My understanding (I've never actually looked too hard at this) was that with videos/movies, you use the Xv extension. That allows the app to decode into a shared memory segment (like the old Xshm extension), and leave the graphics card to do the scaling and YUV=>RGB colour space conversion. You certainly do not send every pixel over the X socket. Otherwise my 1600x1200 display would grind to a halt when playing a movie fullscreen. In reality the player only uses a few percent of my AthlonXP/2400 to decode a DVD or XViD video.
Even better, SPF doesn't necessarily compete with DomainKeys.
SPF enumerates which servers are allowed to send email for a certain domain.
DomainKeys authenticates individual email messages as having come from a certain domain.
Together they could be quite effective against spam. In particular, Yahoo also talks about building a reputation system on top of DomainKeys. The idea is that a spammer would quickly find the 'reputation' of their domain going down and soon no email server would accept their email.
The funny thing is that the WWW is actually a pretty good low-bandwidth widget system. However, it has two major shortcomings: the web server cannot push data to the client, and HTTP requests are heavy (including User-Agent headers and such). And, of course, XML is not very efficient for machines.
The problem I see with Gosling's suggestions is that it relies on a fast, low-latency network. While this is certainly true of modern local networks, it certainly isn't of the wider internet. People have already long been using things like X11 (with DXPC or LBX), or Citrix/WTS over the public internet to remote-control machines and to tele-commute. I can only see this usage increasing in the future.
While the internet may be becoming faster for bulk transfers, latency is still a problem. And latency is very important for interactivity, especially in Gosling's client-heavy model. A more server-heavy model like we're discussing would allow good interactivity over high-latency networks. The server-side event handler scripts would allow all the nitty-gritty little details to be handled immediately in the local window server. The interface would only slow down when it needs to communicate with the client. Obviously that would depend a lot on how the application and/or widget set is structured, but at least the capability is there to make things more effecient.
I must say I still prefer the idea of a "heavy" windowing system/manager, mainly for the benefits it gives to network transparency. For example, imagine several clients connecting from several different machines and/or user accounts. Under X11 with GTK+/QT/whatever, the different widget sets appear differently, and can appear differently depending on user settings. I like the sound of Fresco - all widgets are rendered by the server. Under this sort of system the differences between GTK+, QT, etc would simply be in API, not appearance.
I like your bringing up of HTML and the use of onclick, etc Javascript events. I'd like to take it one step further: perhaps an application or widget set could send small scripts to the windowing system to handle simple local events.
For example, the app puts up a dialog with a number of text entry boxes, buttons, and perhaps a graphic (a preview perhaps). Along with the basic widgets, it also sends to the window server a set of event handlers written in some scripting language (lisp, postscript, javascript, python...). These event handlers then control how these widgets interact without bothering the app/widget set running on the client machine. The user can fiddle with buttons and stuff, only needing actual client-server interaction when the preview needs to be updated or when the user hits the [OK] button.
So these scripts would handle the little interactions with the low-level widgets. They would allow the widgets themselves to be rather simple. The applications and/or widget sets would provide scripted event handlers to customize their exact behaviour. In this way, the set of "fixed" widgets in the windowing system could still remain flexible without becoming too complex. And like another poster said, GUI's are mostly "done" right now. Assemble the most common and unique widgets in the server, and let client-side widget sets customize them with a server-side scripting language.
No, AGP has pretty much the same problems as PCI. What supercomputers generally use is much more direct - special memory management in what is essentially the "north bridge". Supercomputer nodes have no need for peripherals anyway, so a peripheral bus is a waste. Each node is just a CPU, memory, and some communications hardware. The latter is the important part.
I've had crazy idea for a while. One of those "if I ruled the world" ideas. And it is this: Ban advertising from any news, current affairs, or similar TV program. Allowing ads during the news only encourages the TV stations to jazz it up to get higher ratings and thus ad revenue. It is very important in any democracy for the general populace to be well informed about current issues. When the media jazz-up unimportant issues, or worse - the politicians are allowed to drag the public focus onto unimportant issues - then we just get grand-standing and stupid politicians get elected.
The "coming up next..." bits are to keep you from changing channel during an ad break.
Stories are simplified and dumbed down into good/evil binary issues. Nothing is ever a matter of perspective. There's always a "bad guy".
Stories are also blown out of proportion. Direct danger to the viewers is emphasized (see Bowling for Columbine).
Foreign stories are neglected unless they have local relevance (this is seen here in Australia too, not just USA).
Here in Oz I absolutely adore SBS World News. SBS is a special government-funded TV station focusing on immigrant and foreign issues. It has great foreign movies and interesting programs. So the news doesn't just focus on local stuff. It has the people and resources (like an army of translaters and subtitlers) to cover world news very well. They're also the second Oz TV station with Olympic coverage which is less Australia-centric than Seven. SBS does have ads, but only between programs. And they seem to have much higher standards when it comes to the ads. Unfortunately, Microsoft's annoyingly pretentious "let us unlock your hidden potential" ads somehow got through:(
I think you're getting your colour spaces mixed up. Blue + yellow = green only in a subtractive colour space e.g paint or ink. Go look at the circular colour selector in any paint program. Opposite of yellow is blue.
Imagine white light coming in through the window. If this coating has a yellowish tint, then it must filter out a lot of the blue spectrum, leaving most of the red-green end of the spectrum. If you then have blue glass, it will filter out most of the red-green light. Unfortunately, you might not have much light left after going through the two filters. But it would remove the strong colour tint.
BTW, about those Mars images: Each "eye" on the panoramic camera only has a small set of filters and IIRC they seem to be evenly split between the two cameras. So any given wavelength (colour) is only available on one camera, not both. The controllers then often have to resort to using a near-IR filter in place of a "true" red to get the full-colour images. For most of the Mars terrain this is ok. But it happens that the blue paint on the colour target also reflects light in the IR band. So when they use this IR image in place of red to create a colour image, this blue tab comes out looking pink or purple. It looks like a similar thing is happening with the green tab, making it look orange.
But it's still fun watching the tin-foil hat parade stiring themselves up:)
I happened to be watching the mens synchro diving the other night and saw the UK pair. The shorter of the two really only came up to the shoulder of the other! I wonder how that effects the dives. Not only would the difference in body length affect the time that they hit the water, but possibly also change their spin characteristics.
I don't know, but that's what I've heard also. I now see on www.athens2004.com that even by this metric, the USA is now equal second with us (Australia) behind China. We have twice as many gold medals though.
She had enough trouble learning XP - I wouldn't dare put Linux in front of her.
This is just like all those MS-funded TCO reports that claim users need lots of training to learn Linux but fail to mention that those same users need training every 2-3 years when the latest version of Windows+Office roll out of Redmond.
Who says that learning Linux + KDE (or GNOME) from win98 is any harder than learning winXP? And if it's roughly the same, wouldn't it be more worthwhile going with the OS (and desktop and apps) that will cause the least amount of trouble in the future to both you and your mother? In fact, if Linux + KDE + Mozilla/Konqueror cause you to have less security problems, isn't a little extra trouble worth it?
Wow. I always thought Rob's writings were a little out there, but reading his speech he's fucking nuts! This guy is so full of himself, so out of touch with reality, so misleading, and so abrasive! How the hell do you argue with someone like that? The guy should be crowned King Troll.
We haven't heard much from Laura Didio lately. Perhaps she's just too sane for the likes of SCO.
Here are the papers on this HDR display. I guess you really have to see it in real life to appreciate what it does. In the paper all they can do is show photos with different exposures.
Their first version used a projector to get the required brightness, diffused that image, and then blocked this bright image with an LCD. They measured the dynamic range at 54,000:1! Their second version used a hexagonal grid of LED's as the light source, which made it brighter and more compact than the first. I would imagine this is the configuration that Sunnybrook are commercializing.
Watch out for windows-only software. If they're that specific then they'll have trouble adapting to change. XP SP2 is already causing lots of problems for software that was taking advantage of Windows' lax security. And it looks like Longhorn will cause huge changes to the Windows API base. The really flexible software is modular and has platform-specific code seperated from the rest of the application. A change of platform is relatively minor then. Whip up a new platform-specific module, maybe make some minor adjustments, and bingo! one more supported platform.
Companies and developers making win32-only software are dependant on the sole maker of that platform: Microsoft. They must follow and adapt to MS's every whim or become extinct. Their fortune is thus more volatile than the cross-platform companies, even if their development effort would appear to be lower at the start. While the windows-centric world has seen huge growth in recent years, Microsoft's future doesn't look so good or certain. They're facing real competition from Apple and Linux/FLOSS. You can see their desperation in their anti-Linux efforts.
Because FLOSS software has always spread by word-of-mouth. Commercial vendors have a thing called a budget and part of it will be money for advertising and other promotional gimmicks. Most FLOSS doesn't have any of that but still need to "get the word out". It's just different methods used by two different systems of software development. I'm a long-time Linux and FLOSS user/supporter so I usually know about the things they mention. But occasionally someone will mention a package or project I haven't heard of before. It's useful information.
I'm not so sure the Jabber system would work so well with Google. With Jabber (IIRC) all communications go through a central server. Apart from the privacy concerns, that'd be a helluva lot of bandwidth. Jabber servers are really meant to be implemented at the ISP/company/campus/whatever level. That would still work with having identical email addresses and JID's. Google would either have to come up with some geographically-based set of virtual servers (which they probably already do!) or modify the Jabber system to be more peer-to-peer like other IM protocols. i.e The central server is used for tracking user status, searching, etc while the actual communications go directly from user to user.
Is the 2.2GHz speed of the Athlon (and most of the other AMD offerings seem to plateau out around this figure) a limit for AMDs?
Considering that the K8 architecture is only a year old, I would certainly hope that they can scale to much higher clock speeds. A large CPU maker doesn't launch into a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project to make its next generation of CPUs without planning ahead for at least several years. Improvements in clock speed, die size, cache size, and architectural tweaks should keep the K8 line moving ahead for a good few years. And hopefully at some point I will be able to afford one...:P
Agreed. ID3 is a horribly limited hack (hence the need for ID3v2) on a format (MPEG) that was never meant to support arbitrary user metadata. I have no problem with my Ogg Vorbis music files. Ogg files are designed to hold metadata in a simple but flexible name=value format. Title, artist, album, track number, genre, whatever you want. You can even add your own fields, like Vorbisgain data.
ID3 is just a block of data tacked onto the end of the MPEG I layer 3 audio file. It isn't a part of the MPEG standards. Frankly, it's very poorly designed, with fixed-length fields and no way to add extra fields. Except by adding even more data at the end, hence ID3v2. Bad, bad, bad.
It blows my mind that they added bluetooth before adding ethernet
They're obviously targeting the small portable device market rather than the network device/appliance market. The fact that it has a USB client port but no USB host capability pretty much proves this. I haven't used bluetooth myself, but what's wrong with getting one of those USB bluetooth "dongles" for your laptop or PC? With its low power usage (and low price!) the gumstix sound great for a battery-operated remote sensing device. Just rock up every week or so and download the latest data either through a USB connection or over bluetooth.
Hmmm, that's an interesting point. IANAL, but I can't see the nasties jumping over to NZ that easily. I would imagine our AU-NZ FTA would specify exactly what sort of laws and regulations would be "harmonized", just like this AU-US one. And I would also imagine it would take some work by the courts and/or government to bring the new laws and regulations into effect. They at least wouldn't turn up "automatically" with no warning. Now lets just hope that NZ has a healthier system of government and opposition parties than we do here in Australia. God damn John Howard and his wedge politics...
Vote out Howard, but don't give Latham & Labor a landslide - give your first vote to left-wing parties such as Socialist Alliance and the Greens, and give your preferences to Labor - send Labor a message that we aren't 100% with them.
Thanks to the preferential voting system this is pretty much how I vote. I give my first preferences to the Greens and Democrats before Labour and the coalition (and then the small nutbag parties). I can do this confident that I'm not "throwing away" my vote. I can vote for the little parties and my lesser-of-two-evils large party at the same time.
I must say that New Zealand is looking better all the time. We've always made jokes about sheep in NZ and their accents. But with our "American arse-kisser" of a PM, the whole fear-mongering "war on terrorism", and now this FTA - NZ isn't looking so bad! It's not far and I have relatives other there. If the DMCA-like and other IP parts of this FTA turns out as bad as we're fearing, I think we will see a large trans-Tasman migration. And not just of IT workers but even whole companies could move their base over.
*sigh* No. You sound like the Apollo-fakers that try to pin all sorts of claimed "oddities" in the moon photos on the lack of atmosphere. Ever notice that here on Earth that shadows from the sun don't have a penumbra either? (at least, not big enough to notice)
Go read up on "soft shadows" in any CG text. Soft shadows, or penumbras, are not due to atmosphere. Soft shadows are due to the light source being an area and that some points on a surface only "see" part of the light. These areas form a gradient on the surface from fully-lit to full-shadow.
Presumebly you are referring to picture 6? That fade-off doesn't even have anything to do with soft shadows. That's simple diffuse lighting. As the surface turns away from the light source, it emits less light.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding (I've never actually looked too hard at this) was that with videos/movies, you use the Xv extension. That allows the app to decode into a shared memory segment (like the old Xshm extension), and leave the graphics card to do the scaling and YUV=>RGB colour space conversion. You certainly do not send every pixel over the X socket. Otherwise my 1600x1200 display would grind to a halt when playing a movie fullscreen. In reality the player only uses a few percent of my AthlonXP/2400 to decode a DVD or XViD video.
Even better, SPF doesn't necessarily compete with DomainKeys.
SPF enumerates which servers are allowed to send email for a certain domain.
DomainKeys authenticates individual email messages as having come from a certain domain.
Together they could be quite effective against spam. In particular, Yahoo also talks about building a reputation system on top of DomainKeys. The idea is that a spammer would quickly find the 'reputation' of their domain going down and soon no email server would accept their email.
As reported yesterday:
Josh Ledgard: Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you?
Stop pulling stupid shit like this perhaps?
I belive in spell-checkers!
The problem I see with Gosling's suggestions is that it relies on a fast, low-latency network. While this is certainly true of modern local networks, it certainly isn't of the wider internet. People have already long been using things like X11 (with DXPC or LBX), or Citrix/WTS over the public internet to remote-control machines and to tele-commute. I can only see this usage increasing in the future.
While the internet may be becoming faster for bulk transfers, latency is still a problem. And latency is very important for interactivity, especially in Gosling's client-heavy model. A more server-heavy model like we're discussing would allow good interactivity over high-latency networks. The server-side event handler scripts would allow all the nitty-gritty little details to be handled immediately in the local window server. The interface would only slow down when it needs to communicate with the client. Obviously that would depend a lot on how the application and/or widget set is structured, but at least the capability is there to make things more effecient.
I must say I still prefer the idea of a "heavy" windowing system/manager, mainly for the benefits it gives to network transparency. For example, imagine several clients connecting from several different machines and/or user accounts. Under X11 with GTK+/QT/whatever, the different widget sets appear differently, and can appear differently depending on user settings. I like the sound of Fresco - all widgets are rendered by the server. Under this sort of system the differences between GTK+, QT, etc would simply be in API, not appearance.
I like your bringing up of HTML and the use of onclick, etc Javascript events. I'd like to take it one step further: perhaps an application or widget set could send small scripts to the windowing system to handle simple local events.
So these scripts would handle the little interactions with the low-level widgets. They would allow the widgets themselves to be rather simple. The applications and/or widget sets would provide scripted event handlers to customize their exact behaviour. In this way, the set of "fixed" widgets in the windowing system could still remain flexible without becoming too complex. And like another poster said, GUI's are mostly "done" right now. Assemble the most common and unique widgets in the server, and let client-side widget sets customize them with a server-side scripting language.
No, AGP has pretty much the same problems as PCI. What supercomputers generally use is much more direct - special memory management in what is essentially the "north bridge". Supercomputer nodes have no need for peripherals anyway, so a peripheral bus is a waste. Each node is just a CPU, memory, and some communications hardware. The latter is the important part.
I've had crazy idea for a while. One of those "if I ruled the world" ideas. And it is this: Ban advertising from any news, current affairs, or similar TV program. Allowing ads during the news only encourages the TV stations to jazz it up to get higher ratings and thus ad revenue. It is very important in any democracy for the general populace to be well informed about current issues. When the media jazz-up unimportant issues, or worse - the politicians are allowed to drag the public focus onto unimportant issues - then we just get grand-standing and stupid politicians get elected.
Here in Oz I absolutely adore SBS World News. SBS is a special government-funded TV station focusing on immigrant and foreign issues. It has great foreign movies and interesting programs. So the news doesn't just focus on local stuff. It has the people and resources (like an army of translaters and subtitlers) to cover world news very well. They're also the second Oz TV station with Olympic coverage which is less Australia-centric than Seven. SBS does have ads, but only between programs. And they seem to have much higher standards when it comes to the ads. Unfortunately, Microsoft's annoyingly pretentious "let us unlock your hidden potential" ads somehow got through :(
I think you're getting your colour spaces mixed up. Blue + yellow = green only in a subtractive colour space e.g paint or ink. Go look at the circular colour selector in any paint program. Opposite of yellow is blue.
Imagine white light coming in through the window. If this coating has a yellowish tint, then it must filter out a lot of the blue spectrum, leaving most of the red-green end of the spectrum. If you then have blue glass, it will filter out most of the red-green light. Unfortunately, you might not have much light left after going through the two filters. But it would remove the strong colour tint.
BTW, about those Mars images: Each "eye" on the panoramic camera only has a small set of filters and IIRC they seem to be evenly split between the two cameras. So any given wavelength (colour) is only available on one camera, not both. The controllers then often have to resort to using a near-IR filter in place of a "true" red to get the full-colour images. For most of the Mars terrain this is ok. But it happens that the blue paint on the colour target also reflects light in the IR band. So when they use this IR image in place of red to create a colour image, this blue tab comes out looking pink or purple. It looks like a similar thing is happening with the green tab, making it look orange.
But it's still fun watching the tin-foil hat parade stiring themselves up :)
I happened to be watching the mens synchro diving the other night and saw the UK pair. The shorter of the two really only came up to the shoulder of the other! I wonder how that effects the dives. Not only would the difference in body length affect the time that they hit the water, but possibly also change their spin characteristics.
I don't know, but that's what I've heard also. I now see on www.athens2004.com that even by this metric, the USA is now equal second with us (Australia) behind China. We have twice as many gold medals though.
I still prefer Roy and H.G's tallies anyway :)
This is just like all those MS-funded TCO reports that claim users need lots of training to learn Linux but fail to mention that those same users need training every 2-3 years when the latest version of Windows+Office roll out of Redmond.
Who says that learning Linux + KDE (or GNOME) from win98 is any harder than learning winXP? And if it's roughly the same, wouldn't it be more worthwhile going with the OS (and desktop and apps) that will cause the least amount of trouble in the future to both you and your mother? In fact, if Linux + KDE + Mozilla/Konqueror cause you to have less security problems, isn't a little extra trouble worth it?
Wow. I always thought Rob's writings were a little out there, but reading his speech he's fucking nuts! This guy is so full of himself, so out of touch with reality, so misleading, and so abrasive! How the hell do you argue with someone like that? The guy should be crowned King Troll.
We haven't heard much from Laura Didio lately. Perhaps she's just too sane for the likes of SCO.
Here are the papers on this HDR display. I guess you really have to see it in real life to appreciate what it does. In the paper all they can do is show photos with different exposures.
Their first version used a projector to get the required brightness, diffused that image, and then blocked this bright image with an LCD. They measured the dynamic range at 54,000:1! Their second version used a hexagonal grid of LED's as the light source, which made it brighter and more compact than the first. I would imagine this is the configuration that Sunnybrook are commercializing.
Watch out for windows-only software. If they're that specific then they'll have trouble adapting to change. XP SP2 is already causing lots of problems for software that was taking advantage of Windows' lax security. And it looks like Longhorn will cause huge changes to the Windows API base. The really flexible software is modular and has platform-specific code seperated from the rest of the application. A change of platform is relatively minor then. Whip up a new platform-specific module, maybe make some minor adjustments, and bingo! one more supported platform.
Companies and developers making win32-only software are dependant on the sole maker of that platform: Microsoft. They must follow and adapt to MS's every whim or become extinct. Their fortune is thus more volatile than the cross-platform companies, even if their development effort would appear to be lower at the start. While the windows-centric world has seen huge growth in recent years, Microsoft's future doesn't look so good or certain. They're facing real competition from Apple and Linux/FLOSS. You can see their desperation in their anti-Linux efforts.
Because FLOSS software has always spread by word-of-mouth. Commercial vendors have a thing called a budget and part of it will be money for advertising and other promotional gimmicks. Most FLOSS doesn't have any of that but still need to "get the word out". It's just different methods used by two different systems of software development. I'm a long-time Linux and FLOSS user/supporter so I usually know about the things they mention. But occasionally someone will mention a package or project I haven't heard of before. It's useful information.
I'm not so sure the Jabber system would work so well with Google. With Jabber (IIRC) all communications go through a central server. Apart from the privacy concerns, that'd be a helluva lot of bandwidth. Jabber servers are really meant to be implemented at the ISP/company/campus/whatever level. That would still work with having identical email addresses and JID's. Google would either have to come up with some geographically-based set of virtual servers (which they probably already do!) or modify the Jabber system to be more peer-to-peer like other IM protocols. i.e The central server is used for tracking user status, searching, etc while the actual communications go directly from user to user.
Considering that the K8 architecture is only a year old, I would certainly hope that they can scale to much higher clock speeds. A large CPU maker doesn't launch into a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project to make its next generation of CPUs without planning ahead for at least several years. Improvements in clock speed, die size, cache size, and architectural tweaks should keep the K8 line moving ahead for a good few years. And hopefully at some point I will be able to afford one...:P
Agreed. ID3 is a horribly limited hack (hence the need for ID3v2) on a format (MPEG) that was never meant to support arbitrary user metadata. I have no problem with my Ogg Vorbis music files. Ogg files are designed to hold metadata in a simple but flexible name=value format. Title, artist, album, track number, genre, whatever you want. You can even add your own fields, like Vorbisgain data.
ID3 is just a block of data tacked onto the end of the MPEG I layer 3 audio file. It isn't a part of the MPEG standards. Frankly, it's very poorly designed, with fixed-length fields and no way to add extra fields. Except by adding even more data at the end, hence ID3v2. Bad, bad, bad.
They're obviously targeting the small portable device market rather than the network device/appliance market. The fact that it has a USB client port but no USB host capability pretty much proves this. I haven't used bluetooth myself, but what's wrong with getting one of those USB bluetooth "dongles" for your laptop or PC? With its low power usage (and low price!) the gumstix sound great for a battery-operated remote sensing device. Just rock up every week or so and download the latest data either through a USB connection or over bluetooth.
Hmmm, that's an interesting point. IANAL, but I can't see the nasties jumping over to NZ that easily. I would imagine our AU-NZ FTA would specify exactly what sort of laws and regulations would be "harmonized", just like this AU-US one. And I would also imagine it would take some work by the courts and/or government to bring the new laws and regulations into effect. They at least wouldn't turn up "automatically" with no warning. Now lets just hope that NZ has a healthier system of government and opposition parties than we do here in Australia. God damn John Howard and his wedge politics...
Thanks to the preferential voting system this is pretty much how I vote. I give my first preferences to the Greens and Democrats before Labour and the coalition (and then the small nutbag parties). I can do this confident that I'm not "throwing away" my vote. I can vote for the little parties and my lesser-of-two-evils large party at the same time.
I must say that New Zealand is looking better all the time. We've always made jokes about sheep in NZ and their accents. But with our "American arse-kisser" of a PM, the whole fear-mongering "war on terrorism", and now this FTA - NZ isn't looking so bad! It's not far and I have relatives other there. If the DMCA-like and other IP parts of this FTA turns out as bad as we're fearing, I think we will see a large trans-Tasman migration. And not just of IT workers but even whole companies could move their base over.
*sigh* No. You sound like the Apollo-fakers that try to pin all sorts of claimed "oddities" in the moon photos on the lack of atmosphere. Ever notice that here on Earth that shadows from the sun don't have a penumbra either? (at least, not big enough to notice)
Go read up on "soft shadows" in any CG text. Soft shadows, or penumbras, are not due to atmosphere. Soft shadows are due to the light source being an area and that some points on a surface only "see" part of the light. These areas form a gradient on the surface from fully-lit to full-shadow.
Presumebly you are referring to picture 6? That fade-off doesn't even have anything to do with soft shadows. That's simple diffuse lighting. As the surface turns away from the light source, it emits less light.