio. It is completely open and distributed under a BSD license so you can use it in any kind of application.
For details, see the top-level Uni-Verse site (toplevel page about the current research project). If you're a developer, perhaps heading directly to the Verse pages is more interesting. You could also check out the specification for the Verse core technology. Or why not just surf the CVS and read some code? :)
If you have questions, you could drop by #verse on FreeNode, or use the mailing list. More developers would certainly not hurt.
Not to shoot you down or anything, but it makes me giggle a bit that you say "I know what a GFlop is and all that", heh. As you then know, the basic abbreviation means "floating point operations per second". So, the last 's' is not to make it plural, it's part of the acronym. You can't say "a GFLOP", it's "a GFLOPS". The difference between 1 GFLOPS and 2 GFLOPS is 1 GFLOPS, not 1 GFLOP. And so on. This is one of my big zoo of pet peeves, not meant as a personal attack at all. :)
Um, had you actually followed your own links, you'd perhaps have realized that Cinepaint is the program formerly known as Film Gimp. Still, there seems to be some content that has not yet been moved, so I guess the link does serve some purpose.
Excellent, that makes more space for the rest of us here out in the rest of the world. Perhaps you've heard of it, it's that little area that Google Maps seems to ignore for now. Sometime in the future, perhaps you can use the service to plan a visit.
Probably the magic of GSM repeaters. That's how the subways of Stockholm get their (imo excellent) GSM coverage, at least. I seem to recall that people back in the day said "we're about to enter a tunnel, I might disappear", but nowadays there's no need to care. It just works, and would probably work just as well in a Polish salt mine too, if there is general coverage in the area surrounding the mine...
Regarding the spelling, it's Bahnhof. Two 'h':s in there. This is actually a German word, meaning "railroad station". Not sure why a Swedish company would name themselves in German, but there you go. Btw, it looks as if the submitter could have done with an "(sp?)" marker as well, heh.
I didn't check on your math per se, but I think your assumptions are wrong. The "substrate" the blurb talks about is most likely something that is processed, then cut into multiple actual screens. At least that is how the term is used in e.g. IC production, I think. Anyway, if you compute the diagonal of a 2.2 by 1.87 meter rectangle, it comes out to 2.9 meters. This is about 113", which is why I think you're using the wrong numbers (113" IsNot 82").
Also, you're getting ready to do the switch. :)
Shouldn't that be |? Consider for instance x = 42 = 0x0000002a. Now, x << 8 is simply 0x00002a00, but x >> 24 is 0. And since x & 0 == 0 for all x, the result becomes 0 rather than the expected 0x00002a00. Just my two bits of Friday night debugging. Enjoyed the trick though.
We are working on that problem, in our own little way.
In Sweden, which is part of Europe, caller ID is available on plain old analog telephone lines. It costs an additional 20 SEK/month from the major provider, Telia. Personally I don't have it, since my presenter (tiny box with LCD hooked to a phone jack, cheaper than getting a phone with built-in display) broke and I the novelty wore off.
Sorry, just knee-jerking from one of my pet peeves here. The name of the company is very likely PHILIPS. Please go ahead and count the number of Ls in there. Yes, there can be only one! Now we continue with our scheduled comments.
Uh, so how exactly do you think Apple engineers implement those features, if they don't use a "chipset"? By asking Jobs to wave his magic wand over the blueprints for the boards, then stand all along the production lines, closing their eyes and wishing really hard? I think not.
I would wager that x86 technology as found in e.g. laptops could integrate to a size this small or thereabouts. There's nothing magical with the Mac Mini, it is "just" some really good engineering work done towards a target that still (efter how many years of Shuttles and other small form-factor PCs?) hasn't occured to the x86/PC industry.
Standard (PC) floppy drives cannot read Amiga-formatted disks; they are incompatible on a very low level. It is not software-fixable, you will need to find someone who has an actual working "classic" Amiga, and hope your old disks have stood the test of time. Most disks don't, it seems. :/
The Amiga Workbench always listed available memory in the screen's title bar like that. I was happy to see it remained in OS4. :) It's interesting that the two numbers are the same, on "classic" Amiga hardware that was never the case since the two memory types were physically different on the motherboard, and used for different purposes by the system. I sure hope your assumption that they will be removed is wrong, although displaying in mega- or kilobytes might make them a bit more readable.
Interesting. I'd argue a command line shines brighter when several files need to be manipulated at the same time, i.e. in parallel. As long as there is an easy way to identify all the files from the command line, doing something like rm *.jpg is much faster than the equivalent in most GUIs.
Certainly, this is the much talked-about "Start Menu caching driver", by R.U. Inseign. If you built your kernel to include it, you will have a device node (major 666, minor 257) at /dev/startmenu through which the desktop's panel can access the functionality. I think the driver was merged in kernel 2.6.5 or there abouts, so you might have it.