Every time I read a history of a programme and find a line "completely re-wrote the code", I begin having second thougths about how really good the programme is.
minor correction: "completely re-wrote the code with new insights." Anyone who's done a half-complex software engineering project can tell you there are often subtle design decisions that will not become apparent until an attempt of a full-blown implementation. These design decisions which seemed insignificant originally, might dictate the organizational structure of the program, and such a thing may not be easily altered cheaply afterwards.
Didn't the Linux TCP/IP stack undergo several rewrites?
With all the recent lawsuits related to DVD "built-in" security features and whatnot, it just seems to me that client-side security (i.e: DVD players needing the decryption keys), and the whole business of specifying regions, are dying a horrible death. I'm not sure which idiot chose this protection scheme, as the implementation is obviously bound to security holes. It's the same as having locked audio files... it simply can't be done.
I'm not saying the idea is bad (or good)... but the design and implementation definitely have a lot of room for improvement.
I remember a long time ago when 486sx25 was king, I read that the Intel 8086 processor was named 8086 because it has that many transisters (which explains why I still remember it). 8088 is slighly newer than 8086, so I would guess it has a few more transisters.
By the way, I believe a NAND gate needs 4 fets by the way - 2 n's and 2 p's.
My cs professor told me about the origin and "evolution" of the FFT, which is quite interesting. It's true that FFT (not called FFT then of course) was found on Gauss' notebook, but Gauss believed that such an algorithm was so trivial that he didn't bother to publish it. Of course, he didn't have computers then, and so it seemed FFT had no practical use.
Fast forward to more modern time. There was a little conference about developing the software for a little weapon if I recall correctly. One of the main algorithms required either fourier transform or polynomial multiplication (the two are actually the same thing), but the only known algorithm, to those people, was the naive O(n^2) algorithm, and it's just too expensive for the task at hand. At the conference, there happened to be this statistics professor, and he said it could be done in O(nlogn) time. The professor said he taught this to students all the time, and he thought it's a very trivial idea coincidentally. The IBM people there, who were developing the software, weren't so convinced then, so they asked a programmer (argghh, sucks that I don't remember all the names) to implement the algorithm, and to their surprise, it worked flawlessly.
Now if we attach these little things to appropriate body parts, not only do we get the usual left-ctrl left-shift, we can now get left-toe, right-toe, or any other body parts (use your imagination).
the Jerry Springer show, you shouldn't be too surprised by the result. The "guests" in that show are actually not the "nuts"; the real ones are in the audience, chanting "Jerry Jerry Jerry" and watching people fight. I don't understand. They should be spending their time doing more worthwhile things, like trying to understand Circuit-SAT, reduction from 3-CNF-SAT to Independant Set Problem, or... okay, maybe not. I guess everyone has diagnosable mental illness the night before finals.
Just a little idea from someone who doesn't really know much about XFree and its driver model and associated legal issues and all. Wouldn't it be convenient if we could extract the necessary hardware interface code from the existing Windows drivers? I mean, there's gotta be some overlap between the API implemented in those drivers and the ones in X.
It's a good idea, but it only works if the machines playing the games have a narrow range of hardware. Imagine writing all the drivers for the so many soundcards and video cards in the market. It'd be all like DOS games all over again. (select your soundcard: Adlib, Sound Blaster, SoundBlaster Pro, PC Speaker). What might work is booting a game-specific Linux. That way, we can simply use the existing modules to support the hardware.
What about other hardware accelerated features such as filtering (bilinear + zooming) for my good old RIVA 128? I'm a little tired of having to watch an MPEG video in a small window, and I really do not wish to boot to windows for trivial things like that. Or is this limited to the driver in XFree86?
assuming your "tracking" means wheeling, you have to modify some setting files to make it work in some programs under linux, such as netscape, xterm. GTK toolkit has wheel support built-in, which works very well (ie: xmms, eterm, gmc, etc). More information can be found here: http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scro ll
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Linux wasn't very portable in the beginning either, and consider, this is kernel programming, it's bound to have platform specific codes.
megumi
Every time I read a history of a programme and find a line "completely re-wrote the code", I begin having second thougths about how really good the programme is.
minor correction: "completely re-wrote the code with new insights." Anyone who's done a half-complex software engineering project can tell you there are often subtle design decisions that will not become apparent until an attempt of a full-blown implementation. These design decisions which seemed insignificant originally, might dictate the organizational structure of the program, and such a thing may not be easily altered cheaply afterwards.
Didn't the Linux TCP/IP stack undergo several rewrites?
megumi
With all the recent lawsuits related to DVD "built-in" security features and whatnot, it just seems to me that client-side security (i.e: DVD players needing the decryption keys), and the whole business of specifying regions, are dying a horrible death. I'm not sure which idiot chose this protection scheme, as the implementation is obviously bound to security holes. It's the same as having locked audio files... it simply can't be done.
I'm not saying the idea is bad (or good)... but the design and implementation definitely have a lot of room for improvement.
I remember a long time ago when 486sx25 was king, I read that the Intel 8086 processor was named 8086 because it has that many transisters (which explains why I still remember it). 8088 is slighly newer than 8086, so I would guess it has a few more transisters.
By the way, I believe a NAND gate needs 4 fets by the way - 2 n's and 2 p's.
and 5500x10^6 is very mind boggling.
My cs professor told me about the origin and "evolution" of the FFT, which is quite interesting. It's true that FFT (not called FFT then of course) was found on Gauss' notebook, but Gauss believed that such an algorithm was so trivial that he didn't bother to publish it. Of course, he didn't have computers then, and so it seemed FFT had no practical use.
Fast forward to more modern time. There was a little conference about developing the software for a little weapon if I recall correctly. One of the main algorithms required either fourier transform or polynomial multiplication (the two are actually the same thing), but the only known algorithm, to those people, was the naive O(n^2) algorithm, and it's just too expensive for the task at hand. At the conference, there happened to be this statistics professor, and he said it could be done in O(nlogn) time. The professor said he taught this to students all the time, and he thought it's a very trivial idea coincidentally. The IBM people there, who were developing the software, weren't so convinced then, so they asked a programmer (argghh, sucks that I don't remember all the names) to implement the algorithm, and to their surprise, it worked flawlessly.
That was the beginning of a revolution.
Now if we attach these little things to appropriate body parts, not only do we get the usual left-ctrl left-shift, we can now get left-toe, right-toe, or any other body parts (use your imagination).
Maybe one day we can ctrl-x-left-toe.
the Jerry Springer show, you shouldn't be too surprised by the result. The "guests" in that show are actually not the "nuts"; the real ones are in the audience, chanting "Jerry Jerry Jerry" and watching people fight. I don't understand. They should be spending their time doing more worthwhile things, like trying to understand Circuit-SAT, reduction from 3-CNF-SAT to Independant Set Problem, or... okay, maybe not. I guess everyone has diagnosable mental illness the night before finals.
IIRC = if i recall correctly
Just a little idea from someone who doesn't really know much about XFree and its driver model and associated legal issues and all. Wouldn't it be convenient if we could extract the necessary hardware interface code from the existing Windows drivers? I mean, there's gotta be some overlap between the API implemented in those drivers and the ones in X.
It's a good idea, but it only works if the machines playing the games have a narrow range of hardware. Imagine writing all the drivers for the so many soundcards and video cards in the market. It'd be all like DOS games all over again. (select your soundcard: Adlib, Sound Blaster, SoundBlaster Pro, PC Speaker). What might work is booting a game-specific Linux. That way, we can simply use the existing modules to support the hardware.
What about other hardware accelerated features such as filtering (bilinear + zooming) for my good old RIVA 128? I'm a little tired of having to watch an MPEG video in a small window, and I really do not wish to boot to windows for trivial things like that. Or is this limited to the driver in XFree86?
assuming your "tracking" means wheeling, you have to modify some setting files to make it work in some programs under linux, such as netscape, xterm. GTK toolkit has wheel support built-in, which works very well (ie: xmms, eterm, gmc, etc).o ll
More information can be found here:
http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scr