Then use the same technique as jet engines. Those suck in air at the front, accelerate it and blast it out at the end. You want to break? Just reroute the blast to exit at the front instead of back.
Turn around the solar sail or open a new sail with the magic paint on the other side to emit the whatever-oxide particles towards the other direction.
So much for my naive ideas. Someone more educated in aerodynamics (after all, this is some sort of sailing) may jump in and tell me why they're a bad idea and how to do it in real life.
Slow down: Rocket thrusters (mainly for maneuvering) and athmosphere.
Coming back: Send robotic missions do deliver necessary parts and prefabricated modules, then send human heroes to put everything together. If some part fails, they at least are heroes.
Mind you, exploration never included the guarantee of a safe way back. It always took some people to take the risk of losing their lives.
Because you can now safely travel over the Pacific Ocean in 5 hours doesn't mean it always was like that.
May I tell this little story about my father. It happened way before the dotcom bubble.
He was visiting the local bank to inform himself about possible investment possibilities. The investment banker offered my father certain shares telling that these really have high potential and he can surely tell because he's working in that job for over 25 years now.
My father smiled and said: "Well, then you're either bullshitting me or you're outright incompetent. If you were that competent as you say, you wouldn't still be playing here in the 'little league' after 25 years... Couldn't it rather be that selling shares and controlling equity funds guarantees more and also more 'secure' money after all than actually investing yourself in the stuff you recommend? And if you don't trust your recommendations that far, why should I?"
Also, optimizing compilers have very nearly caught up with human assembly programmers, at least when using modern chips with complex architectures and very aggressive internal scheduling (depending on platform, of course).
True, but is covers only the code optimization stage. On modern architectures you pretty much don't want and probably also really can't write hand-optimized code (because you would spend way more time in reformulating your code so that it matches a 30+ pipeline with all its result forwarding and feedback).
However, optimizing compilers do not target algorithm optimization. And that is where you can win most. This starts with data layout in memory so that you can make best use of the cache system and ends with understanding and completely reformulating a problem, so that it runs fast and efficiently.
This latter power seems to have completely gone with more recent "programmers" and (which really saddens me) computer science students.
No, I'm no banker. But you obviously didn't visit your local clerk during the heyday of dotcom. They were telling you what great opportunities they see, how big the earnings will be.
I do some stock trading from time to time and found this situation more than one time during that very time.
Too bad you didn't cite the part about them not knowing about exponential growth. But since you feel like objecting my simplistic banker picture, probably you can do the math: you have a business plan which is stupid and has hardly any future (and yes, back then also stupid plans with hardly any future got funding), any transaction volume is generated by burning, not earning money. Why should the value of such a company go any other way but exponentially *down*? Instead, those shares went exponentially up -- and finally belly-up as a lot of them deserved.
1. raise money and generate a lot of noise
2. ???
3. profit
didn't even work in South Park. Neither did it in real life.
And since you're raising the issue of "mastering the intricacies of banking" -- in not so few cases this rather meant "creative bookkeeping". Not something *I* want to devote my professional life to.
But everyone knows that geeks know everything about business, and the PHBs are the ones who destroy business! How could all these big geek corps go out of business?
Because it weren't geek corps.
Geek corps go bankrupt because they don't advertise or advertise wrongly. But they usually don't go bankrupt for starting with an entirely stupid idea which only takes off for a while because greedy bankers stick all the money they get up the geeks' asses because the bankers somewhere heard that "the internet" (whatever that is) is the future.
In fact, geek corps usually have to beg for money and even if their idea is admittedly great (well, admitted by other tech savvy people), this doesn't mean they get the funding they need.
What I've seen on the Forbes site is mostly bullshit and YAMOSAP (yet another manifestation of something already present). Geeks and other people with brains in their heads would have told you that in 2000 and before.
Bankers, however, are a different kind. They don't believe in reason. They don't believe in knowledge -- after all, having a degree from a business school teaches you all you need to know. They also don't believe in mathematics, especially not in exponential functions. All they know is that there must be growth, growth, growth.
So here they found something where they believed it would promise growth and wealthiness beyond imagination -- and for a short period of time they were right. Because they pumped money in like mad. Until it happened what hat to happen...
Too bad, that the bubble burst also ruined the market for several other companies...
Ok, they didn't put up a clear picture, but from what I can see and what is visible in the picture, this keyboard suffers from some major flaws:
First, cursor keys belong everywhere but the middle of the keyboard. Or does anyone want to use both hands for cursor control?
Second -- as already pointed out by others -- where's the space bar? There's a reason why certain control keys are bigger than others such as Alt, Shift, Ctrl, Enter/Return and, most notably, Space.
Third, I don't think it's a good idea to place average control keys into the lowest row while having an empty row above. Can't see how this will improve ergonomy.
Oh, and finally, what the heck is it with color coding keys? The one who needs color on keys to determine their function can type on any keyboard, no matter how silly the layout is. That person will also never suffer from wrist problems because with the "search, target, and pick"-method you only use 1-2 fingers and don't get fast enough anyways.
If you want to give your wrists a rest, get a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. No big learning curve and instant relief.
Sounds familiar. I got my Canon S45 from Beach Camera in NJ in 2003; back then, the price in Germany was EUR550, price at Beach Camera including sales tax was around US$330. Since the EUR was already at US$1,20 this translated to EUR275 which was *half* the price I had to pay in Germany.
Same goes for other electronic gadgets... Or CDs, DVDs etc. Nowadays I order a lot in the States; despite higher cost of transportation (as opposed to local ordering) and even when I hit the 45 Euro limit and customs charges me 16% import tax it's usually still significantly cheaper than getting stuff here.
A 'Great Leap Forward' is happening now in microcontroller chips. These are processors that have internal flash ROM for their programs and also have most of their peripherals on the controller itself instead of external chip sets.
This is not happening *now* but has been design criteria from the first microcontroller on... On-chip FlashROM and EEPROM were already introduced at least a decade ago when those techniques became dirt cheap and replaced common PROM and EPROM technologies.
Agreed, AVR is dirt cheap and offers computing power comparable to better PCs and workstations about 10-15 years ago. And if you think that they are fast, check out Scenix (sorta PICs on steroids achieving 80 MIPS).
Interestingly, those low-end controllers feature more or less stone-age technology. 8051 is still around and so is PIC (the original GI1650 design).
But yes, I basically agree. Embedded systems are as exciting as ever, although I don't really see a quantum leap there. They just scaled similarly to desktop/workstation systems while still focusing on cost-reduction and time-to-market.
The jump from the 6502 to the 68000 (a scant four years apart), was a huge one. Ditto for many of the x86 generations. But performance has leveled off quite obviously in the last few years. The difference between a 3GHz P4 and a 3.6GHz P4 is fairly small, as both tend to be memory bound for real-world applications. And at the same time the power consumption for the 3.6GHz has increased more than the performance.
Amen, brother.
That's what I'm seeing for quite some time especially on the PC market. ZX81 to C64 was a quantum leap, C64 to Amiga was another (this time even in processing power). And then the "PC revolution" when Motorola stopped further development of the 68k line and left the field for 486 and Pentium.
Personally, I'd say the last "felt" revolution was the DEC Alpha and maybe the introduction of DSP-like instruction set enhancements like MMX, 3dnow!, Altivec and the likes.
Nowadays, "revolution" takes place on the GPU side, not so much on the CPU which suffers from the effects you're mentioning. But also on GPU level we're slowly approaching an end, i.e. will be hitting the memory barrier (not to mention heat and power consumption).
What's coming next? My guess is that the next *big* hits come from neural networking and quantum computing, but not from traditional general purpose computing... That branch has pretty much come to an evolutionary end -- also on physical level because with current clock speeds the travel speed of electrons indeed does matter (ask the Pentium-4 designers...)
Instead, you will see a constant rise of specialized systems (system-on-chips, SoCs) and partly reconfigurable systems. Going away from overdesigned general purpose machines towards application-specific, efficient designs. Reconfiguring, self-aware systems which can either be manually adapted to given tasks or will self-optimize towards a (set of) given application(s).
In other words: the PC revolution is over and you will not see a massive performance leap there. Not unless someone finds a cheap way to overcome the memory bottleneck -- and even then the performance leap would not be *that* dramatic given the current results for cache hit ratio, and branch (and other) prediction accuracy.
the 64-bit CPUs that exist today have 32-bit instructions.
That is because someone decided to mix up address and data sizes when it comes to naming "n-bit CPUs".
In the good old times calling a CPU 16-bit meant that its data size was 16-bit. Whether they offered 16-bit (TMS9900), 20-bit (8086/88), 24-bit (68000), or 32-bit address space was something completely different which is why people kept talking m-bit address and n-bit data size.
Personally, I blame it on the PC market which never cared much for existing definitions. Suddenly, an "n-bit processor" was a processor having an 2^n address space, not one which was capable of natively processing n-bit data. (As another example, wavetable synthesis described plain sample playback and not wavetable scanning as with PPG, Wavestation, Microwave etc.).
That's why you now can't tell whether "64-bit" means 64-bit address space, 64-bit data size, or 64-bit instructions...
Re:There are reasons why people do that
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I feel your pain... Take the episode where Homer is joining the Navy.
Admiral: "What do we want most?"
Homer: "Peas!"
Admiral: "Exactly. Peace! And how do we get peace?"
Homer: (trying to reach the peas with a knife) "With a knife!"
It just doesn't work in German, especially since they translated it literally.
Care for another one? (Movie, this time):
"He jammed the radar!"... Do anything, but don't translate it as "Er hat das Radar mit Marmelade verschmiert" (he dirtened the radar with jam).
Ok, there are always counter examples: the only movie where I'd prefer the dubbed version over the original is Ghostbusters. Not to mention "The Persuaders" (Die Zwei).
I think at some point everyone needs to get together and say OK. Everything from this point on will be compatible with everything from this point on. No more of this crap.
Actually, we had this like 20 years ago. Whenever you upgraded your machines (at least in home and semi-pro market) there was a sharp cut. Hardware changed, the OS was not even remotely the same, you had to get new software. Sometimes you even got converters to re-use old data.
Someone decided that this is "bad" (and which finally opened the market for DOS/Windows), which I still don't fully get. If the software/system is still usable to me, I keep on using it (I'm still running my trusty old Atari in the studio for average MIDI sequencing). If I need to get a more powerful machine and/or the software will only be supported on this new machine -- what is this any different to todays Windows/Office situation?
With each new Windows the user interface changes (think of 3.11->95; XP anyone?), new data formats which are not backward compatible are introduced (.doc), and all they ensure is that you can load your old documents and please, please use the new formats as quickly as possible to make a lot of people buy the latest release...
If your Linux application breaks because it requires some stoneage whatever library, then just install it. For instance, people are used to carry a shitload of same-but-of-different-version DLLs on Windows systems and don't seem to object it.
With wide acceptance of RPMs we also accepted the breaks-if-lib-version-of-the-day-is-not-present kind of behavior... (The next logial step would be including required libraries in the RPMs just as every Windows program will come with all required DLLs.)
I know. That's why "newline" on the ZX81 is mapped to dec(118) which "accidentally" is the Z80's NOP...
Having a decent graphics hardware would save the CPU from being responsible for feeding the shift register... But even with the ZX81 you still have to store your 24x32 char screen. Call it screen buffer or whatever, after all it's your video memory.
The same hardware for video generation was also used for tape storage which produced interesting patterns during load/store operations. But you could instantly see the quality of your recordings and eventually adjust volume etc.
Makes me wonder what an early NEC multisync would show...
Yep, you could disable the ROM by tying ROMCS# high.
Regarding software hires, the point was that the bus layout was in a way that you couldn't just add graphics memory and let this be accessed by the SCL. It must reside on the "ROM side" of the bus.
That was why I installed a piggy-back RAM on top of the ROM and fully decoded ROM space. Otherwise, Hires only worked by abusing "best-match" patterns found in ROM.
$d011 effects are used on the Commodore 64. That was why I felt *really* old. If having programmed a C64 makes you an old fart...
Bah, that's nothing against an old ZX81 with a whole 1 KB (yes, that's 1024 Bytes) of RAM (you could upgrade to 16 KB by adding a memory pack to the extension slot).
Don't forget to mention that this 1kB of memory *of course* included video memory with a worst case requirement of 768 bytes (24x32).
Thus, the ZX81 detected if it would run with stock 1kB or more and in case of 1kB using some basic video memory "compression" (i.e. a line was not necessarily occupying 32 lines but ended with the last non-space character). Never saw schematics for the 64kB unit (but you could tweak it to work as graphics memory for "software hires", i.e. 256x192 pixels for the sake of a computer slowed down by a factor of 8).
Btw., you could get up to 64kB memory expansions from Memotech, although I still don't know how the 64kB expansion actually worked, cause A15=1 (i.e. the upper 32kB) were actually indicating accesses to the Sinclair Logic Chip (ZX80 users: the video hardware).
Now please don't ask me why I still remember all this... Last week one of my students caught me discussing $d011 effects with a colleague of similar age -- and the student said: "Sheesh, you must feel really old, don't you."
I've seen copies of movies taken by some guy with a camcorder... the audio quality is always lousy [...]
Interestingly, these are -- to my limited experience -- a minority by far. Most copies were of astonishing, yet even DVD, quality which makes me wonder where they came from. The really good quality must come right from the source of distribution, not from the minimum wage guy at the theater.
Speaking of audio watermarking: until proven wrong, I do not believe in *robust inaudible* or inaudible but undetectable watermarking. If it's audible, it might be robust but will certainly spoil the fun or be easy detectable (crackles or similar).
If it's inaudible, I frankly doubt that it will survive a series of filtering and recoding -- or that it's not detectable.
After all, bootlegging cinema movies is a huge market. And they surely pay some people who will know about those techniques and be able to at least obfuscate them to a level where the source can't be tracked back.
All they achieve is getting rid of the average cam guy and the minimum wage bootlegger working at the theater. But those are not the ones who create high-quality bootlegs and also not the ones who have a severe impact on the box office numbers.
However, quite a number of pages became literally unreadable by squeezing in as much advertising as possible. Since those became the majority, I'm not adding extra rules for the few "nice" sites which keep it quiet -- but just redirect all links to known ad servers.
What's even more annoying than the sheer amount of advertising are animated ads. The eye gets constantly distracted by animated GIFs or (yet worse) Flash animations, well, flashing and blinking around -- or they just annoy me with browser warnings that I don't have the appropriate plugin for this very Flash or Shockwave stuff.
Besides, I frankly doubt the effectiveness of web ads (besides paying some bills for high traffic sites)... Maybe it's just me, but I never saw a web ad, even when thematically appropriate and not just some vanilla "click4cash" ad, where I said: Wow, hey, now that's something I need to get.
PS - why the _HELL_ is Slashdot having an applet in the ads? It freezes up my browser in Windows for a while. It's getting to be a pain. At the very least, provide some way of turning off Applet ads.
What, there are ads on/.? Or on any other website?
One word for you: squid... Never seen ads again since the installation of squid together with a nice redirector script effectively replacing all picture and applet ads with something less distractive.
your bottled water your talking about is more expensive then gasoline because of the extra energy used to filter it (ie remove the polutants) and bottle it and move it to market. This doesn't even count the refridgeration of it. most stored seel it to you cold.
Actually, I'm not getting your point:
(1) If the water comes from a mineral water spring, there is no filtering (besides mechanical for removing little pebbles) involved. You just pump it out and bottle it.
(2) As for gas, guess what, it doesn't just come right out of the ground. It needs to be refined from crude oil. It doesn't grow at your local gas station but must be moved to the market, to take up your term. And instead of being refridgerated, it's getting electrically pumped out of big tanks into your car.
Now why again is bottled water more expensive than gas? (And, frankly, I don't care if the tap water is perfectly safe or not -- I don't like my tea taste of chlorine. Sure, I can fix that with a water filter, at extra costs, of course.)
Well I guess that about says it. Either you're against polution or against jobs. Take your pick.
Bullshit.
This so reminds me of the fuzz about the introduction of catalytic converters in Germany. "It will be way more expensive. It will cost jobs!", was the car industry's mantra.
And what happened? Instead of killing jobs, jobs were actually created. Someone had to design and build those converters.
Same goes with all other eco stuff, e.g. recycling instead of just dumping. Created plenty of new jobs instead of killing others.
Of course, those jobs are (at first) not within the big industries. Yes, those need to spend money to modify their "cost/win optimized" fabrication processes. Unfortunately, those are also the ones with deep pockets to buy politicians and laws.
If you're living in the US think about the following: why is pure drinking water more expensive than gasoline? And no, I'm not talking about that chlorified crap which runs out of your kitchen faucet and needs to be filtered to be useful for anything but cleaning.
Slashdot Mirror
Then use the same technique as jet engines. Those suck in air at the front, accelerate it and blast it out at the end. You want to break? Just reroute the blast to exit at the front instead of back.
Turn around the solar sail or open a new sail with the magic paint on the other side to emit the whatever-oxide particles towards the other direction.
So much for my naive ideas. Someone more educated in aerodynamics (after all, this is some sort of sailing) may jump in and tell me why they're a bad idea and how to do it in real life.
Coming back: Send robotic missions do deliver necessary parts and prefabricated modules, then send human heroes to put everything together. If some part fails, they at least are heroes.
Mind you, exploration never included the guarantee of a safe way back. It always took some people to take the risk of losing their lives.
Because you can now safely travel over the Pacific Ocean in 5 hours doesn't mean it always was like that.
He was visiting the local bank to inform himself about possible investment possibilities. The investment banker offered my father certain shares telling that these really have high potential and he can surely tell because he's working in that job for over 25 years now.
My father smiled and said: "Well, then you're either bullshitting me or you're outright incompetent. If you were that competent as you say, you wouldn't still be playing here in the 'little league' after 25 years... Couldn't it rather be that selling shares and controlling equity funds guarantees more and also more 'secure' money after all than actually investing yourself in the stuff you recommend? And if you don't trust your recommendations that far, why should I?"
However, optimizing compilers do not target algorithm optimization. And that is where you can win most. This starts with data layout in memory so that you can make best use of the cache system and ends with understanding and completely reformulating a problem, so that it runs fast and efficiently.
This latter power seems to have completely gone with more recent "programmers" and (which really saddens me) computer science students.
I do some stock trading from time to time and found this situation more than one time during that very time.
Too bad you didn't cite the part about them not knowing about exponential growth. But since you feel like objecting my simplistic banker picture, probably you can do the math: you have a business plan which is stupid and has hardly any future (and yes, back then also stupid plans with hardly any future got funding), any transaction volume is generated by burning, not earning money. Why should the value of such a company go any other way but exponentially *down*? Instead, those shares went exponentially up -- and finally belly-up as a lot of them deserved.
1. raise money and generate a lot of noise
2. ???
3. profit
didn't even work in South Park. Neither did it in real life.
And since you're raising the issue of "mastering the intricacies of banking" -- in not so few cases this rather meant "creative bookkeeping". Not something *I* want to devote my professional life to.
Geek corps go bankrupt because they don't advertise or advertise wrongly. But they usually don't go bankrupt for starting with an entirely stupid idea which only takes off for a while because greedy bankers stick all the money they get up the geeks' asses because the bankers somewhere heard that "the internet" (whatever that is) is the future.
In fact, geek corps usually have to beg for money and even if their idea is admittedly great (well, admitted by other tech savvy people), this doesn't mean they get the funding they need.
What I've seen on the Forbes site is mostly bullshit and YAMOSAP (yet another manifestation of something already present). Geeks and other people with brains in their heads would have told you that in 2000 and before.
Bankers, however, are a different kind. They don't believe in reason. They don't believe in knowledge -- after all, having a degree from a business school teaches you all you need to know. They also don't believe in mathematics, especially not in exponential functions. All they know is that there must be growth, growth, growth.
So here they found something where they believed it would promise growth and wealthiness beyond imagination -- and for a short period of time they were right. Because they pumped money in like mad. Until it happened what hat to happen...
Too bad, that the bubble burst also ruined the market for several other companies...
First, cursor keys belong everywhere but the middle of the keyboard. Or does anyone want to use both hands for cursor control?
Second -- as already pointed out by others -- where's the space bar? There's a reason why certain control keys are bigger than others such as Alt, Shift, Ctrl, Enter/Return and, most notably, Space.
Third, I don't think it's a good idea to place average control keys into the lowest row while having an empty row above. Can't see how this will improve ergonomy.
Oh, and finally, what the heck is it with color coding keys? The one who needs color on keys to determine their function can type on any keyboard, no matter how silly the layout is. That person will also never suffer from wrist problems because with the "search, target, and pick"-method you only use 1-2 fingers and don't get fast enough anyways.
If you want to give your wrists a rest, get a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. No big learning curve and instant relief.
Same goes for other electronic gadgets... Or CDs, DVDs etc. Nowadays I order a lot in the States; despite higher cost of transportation (as opposed to local ordering) and even when I hit the 45 Euro limit and customs charges me 16% import tax it's usually still significantly cheaper than getting stuff here.
Something's significantly wrong here.
Looking closer at the second pic I can't help but realize that he's about to show us his middle finger...
Agreed, AVR is dirt cheap and offers computing power comparable to better PCs and workstations about 10-15 years ago. And if you think that they are fast, check out Scenix (sorta PICs on steroids achieving 80 MIPS).
Interestingly, those low-end controllers feature more or less stone-age technology. 8051 is still around and so is PIC (the original GI1650 design).
But yes, I basically agree. Embedded systems are as exciting as ever, although I don't really see a quantum leap there. They just scaled similarly to desktop/workstation systems while still focusing on cost-reduction and time-to-market.
That's what I'm seeing for quite some time especially on the PC market. ZX81 to C64 was a quantum leap, C64 to Amiga was another (this time even in processing power). And then the "PC revolution" when Motorola stopped further development of the 68k line and left the field for 486 and Pentium.
Personally, I'd say the last "felt" revolution was the DEC Alpha and maybe the introduction of DSP-like instruction set enhancements like MMX, 3dnow!, Altivec and the likes.
Nowadays, "revolution" takes place on the GPU side, not so much on the CPU which suffers from the effects you're mentioning. But also on GPU level we're slowly approaching an end, i.e. will be hitting the memory barrier (not to mention heat and power consumption).
What's coming next? My guess is that the next *big* hits come from neural networking and quantum computing, but not from traditional general purpose computing... That branch has pretty much come to an evolutionary end -- also on physical level because with current clock speeds the travel speed of electrons indeed does matter (ask the Pentium-4 designers...)
Instead, you will see a constant rise of specialized systems (system-on-chips, SoCs) and partly reconfigurable systems. Going away from overdesigned general purpose machines towards application-specific, efficient designs. Reconfiguring, self-aware systems which can either be manually adapted to given tasks or will self-optimize towards a (set of) given application(s).
In other words: the PC revolution is over and you will not see a massive performance leap there. Not unless someone finds a cheap way to overcome the memory bottleneck -- and even then the performance leap would not be *that* dramatic given the current results for cache hit ratio, and branch (and other) prediction accuracy.
Kommt mir bekannt vor. Aus dem Grund submitte ich nichts mehr...
In the good old times calling a CPU 16-bit meant that its data size was 16-bit. Whether they offered 16-bit (TMS9900), 20-bit (8086/88), 24-bit (68000), or 32-bit address space was something completely different which is why people kept talking m-bit address and n-bit data size.
Personally, I blame it on the PC market which never cared much for existing definitions. Suddenly, an "n-bit processor" was a processor having an 2^n address space, not one which was capable of natively processing n-bit data. (As another example, wavetable synthesis described plain sample playback and not wavetable scanning as with PPG, Wavestation, Microwave etc.).
That's why you now can't tell whether "64-bit" means 64-bit address space, 64-bit data size, or 64-bit instructions...
Admiral: "What do we want most?" Homer: "Peas!" Admiral: "Exactly. Peace! And how do we get peace?" Homer: (trying to reach the peas with a knife) "With a knife!"
It just doesn't work in German, especially since they translated it literally.
Care for another one? (Movie, this time):
"He jammed the radar!" ... Do anything, but don't translate it as "Er hat das Radar mit Marmelade verschmiert" (he dirtened the radar with jam).
Ok, there are always counter examples: the only movie where I'd prefer the dubbed version over the original is Ghostbusters. Not to mention "The Persuaders" (Die Zwei).
Someone decided that this is "bad" (and which finally opened the market for DOS/Windows), which I still don't fully get. If the software/system is still usable to me, I keep on using it (I'm still running my trusty old Atari in the studio for average MIDI sequencing). If I need to get a more powerful machine and/or the software will only be supported on this new machine -- what is this any different to todays Windows/Office situation?
With each new Windows the user interface changes (think of 3.11->95; XP anyone?), new data formats which are not backward compatible are introduced (.doc), and all they ensure is that you can load your old documents and please, please use the new formats as quickly as possible to make a lot of people buy the latest release...
If your Linux application breaks because it requires some stoneage whatever library, then just install it. For instance, people are used to carry a shitload of same-but-of-different-version DLLs on Windows systems and don't seem to object it.
With wide acceptance of RPMs we also accepted the breaks-if-lib-version-of-the-day-is-not-present kind of behavior... (The next logial step would be including required libraries in the RPMs just as every Windows program will come with all required DLLs.)
Having a decent graphics hardware would save the CPU from being responsible for feeding the shift register... But even with the ZX81 you still have to store your 24x32 char screen. Call it screen buffer or whatever, after all it's your video memory.
The same hardware for video generation was also used for tape storage which produced interesting patterns during load/store operations. But you could instantly see the quality of your recordings and eventually adjust volume etc.
Makes me wonder what an early NEC multisync would show...
Regarding software hires, the point was that the bus layout was in a way that you couldn't just add graphics memory and let this be accessed by the SCL. It must reside on the "ROM side" of the bus.
That was why I installed a piggy-back RAM on top of the ROM and fully decoded ROM space. Otherwise, Hires only worked by abusing "best-match" patterns found in ROM.
$d011 effects are used on the Commodore 64. That was why I felt *really* old. If having programmed a C64 makes you an old fart...
Thus, the ZX81 detected if it would run with stock 1kB or more and in case of 1kB using some basic video memory "compression" (i.e. a line was not necessarily occupying 32 lines but ended with the last non-space character). Never saw schematics for the 64kB unit (but you could tweak it to work as graphics memory for "software hires", i.e. 256x192 pixels for the sake of a computer slowed down by a factor of 8).
Btw., you could get up to 64kB memory expansions from Memotech, although I still don't know how the 64kB expansion actually worked, cause A15=1 (i.e. the upper 32kB) were actually indicating accesses to the Sinclair Logic Chip (ZX80 users: the video hardware).
Now please don't ask me why I still remember all this... Last week one of my students caught me discussing $d011 effects with a colleague of similar age -- and the student said: "Sheesh, you must feel really old, don't you."
Now I do.
Speaking of audio watermarking: until proven wrong, I do not believe in *robust inaudible* or inaudible but undetectable watermarking. If it's audible, it might be robust but will certainly spoil the fun or be easy detectable (crackles or similar).
If it's inaudible, I frankly doubt that it will survive a series of filtering and recoding -- or that it's not detectable.
After all, bootlegging cinema movies is a huge market. And they surely pay some people who will know about those techniques and be able to at least obfuscate them to a level where the source can't be tracked back.
All they achieve is getting rid of the average cam guy and the minimum wage bootlegger working at the theater. But those are not the ones who create high-quality bootlegs and also not the ones who have a severe impact on the box office numbers.
However, quite a number of pages became literally unreadable by squeezing in as much advertising as possible. Since those became the majority, I'm not adding extra rules for the few "nice" sites which keep it quiet -- but just redirect all links to known ad servers.
What's even more annoying than the sheer amount of advertising are animated ads. The eye gets constantly distracted by animated GIFs or (yet worse) Flash animations, well, flashing and blinking around -- or they just annoy me with browser warnings that I don't have the appropriate plugin for this very Flash or Shockwave stuff.
Besides, I frankly doubt the effectiveness of web ads (besides paying some bills for high traffic sites)... Maybe it's just me, but I never saw a web ad, even when thematically appropriate and not just some vanilla "click4cash" ad, where I said: Wow, hey, now that's something I need to get.
One word for you: squid... Never seen ads again since the installation of squid together with a nice redirector script effectively replacing all picture and applet ads with something less distractive.
(2) As for gas, guess what, it doesn't just come right out of the ground. It needs to be refined from crude oil. It doesn't grow at your local gas station but must be moved to the market, to take up your term. And instead of being refridgerated, it's getting electrically pumped out of big tanks into your car.
Now why again is bottled water more expensive than gas? (And, frankly, I don't care if the tap water is perfectly safe or not -- I don't like my tea taste of chlorine. Sure, I can fix that with a water filter, at extra costs, of course.)
This so reminds me of the fuzz about the introduction of catalytic converters in Germany. "It will be way more expensive. It will cost jobs!", was the car industry's mantra.
And what happened? Instead of killing jobs, jobs were actually created. Someone had to design and build those converters.
Same goes with all other eco stuff, e.g. recycling instead of just dumping. Created plenty of new jobs instead of killing others.
Of course, those jobs are (at first) not within the big industries. Yes, those need to spend money to modify their "cost/win optimized" fabrication processes. Unfortunately, those are also the ones with deep pockets to buy politicians and laws.
If you're living in the US think about the following: why is pure drinking water more expensive than gasoline? And no, I'm not talking about that chlorified crap which runs out of your kitchen faucet and needs to be filtered to be useful for anything but cleaning.
...not unless you keep the drinkers from burping.