So with the hardware [Dvorak] keyboards, you'd keep the pc set up to use qwerty, and it gets it right in the Bios etc? Exactly. And it gets it right on devices that don't have layout preferences (PlayStation3??) or for which one doesn't have permission to change the layout preference.
I believe Fentek once did sell (non-USB) hardware Dvorak keyboards, but if you look at their current line-up you'll see that they are all "Software Activated." This means they are plain qwerty keyboards as far as the firmware is involved, just that the keycaps are arranged for the dvorak layout. It's the same effect you get by just rearranging the keycaps of a standard keyboard, which I have done a few times.
The PS2, ADB, and AT Dvorak keyboards I own are different. For example, the code sent from the keyboard when the user depresses the key to the right of the 'A' key corresponds to 'O' (not 'S'). The Dvorak mapping is applied in hardware before the host's keyboard driver plays any role.
btw, my ADB Dvorak keyboards (which were sold by the KeyTime company) are hardware switchable for dvorak/qwerty/left-handed-dvorak/right-handed-dvor ak. The keycaps are marked Dvorak on top, but qwerty on the front-facing side.
There are a few USB keyboards on the market that are "hardware Dvorak switchable," which means they have qwerty keycaps but can be switched to send the Dvorak codes. But AFAIK they all have unusual "ergonomic" key positions, such as the two-bowls Kinesis and the aligned-columns TypeMatrix. I may look into these some day, but in the meantime I'm still looking for a "regular" hardware Dvorak USB keyboard.
"On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard."
I own several with PS2, ADB, and even AT (which has been all but useless for two decades now) interfaces.
However, I have never seen a _USB_ Dvorak keyboard. If they existed, I would probably pick one up. In the meantime I opt for software Dvorak layouts on qwerty keyboards.
btw, if I could do it over again I would probably learn left-handed Dvorak instead of "reguar" Dvorak. That would leave my right hand free to remain on the mouse.
The RISKS stories aside, I think the choice to discuss
rounding was an excellent pick.
Everyone learns that floating point is imprecise in cs101,
but how many people realize that
int n = round( (float)int1 / int2 );
will sometimes be off by an entire unit unless they are
very very careful?
In my code I haven't yet needed to care which way the
rounding goes for values with fractional parts very close
to.5, but not everyone has that luxury.
and if you hire good people, then you don't need to worry about what they commit. An occasional check should be enough to make sure you haven't accidentally hired a loser.
This is still a commonly held belief, but it's just
not true.
Allow me to quote from a 2004 OOPSLA paper:
"we have found that even well tested code written by experts contains a surprising number of obvious bugs." (Link to entire paper is here.)
Even very good programmers make mistakes sometimes, and some of them are simple enough to be found by tools like FindBugs. Some of these have managed to slip through multiple human code reviews.
Simple, they should just lease the book/magazine, not sell it.
If they don't transfer ownership they can require whatever they want.
This does sometimes happen even now. For example, there are some orchestral works for which it is impossible to buy a score and parts, so they instead must be leased.
At least eventually (though some publishers trying to change this) they will eventually fall into the public domain and someone can then rent them and make copies with impunity. (Or can they? I suppose the owner could insist on some no-copying language in the contract.)
I can't tell from the website. Is the film in English or German?
That's exactly what I want to know. I couldn't find a hint on the uni-heidelberg pages.
I was also hoping to find more details on the contract with Pratchett.
Someone answer this, then the rest of you mod it up.:)
I think this suit is about a breach of contract. The chip makers have a contract with the MPAA(or some related org) that they will only sell to approved DVD player manufacturers. The chip maker signed the contract and then breach.
But did they really breach the contract?
I'm just making this up, but presumably Sigma and MediaTek licensed code years ago from the MPAA to allow them to produce chips that can decode DVDs. Later they realize they can create equivalent chips without using any MPAA code, so they do.
Are they restricted to whom they can sell these new unencumbered chips? I dunno. I suppose it depends on the terms of their contract with the MPAA.
I believe you are mistaken. It is true that "Intel already had their own 64-bit chip designed beforehand," and in fact it was actually available as a product. These 64-bit Itanium chips have a completely different instruction set--they are not x86 chips. Intel's plan was to move the world from x86 to Itanium, so it is incorrect to say "Intel would have eventually reseased the same chip" without AMD breaching down its neck. The success of AMD64 forced Intel's hand.
As far as copy/clone/reverse-engineer goes, I think we can all agree that it is unlikely that Intel copied AMD's silicon implementation. They simply implemented (most of?) the instruction set their own way. They didn't even have to reverse-engineer it because AMD published the specs.
When I ask about differences between EM64T and AMD64, I'm asking if they always do the same thing with the same opcodes.
You don't trust AMD enough to buy their CPU but you want to trust Intel to make a cloned version of *their* architechture?
If you take a look it my original post, I think I made it clear that I do trust AMD. Well, at least as far as I trust the x86 architecture, which I'm not wild about.
But business users seem to be wild about the x86s and also wary of AMD, hence my worries. (And no, I don't trust Intel to make a decent clone, which is why I was asking about differences.)
So now people like me who don't think it makes sense to buy a x86 that can't handle 64 bits, and who (unlike me) don't have confidence in AMD, can start buying x86 chips again.
Tell me, is EM64T truly identical to AMD64 or are there small differences? I'm curious.
I think you mean continuations. Common Lisp has lexical closures, just as Scheme does.
I did not mean continuations, though they are cool.
I must admit that my understanding of how Lisp and Scheme differ is out of date, but it used to be that Lisp's scoping system did not allow first-class functions to truly be closures.
Here's a reference
that explains this and strongly hints that this aspect of Lisp has changed in the 18 years in which I haven't been paying attention. I remember Lisp working the way that page describes Emacs Lisp working.
I also think it is ugly that Lisp requires keywords function and apply to be used, but that's probably because I'm a Scheme bigot. But doesn't it make functions slightly less than first-class.
LISP, Python and Perl do have language _features_ that make it much more powerful to good programmers. Closures, anonymous functions. LISP has macros. Imagine java or C/etc without recursion. That's what Java is. A language without closures, macros and lambda. It's missing stuff!
Since when does Lisp have closures? That's why I use Scheme instead.
I do like Java, but we'll see if that's still true after they've added the kitchen sink to it.
This thread is a few days old now, so I don't know why I bother, but here goes:
Gosling's personal attacks on RMS are a little over the top.
I don't see how his comments on RMS could be considered personal attacks. (Saying "viral infection clause" is indeed inflammatory , but refers to the licence, not to RMS personally.)
He starts off by accusing RMS of redefining "Free"
But RMS did redefine the word "free." That's why we keep having to clarify with phrases such as "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer." When someone says "free as in freedom" s/he is explicitly referring to RMS's definition of "free," even though "free as in freedom" would otherwise be ambiguous.
and then proceeds to deconstruct the entire concept of Software Freedom based on the hinge that RMS is essentially a kook.
Well RMS is essentially a kook, isn't he? But kooks can change the world.
I think the biggest thing about gigabit is that PCI isn't really fast enough to support it.
<snip/> I think about the best you're going to get off most PCs, even very, very fast ones, is about 300 megabits sustained.
But 300 Mb/s would be a huge improvement over 100baseT.
Lots of people here are calculating what it would take to use all of Gigabit's bandwidth, which IMHO misses the point.
Sure, try reading a dictionary, but be careful which dictionary you use.
Everyone agrees that "million" is 10^6.
In the U.S. "billion" is 10^9. (10^12 is called "trillion".)
In the U.K. "billion" is 10^12. (10^9 is called "thousand million".)
I dunno about the rest of the world.
However, even though the Register is apparently a U.K. entity, I don't think anyone believes that M$ is going to pay Sun 2*10^12 dollars. $2*10^9 is already a huge amount of money. $2*10^12 is an ungodly amount of money.
Two billion is a lot of cash but, as they say, the devil is in the details. The Register has mory details than usual for a story like this, but things are still sketchy. For example:
Future Collaboration for Java and.NET Sun and Microsoft have agreed that they will work together to improve technical collaboration between their Java and.NET technologies.
What exactly does this mean? Could part of the $2*10^9 be a bribe to weaken Java's competitive position vs..NET?
The University of Geneva and the company id Quantique team to launch the first web site offering the possibility to download random numbers from quantum origin.
but HOTBITS has been generating random numbers from quantum origin for years.
I bought an HDTV tuner ($400) and attached it to a standard 19" computer monitor (under $100), so I had a passable OTA HDTV system for under $500. The image size was pretty much the same as the that of the 20" NTSC TV it replaced.
The two downsides were:
It was still 4:3, not widescreen. (Though I could letterbox it if I wanted to.)
I could no longer receive analog NTSC signals. This was annoying because my local PBS station does not broadcast their regular schedule on DTV, instead broadcasting 'special' digital programming. This means that TV Guide lists an interesting show on PBS, I have to find an anolog set to watch it.
So I eventually replaced the 19" computer monitor with a widescreen HDTV monitor with integrated NTSC tuner that had been a demo model. Still, the whole thing was under $1000.
Samsung HDTV tuners like mine seem to be selling for under $150 on ebay these days, so perhaps the subject of this post should be "under $250" is possible. Or heck, my cable company says I can rent an HD cable box for an additional $4 month (though I don't know if it has a VGA output), but I'm happy with over-tho-air.
The next film will have to be Ep III, but the starting credits for the one after that should say Ep XVI.
That way there will be throngs of hysterical fans who won't be satisfied until they've taken out their wallets and thrown money at each of the nine intervening films: VII through XV.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Fentek once did sell (non-USB) hardware Dvorak keyboards, but if you look at their current line-up you'll see that they are all "Software Activated." This means they are plain qwerty keyboards as far as the firmware is involved, just that the keycaps are arranged for the dvorak layout. It's the same effect you get by just rearranging the keycaps of a standard keyboard, which I have done a few times.
r ak. The keycaps are marked Dvorak on top, but qwerty on the front-facing side.
The PS2, ADB, and AT Dvorak keyboards I own are different. For example, the code sent from the keyboard when the user depresses the key to the right of the 'A' key corresponds to 'O' (not 'S'). The Dvorak mapping is applied in hardware before the host's keyboard driver plays any role.
btw, my ADB Dvorak keyboards (which were sold by the KeyTime company) are hardware switchable for dvorak/qwerty/left-handed-dvorak/right-handed-dvo
There are a few USB keyboards on the market that are "hardware Dvorak switchable," which means they have qwerty keycaps but can be switched to send the Dvorak codes. But AFAIK they all have unusual "ergonomic" key positions, such as the two-bowls Kinesis and the aligned-columns TypeMatrix. I may look into these some day, but in the meantime I'm still looking for a "regular" hardware Dvorak USB keyboard.
"On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard."
I own several with PS2, ADB, and even AT (which has been all but useless for two decades now) interfaces.
However, I have never seen a _USB_ Dvorak keyboard. If they existed, I would probably pick one up. In the meantime I opt for software Dvorak layouts on qwerty keyboards.
btw, if I could do it over again I would probably learn left-handed Dvorak instead of "reguar" Dvorak. That would leave my right hand free to remain on the mouse.
The author could really pick his examples better
The RISKS stories aside, I think the choice to discuss rounding was an excellent pick.
Everyone learns that floating point is imprecise in cs101, but how many people realize that
will sometimes be off by an entire unit unless they are very very careful?
In my code I haven't yet needed to care which way the rounding goes for values with fractional parts very close to .5, but not everyone has that luxury.
and if you hire good people, then you don't need to worry about what they commit. An occasional check should be enough to make sure you haven't accidentally hired a loser.
This is still a commonly held belief, but it's just not true.
Allow me to quote from a 2004 OOPSLA paper: "we have found that even well tested code written by experts contains a surprising number of obvious bugs." (Link to entire paper is here.)
Even very good programmers make mistakes sometimes, and some of them are simple enough to be found by tools like FindBugs. Some of these have managed to slip through multiple human code reviews.
[Disclaimer: I work for the Findbugs Project.]
Quibbling over formatting is silly. White space formatting doesn't affect functionality of the code at all.
fyi, FindBugs doesn't look at the source code at all, only at the compiled bytecode.
I thought of Hamilton's formula for quaternions
before I thought of the ideal gas laws.
i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = -1
As for the quadratic equation, it may be useful
but I find it ugly. But if you want really ugly,
take a look at the cubic and quartic equations.
If they don't transfer ownership they can require whatever they want.
This does sometimes happen even now. For example, there are some orchestral works for which it is impossible to buy a score and parts, so they instead must be leased.
At least eventually (though some publishers trying to change this) they will eventually fall into the public domain and someone can then rent them and make copies with impunity. (Or can they? I suppose the owner could insist on some no-copying language in the contract.)
I can't tell from the website. Is the film in English or German?
That's exactly what I want to know. I couldn't find a hint on the uni-heidelberg pages.
I was also hoping to find more details on the contract with Pratchett.
Someone answer this, then the rest of you mod it up. :)
But did they really breach the contract?
I'm just making this up, but presumably Sigma and MediaTek licensed code years ago from the MPAA to allow them to produce chips that can decode DVDs. Later they realize they can create equivalent chips without using any MPAA code, so they do.
Are they restricted to whom they can sell these new unencumbered chips? I dunno. I suppose it depends on the terms of their contract with the MPAA.
I found it informative. I didn't know such beasts existed. Now I (think I) want one.
As far as copy/clone/reverse-engineer goes, I think we can all agree that it is unlikely that Intel copied AMD's silicon implementation. They simply implemented (most of?) the instruction set their own way. They didn't even have to reverse-engineer it because AMD published the specs.
When I ask about differences between EM64T and AMD64, I'm asking if they always do the same thing with the same opcodes.
If you take a look it my original post, I think I made it clear that I do trust AMD. Well, at least as far as I trust the x86 architecture, which I'm not wild about.
But business users seem to be wild about the x86s and also wary of AMD, hence my worries. (And no, I don't trust Intel to make a decent clone, which is why I was asking about differences.)
Did someone just say that the DMA implementations are different enough that device drivers will not be compatible? Tell me more about that.
Tell me, is EM64T truly identical to AMD64 or are there small differences? I'm curious.
I did not mean continuations, though they are cool.
I must admit that my understanding of how Lisp and Scheme differ is out of date, but it used to be that Lisp's scoping system did not allow first-class functions to truly be closures.
Here's a reference that explains this and strongly hints that this aspect of Lisp has changed in the 18 years in which I haven't been paying attention. I remember Lisp working the way that page describes Emacs Lisp working.
I also think it is ugly that Lisp requires keywords function and apply to be used, but that's probably because I'm a Scheme bigot. But doesn't it make functions slightly less than first-class.
Since when does Lisp have closures? That's why I use Scheme instead.
I do like Java, but we'll see if that's still true after they've added the kitchen sink to it.
Gosling's personal attacks on RMS are a little over the top.
I don't see how his comments on RMS could be considered personal attacks. (Saying "viral infection clause" is indeed inflammatory , but refers to the licence, not to RMS personally.)He starts off by accusing RMS of redefining "Free"
But RMS did redefine the word "free." That's why we keep having to clarify with phrases such as "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer." When someone says "free as in freedom" s/he is explicitly referring to RMS's definition of "free," even though "free as in freedom" would otherwise be ambiguous.and then proceeds to deconstruct the entire concept of Software Freedom based on the hinge that RMS is essentially a kook.
Well RMS is essentially a kook, isn't he? But kooks can change the world.I think the biggest thing about gigabit is that PCI isn't really fast enough to support it. <snip/> I think about the best you're going to get off most PCs, even very, very fast ones, is about 300 megabits sustained.
But 300 Mb/s would be a huge improvement over 100baseT.
Lots of people here are calculating what it would take to use all of Gigabit's bandwidth, which IMHO misses the point.
- In the U.S. "billion" is 10^9. (10^12 is called "trillion".)
- In the U.K. "billion" is 10^12. (10^9 is called "thousand million".)
- I dunno about the rest of the world.
However, even though the Register is apparently a U.K. entity, I don't think anyone believes that M$ is going to pay Sun 2*10^12 dollars. $2*10^9 is already a huge amount of money. $2*10^12 is an ungodly amount of money.Two billion is a lot of cash but, as they say, the devil is in the details. The Register has mory details than usual for a story like this, but things are still sketchy. For example:
Future Collaboration for Java and .NET Sun and Microsoft have agreed that they will work together to improve technical collaboration between their Java and .NET technologies.
What exactly does this mean? Could part of the $2*10^9 be a bribe to weaken Java's competitive position vs. .NET?
The University of Geneva and the company id Quantique team to launch the first web site offering the possibility to download random numbers from quantum origin.
but HOTBITS has been generating random numbers from quantum origin for years.I bought an HDTV tuner ($400) and attached it to a standard 19" computer monitor (under $100), so I had a passable OTA HDTV system for under $500. The image size was pretty much the same as the that of the 20" NTSC TV it replaced.
The two downsides were:So I eventually replaced the 19" computer monitor with a widescreen HDTV monitor with integrated NTSC tuner that had been a demo model. Still, the whole thing was under $1000.
Samsung HDTV tuners like mine seem to be selling for under $150 on ebay these days, so perhaps the subject of this post should be "under $250" is possible. Or heck, my cable company says I can rent an HD cable box for an additional $4 month (though I don't know if it has a VGA output), but I'm happy with over-tho-air.
If I remember correctly (and my memory is as old as the explosions themselves) only the sedan was susceptible to such detonation, not the hatchbacks.
The Forbes article, of course, pictures a hatchback.
The next film will have to be Ep III, but the starting credits for the one after that should say Ep XVI. That way there will be throngs of hysterical fans who won't be satisfied until they've taken out their wallets and thrown money at each of the nine intervening films: VII through XV.