He, actually, I believe shaldannon was talking about the new support for binary integer literals added to 5.6.0. You can say stuff like 0b10000 and get 16, and so on. That'd be nice to have in C, actually. Too bad it didn't make it into C9X (the new updated C standard). Time for another GNU extension, perhaps?;^)
Um, don't forget ASM-One, the wonderful assembler/editor/debugger/monitor environment... Hm, on second though, who wants to code x86 assembly, regardless of the environment? I know I don't.;^)
Hm, I like this passage: And computers are called digital in the Western world because they use the binary system, which is based on the digits 1 and 0. (From the page entitled It Came From the Deep ). In my world, the above statement is broken. Computers are called digital because they are not analog, i.e. they work with quantized data expressable as a finite sequence of digits. They are called binary because they use the binary system, with the digits 0 and 1. A computer based on some system with e.g. nine symbols would still be digital, but it would not be binary. Right?
Um, perhaps I'm just being overly bitchy now... But anyway, please realize that from a technical standpoint, games are clearly up there with the most demanding pieces of software you're going to run on your machine. If you run modern games, that is. It is not at all surprising (to me) if a game is more difficult to get running than some "real" program like a word processor. Still, it should not be that hard, of course.
>> Well, it probably makes sense from a PR >> perspective, anyways." > That I really don't get. Oh, what I meant was that it might be (slightly) easier to sell a name such as "onlinephotolab.com" than "onlineimagelab.com" (heh, or "onlinepixmaplab.com";). I just meant that perhaps more (non-geek) people have some intuitive feel for what a photo lab has to offer than an image lab. The term "photo" is an every-day thing, probably more so than a "general 2D bitmap image". Ah, whatever...
Hm, it says very little about what the company is going to live off... My guess would be the usual (=banner ads), since it says right there in the account usage policy that the account is free... Also, I find the conceptual limitation to photos somewhat interesting, as well. An image is an image is an image, I thought. Well, it probably makes sense from a PR perspective, anyways. So, good luck, I guess!;^)
OK, you just exceeded by Amiga-related-bullshit-o-meter. Sorry. The copper in the Amiga was pretty far from "spewing 2D graphics", really. All it did was execute incredibly simplistic almost-always sequential programs, using an instruction set with a massive three (yes, 3!) different instructions. Its execution was synchronized with the raster beam that paints the picture on your TV or monitor. There were instructions to WAIT for a certain raster line, MOVE a 16-bit value into one of the Amiga's custom registers, and also to SKIP the next instruction if a certain raster line had already been reached. Very few programmers ever used the SKIP instruction; I sure never did. The memory in which the copper's program was stored was in the address space of the general-purpose 68K CPU, so you could do all kinds of cool tricks by generating (or modifying) the copper program on the fly. Of course, everything interesting on the Amiga was done through the custom registers, so you could do all kinds of weird tricks using the copper. Things like changing the color palette, or even the screen resolution, anywhere on the screen were almost trivial to achieve, and once expressed as a copper program they continued to repeat at 50 (or 60) Hz, independently of what the main CPU was doing. It was incredibly cool!! OK, I think I'm done now.;^)
In Sweden, of course (?), the situtation is pretty much the opposite:
Phones are almost always sold together with a subscription, which makes the cost of the actual phone very small, but on the other hand ties the customer up for some period of time. The cheapeast phones are around 1 SEK (roughly 13 cents US), but you need to add the cost of the subscription to that. It is still possible to buy phones without a subscription, but few do because of the perceived high price.
You can buy a phone with a special SIM card that includes phone time, so you don't need a subscription. Such phones are often tied for 12 months to the provider.
Also, the costs for making calls vary greatly among countries here. Among the Nordic countries, I think Sweden is the most expensive country to call in. For me, for example, a call during day time (7 AM to 7 PM) costs 5.50 SEK per minute (that'd be rougly 60 cents US).
I don't know how many networks and/or providers there are in other Nordic or European countries, but in Sweden there are basically three GSM providers: Telia, Europolitan and Comviq. Each of these three have more or less nation-wide coverage in their own networks. Roaming between nets is illegal.
Speaking about proprietary, the controller ports used for the joypads are going to be standard USB with respect to the electrical specs and the protocols, but not the actual physical connector. So ordinary USB peripherals won't fit. "What's the bloody point in that?", asks the cool Slashdot reader who thought the 'U' in USB was for "universal"? Well, to let Microsoft license away the right to manufacture and sell X-Box peripherals, of course... Gotta keep those $$$s flowing in some how, you know.
You're correct, according to Bill's presentation it will run a stripped-down version of the Win2k kernel. Interesting, I didn't think stripping down software was within Microsoft's capabilities.;^)
Um, hello? The X-Box was "unveiled" at the GDC, right? At least it felt that way, when they paused NVIDIA's presentation for an hour of finicky Bill, talking about the new console. Still, that happened almost two weeks ago...
He, I visited a short lecture on the x86-64 architecture last week at the GDC, and the guy who gave it specifically noted that the lack of registers on x86 was a pain in the butt... He also hinted pretty strongly about Sledgehammer supporting SIMD-type processing on double-precision floating point numbers. Cool!
Exactly. Someone should have told Casio, though. My wristwatch thought today was March 1st. A few fiddly buttonpresses later, and it's back to a more correct world view. I wonder what it will think about tomorrow, though.;^) (Hmmm, reading that page, I see it actually works as specified...)
500 kbps? Um, like, hello? A single ISDN channel is 64 kbps. ISDN was designed to carry telephony as one of its major aplications, and they still "settled" for 64 kbps. Since then, we've seen the rise of GSM, which transports telephone calls in something like 9.6 kbps. So, without actually beeing anything near a true telecom geek, I think I can say that 500 kbps for a telephone conversation is a bit too much... Corrections welcome, of course.
Believe? Never mind "believe" I don't understand them. Here's what they say about the IIIc: the rechargeable lithium ion battery gives you over two weeks of constant run time, or 14 days of normal use. Is constant run time the same as normal use? Or is a week not seven days anymore?! Color me confused!
Well, you play it like this: you and your opponent sit, facing eachother, with a big table-thingie between you. The table is about the size of a tabletop hockey game, or something. The table is matte black, and somewhere on it there's a steel ball. You score by getting the ball to move to the opponent's end of the table. To move the ball, you need to relax. Relaxing is made harder by the fact that when the game is played, there is a hysterical light & sound show going on, and curves showing each player's brain activity are projected on the wall behind the players. Of course, an audience also helps stressing the players out. Hmmm, I guess I really should dare take the plunge and actually try Brainball next time they demo it (yes, I work at the Interactive Institute)...;^)
Not true. The important thing to keep in mind here, I think, is that this encrypts the signal to a digital display. To see why this is important:
You buy a great DVD movie. The video stream is encrypted on the disk (let's ignore JJ for a while)
You play the movie on your DVD player, which decrypts the stream and sends it to your video card
The video card dumps the video stream into a window on your desktop
The video card emits your desktop to the display device, in blissful ignorance that:
You have disconnected your display, and instead connected an Evil Recording Device!
The net result in this scenario is that you "rip" the movie, in its original all-digital quality, even though it was delivered to you in encrypted form and therefore "supposedly" secure. Sure, you might need to do some trivial editing to get rid of your desktop (or just run the player full-screen), but you still have it. If you instead send the desktop out through S-Video or anything analog, the quality would degrade and you could not duplicate the movie further at original quality. I think the movie industry fears ripping original-quality content quite a lot, since that really makes it "easy" to e.g. resell the content at top quality. This is why this form of encryption really makes sense, from Their perspective.
Hmmm, I assume that this encryption is implemented in the latest stage of the video board (where the RAMDAC would be on an analog board), since having an encrypted frame buffer sounds so stupid it almost scares me.
Um, I'm not sure I should be saying this, but what the heck: have you seen DIVE?. If you hit that link, you'll get their front page featuring a collage of screenshots. Look close, and you'll see standard X apps textured into a 3D world. Scroll down, click "pretty pictures", and you'll see more...
Hm, I think I will take that to mean that the cache has finally been migrated onto the same die as the CPU core itself, a la Intel's Coppermine generation P-IIIs. Great, since that should mean that the L2 cache no longer needs to run at 2/5 of the speed of the core, as was previously the case with the higher-speed Athlons... Hm, perhaps it's time to start lobbying the boss to replace my Athlon-550 from early December. Naah...;^)
Hm, it says HP expects at least 300,000 orders as a result of this offer. It also says that the machines (HP Pavilions; 500 MHz Celeron, 4.3 GB disk, CD-ROM, 56K modem, puny 15" monitor) ship with MS software, including "word processing and spreadsheets". I wonder what kind of money a deal like that gives to MS? ObLinuxRant: just think of the money Ford could have saved if they gave their employees boxes with Linux on them! Heh, I don't think the support costs would go down quite as much, though.;^)
Hm, the idea about not holding your breath waiting for gentoo to turn into an Opus 5.x-clone is probably a good one, as far as survival strategies go.;^) At this point in time, I have no plans to take development in that direction... Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
He, actually, I believe shaldannon was talking about the new support for binary integer literals added to 5.6.0. You can say stuff like 0b10000 and get 16, and so on. That'd be nice to have in C, actually. Too bad it didn't make it into C9X (the new updated C standard). Time for another GNU extension, perhaps? ;^)
Um, don't forget ASM-One, the wonderful assembler/editor/debugger/monitor environment... Hm, on second though, who wants to code x86 assembly, regardless of the environment? I know I don't. ;^)
Hm, I like this passage:
And computers are called digital in the Western world because they use the binary system, which is based on the digits 1 and 0.
(From the page entitled It Came From the Deep ).
In my world, the above statement is broken. Computers are called digital because they are not analog, i.e. they work with quantized data expressable as a finite sequence of digits. They are called binary because they use the binary system, with the digits 0 and 1. A computer based on some system with e.g. nine symbols would still be digital, but it would not be binary. Right?
Um, perhaps I'm just being overly bitchy now... But anyway, please realize that from a technical standpoint, games are clearly up there with the most demanding pieces of software you're going to run on your machine. If you run modern games, that is. It is not at all surprising (to me) if a game is more difficult to get running than some "real" program like a word processor. Still, it should not be that hard, of course.
Hm, am I simply humor-, sarcasm- or irony-impared, or is there some problem with the department-string for this article? I just don't get it... :(
>> Well, it probably makes sense from a PR
>> perspective, anyways."
> That I really don't get.
Oh, what I meant was that it might be (slightly) easier to sell a name such as "onlinephotolab.com" than "onlineimagelab.com" (heh, or "onlinepixmaplab.com";). I just meant that perhaps more (non-geek) people have some intuitive feel for what a photo lab has to offer than an image lab. The term "photo" is an every-day thing, probably more so than a "general 2D bitmap image". Ah, whatever...
Hm, it says very little about what the company is going to live off... My guess would be the usual (=banner ads), since it says right there in the account usage policy that the account is free... Also, I find the conceptual limitation to photos somewhat interesting, as well. An image is an image is an image, I thought. Well, it probably makes sense from a PR perspective, anyways. So, good luck, I guess! ;^)
Ah, that's what takes up all their time, so that they can't release any XFree86 4.0/DRI drivers, I'm sure! It's nice to figure these things out.
As I'm sure most other readers know, that'd be handspring, with their Visor machine.
OK, you just exceeded by Amiga-related-bullshit-o-meter. Sorry. The copper in the Amiga was pretty far from "spewing 2D graphics", really. All it did was execute incredibly simplistic almost-always sequential programs, using an instruction set with a massive three (yes, 3!) different instructions. Its execution was synchronized with the raster beam that paints the picture on your TV or monitor. There were instructions to WAIT for a certain raster line, MOVE a 16-bit value into one of the Amiga's custom registers, and also to SKIP the next instruction if a certain raster line had already been reached. Very few programmers ever used the SKIP instruction; I sure never did. The memory in which the copper's program was stored was in the address space of the general-purpose 68K CPU, so you could do all kinds of cool tricks by generating (or modifying) the copper program on the fly. Of course, everything interesting on the Amiga was done through the custom registers, so you could do all kinds of weird tricks using the copper. Things like changing the color palette, or even the screen resolution, anywhere on the screen were almost trivial to achieve, and once expressed as a copper program they continued to repeat at 50 (or 60) Hz, independently of what the main CPU was doing. It was incredibly cool!! OK, I think I'm done now. ;^)
Speaking about proprietary, the controller ports used for the joypads are going to be standard USB with respect to the electrical specs and the protocols, but not the actual physical connector. So ordinary USB peripherals won't fit. "What's the bloody point in that?", asks the cool Slashdot reader who thought the 'U' in USB was for "universal"? Well, to let Microsoft license away the right to manufacture and sell X-Box peripherals, of course... Gotta keep those $$$s flowing in some how, you know.
You're correct, according to Bill's presentation it will run a stripped-down version of the Win2k kernel. Interesting, I didn't think stripping down software was within Microsoft's capabilities. ;^)
Um, hello? The X-Box was "unveiled" at the GDC, right? At least it felt that way, when they paused NVIDIA's presentation for an hour of finicky Bill, talking about the new console. Still, that happened almost two weeks ago...
He, I visited a short lecture on the x86-64 architecture last week at the GDC, and the guy who gave it specifically noted that the lack of registers on x86 was a pain in the butt... He also hinted pretty strongly about Sledgehammer supporting SIMD-type processing on double-precision floating point numbers. Cool!
Exactly. Someone should have told Casio, though. My wristwatch thought today was March 1st. A few fiddly buttonpresses later, and it's back to a more correct world view. I wonder what it will think about tomorrow, though. ;^) (Hmmm, reading that page, I see it actually works as specified...)
500 kbps? Um, like, hello? A single ISDN channel is 64 kbps. ISDN was designed to carry telephony as one of its major aplications, and they still "settled" for 64 kbps. Since then, we've seen the rise of GSM, which transports telephone calls in something like 9.6 kbps. So, without actually beeing anything near a true telecom geek, I think I can say that 500 kbps for a telephone conversation is a bit too much... Corrections welcome, of course.
Believe? Never mind "believe" I don't understand them. Here's what they say about the IIIc:
the rechargeable lithium ion battery gives you over two weeks of constant run time, or 14 days of normal use.
Is constant run time the same as normal use? Or is a week not seven days anymore?! Color me confused!
The game has been demoed when we've had various party-like occasions here, but I don't know much about how alcohol affects people's results. Sorry. ;^)
Well, you play it like this: you and your opponent sit, facing eachother, with a big table-thingie between you. The table is about the size of a tabletop hockey game, or something. The table is matte black, and somewhere on it there's a steel ball. You score by getting the ball to move to the opponent's end of the table. To move the ball, you need to relax. Relaxing is made harder by the fact that when the game is played, there is a hysterical light & sound show going on, and curves showing each player's brain activity are projected on the wall behind the players. Of course, an audience also helps stressing the players out. ;^)
Hmmm, I guess I really should dare take the plunge and actually try Brainball next time they demo it (yes, I work at the Interactive Institute)...
- You buy a great DVD movie. The video stream is encrypted on the disk (let's ignore JJ for a while)
- You play the movie on your DVD player, which decrypts the stream and sends it to your video card
- The video card dumps the video stream into a window on your desktop
- The video card emits your desktop to the display device, in blissful ignorance that:
- You have disconnected your display, and instead connected an Evil Recording Device!
The net result in this scenario is that you "rip" the movie, in its original all-digital quality, even though it was delivered to you in encrypted form and therefore "supposedly" secure. Sure, you might need to do some trivial editing to get rid of your desktop (or just run the player full-screen), but you still have it. If you instead send the desktop out through S-Video or anything analog, the quality would degrade and you could not duplicate the movie further at original quality. I think the movie industry fears ripping original-quality content quite a lot, since that really makes it "easy" to e.g. resell the content at top quality. This is why this form of encryption really makes sense, from Their perspective.Hmmm, I assume that this encryption is implemented in the latest stage of the video board (where the RAMDAC would be on an analog board), since having an encrypted frame buffer sounds so stupid it almost scares me.
Um, I'm not sure I should be saying this, but what the heck: have you seen DIVE?. If you hit that link, you'll get their front page featuring a collage of screenshots. Look close, and you'll see standard X apps textured into a 3D world. Scroll down, click "pretty pictures", and you'll see more...
Hm, I think I will take that to mean that the cache has finally been migrated onto the same die as the CPU core itself, a la Intel's Coppermine generation P-IIIs. Great, since that should mean that the L2 cache no longer needs to run at 2/5 of the speed of the core, as was previously the case with the higher-speed Athlons... Hm, perhaps it's time to start lobbying the boss to replace my Athlon-550 from early December. Naah... ;^)
Hm, it says HP expects at least 300,000 orders as a result of this offer. It also says that the machines (HP Pavilions; 500 MHz Celeron, 4.3 GB disk, CD-ROM, 56K modem, puny 15" monitor) ship with MS software, including "word processing and spreadsheets". I wonder what kind of money a deal like that gives to MS? ;^)
ObLinuxRant: just think of the money Ford could have saved if they gave their employees boxes with Linux on them! Heh, I don't think the support costs would go down quite as much, though.
Hm, the idea about not holding your breath waiting for gentoo to turn into an Opus 5.x-clone is probably a good one, as far as survival strategies go. ;^) At this point in time, I have no plans to take development in that direction... Sorry.