Well, I got an SBLive with SPDIF output, and am under impression that the mixer is all digital (at 48 kHz), and that was the reason everything got resampled. Converting everything to analog and then converting it do digital again seems more expensive, which certainly isn't reasonable (but for some reason it wouldn't surprise me if Creative did just that if they somehow managed to cut the manufacturing costs by doing so:). I thought the reason the sound is supposed to be so crappy is that the 44.1kHz->48kHz conversion is plain bad.
It's nice to see this thing got SPDIF output. Finally I can use my laptop as MP3 player without using the headphone-output. But I'm wondering, are there other USB-devices with SPDIF output?
I live in a town in Norway with approximately 30000 people, and here most people got 3 alternatives (Telenor ADSL (the former state telephone company), Nextgentel ADSL and a company called sdsl.no).
The Telenor ADSL is shitty PPPoE for about $50/month for 704k downstream/128k upstream with no possibility for static IP.
Nextgentel ADSL is plain ADSL with a NAT'ing router at about the same price as Telenor but with 704k downstream/384k upstream. Static IP is available for about $11/month.
sdsl.no on the other hand is a bit more expensive but is the solution I chose. They target "high-end users", and 1Mbit up and down (at the same time, not asynchronous as ADSL) costs about $110/month. What you get is an sdsl<->ethernet converter, and you have to plug it into a pc/router and configure the pc/router yourself. No DHCP at all, no mandatory NAT. They are not trying to sell you other stuff such as video-on-demand and other things, they just give you a kick-ass connection to the internet and that's it. Do you want to run a server? No problem, just don't run a commercial web server. I wanted to change the reverse dns entry, and mailed them (at 8PM). It was fixed in 30 minutes. In the last months there have been some problems with DOS'ing, but they've sent mails telling us that. This is the ultimate ISP for (wealthy) geeks.
The real problem with the GBA screen was that the screen on the early developer version was much brighter. That's why those first games were so dark. In one issue of Game Developer Magazine one of the creators of Rayman Advance says that just a few days before the release they got a "real" GBA and was horrified because the game was too dark. Since the GBA has quite a limited video system, they had handtuned all the palettes, and now they had to change the palette to make it look OK.
I've done a little bit of GBA coding myself, and to make images look fine I had to adjust the brightness a bit.
(The GBA uses a 15 bit palette. Each sprite can be either 16 color or 256 color, where the data for 16-color sprites uses half the space and is therefore a good idea given the limited amount of sprite memory (32kb). For each sprite you can select between 16 different palettes. The GBA also has several layers of tiled backgrounds, where each layer can be either 256 or 16 color, and with 16-color tiles you can select the palette for each tile).
In case you didn't know, the PS2 got two USB ports. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 supports USB-modems and USB-ethernet adapters for online play and USB-keyboard for chatting.
The students are using university property to develop the code. They only pay a fraction of the cost via their tuition; the rest is obtained from other funding sources including public and corporate ones.
You have to remember that the student actually spends some hours writing the code too. A 100 hour project at $20 is actually (using the hyper-advanced salary calculation algorithm) $2000.
Anyway, I went to college for 3 years in Norway, and in the last semester we had a large project. Usually the groups got tasks from the local industry, and one of the agreements the company had to sign was that all documents (including code) should be freely available (except classified military stuff). The company my group had a project for (and which is now my employer) still uses some of the software we wrote back then (we wrote a tool for internal use only though).
I think it's important that stuff developed at schools and universities are free. This enables other students from all over the world to check out previous work. However, if the school/university cooperates with local industry, that company allowed to use that code to whatever they want (but the code should still be free).
Well, getting used NICs with AUI should be a problem I think. I've bought quite a few at large garage sales. If it is a problem getting one however, just get a Sun Sparcstation 5 or some other machine with built-in AUI.:)
I haven't got a single one neither, but my webserver log is full of Codered, Codered II and Nimda attacks. I think the reason is that most of my friends who got my email in their address books don't use Outlook (or are too smart to get these virii).
We've been having some attacks at work though, but since I'm one of the lucky ones reading my mail on a Sun I wasn't directly affected (but the mail server (Exchange of course:( )) was shut down though. The problem is that the it staff are planning to move all mail-stuff over to Windows and Outlook. I have absolutely no idea why they're doing this considering the vulnerability.
Another thing about Exchange. After we moved from some unix mail-server to Exchange we get mail maybe every other week telling us that the mail server has to be shut down because of a reboot or maintenance. I'm not sure if it really is a problem, but are all mail servers like this?
Indeed, blank CDs now outsell recorded discs in Europe and Canada, according to one label executive.
Well, since a blank cd has many more uses than a cd with a 74 minute audio recording this shouldn't really come as a surprise. But of course, they want an excuse to tax all blank CDs so that they can get more money by not selling anything.
Check here for more info (in norwegian only, sorry) on the Skjold-class MTBs. I'm not sure when they will be ready though. The boats are propelled by water jets which means they can turn really really fast. The swedish navy is also getting stealthy boats, and they got water jets too.
It is possible to turn off the use of IE (or whatever) for displaying mail in Eudora. In Tools->Options->Viewing Mail just uncheck the "Use Microsoft's Viewer" checkbox. (I'm using Eudora 5.1 btw.)
The last few months I've downloaded games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Civilization 3. I've played them for a couple of hours just to test them. My computer is a bit too slow for RTCW, and I just don't have the time to play Civ3, so I didn't buy them.
On the other hand, a few days ago I bought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for Playstation 2. It's a really great game. I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't downloaded the Playstation version and tested it though. I've never played the previous versions at all (except THPS2 on Gameboy Advance, which I've tested about 30 minutes (pirated of course)), so I didn't really know kind of game it was until I tested it on Playstation.
There is also another reason why I usually download the games before I buy them. There aren't any good software/games-stores in the town where I live. You can't try the latest games in any of the stores, not even on PS2, and usually they don't get the games on the release date.
A few years ago, a company I know of had ordered an SGI Onyx 2 from SGI. By some strange reason it got shipped in the afternoon. When the delivery-guy arrived, nobody was at work, and he just put the box outside the doorstep. They couldn't believe their own eyes when they arrived the next morning. They called SGI and they had never seen an SGI Engineer come so fast (because of the wet weather they had to make sure it was dry before booting it).
I don't think many 64k's today are written using much assembler. I won the TG2001 64k compo with this and it is written in 100% C++. Assembler is now usually used for tight innerloops in polyfillers and stuff like that, but with OpenGL/Direct3D you obviously don't need that anymore.
In most cases, you are correct. What I was referring to is the recent obsession with "hit-to-kill" technology. Specifically, Patriot (PAC-3) and THAAD missiles are kinetic-kill rather than explosive. This means that they actually have to slam into the target to make a kill. That is one of the reasons that making THAAD usable is so difficult! Amazing how technology goes backwards, sometimes...
Well, trying to hit a quite small warhead coming from above at mach 10 is probably easier with a kinetic-kill weapon than explosive. I think this is the reason why they try this approach.
You are also right about the doctrine that states "shoot everything down" - the SA-X range even have nuclear options to make sure that you hit the target. (Small nukes, so really not as dramatic as it sounds - but still an impressive hit radius).
The US have actually developed a nuclear air-to-air missile called Genie, and I think it was France who had an nuclear surface-to-air missile (check the "Worst Weapon System"-thread in the sci.military.moderated newsgroup.:)
You said "Admittedly, part of their success may be attributed to a willingness to detonate an explosive near the target - rather than just trying to hit it, but their systems are very advanced."
In case you didn't know, this is how all air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles work. Hey, even flak from WW2 didn't need a direct hit. Some even had proximity fuses which made the shells go off when an aircraft was nearby instead of using a timer.
But Russia do have some kick-ass long range air defence systems, but the problem such systems is target identification. What's the point in shooting down a target far away if you don't know if it's a friend or foe? Another problems is detection vs tracking. To be able to detect an aircraft at a long range doesn't mean that you can track it, and tracking is needed to be able get a good shot. I'm not sure if the double-digit russian SA-systems (NATO classification) uses active or semi-active radar in the missiles (semi-active requires an illumination radar to paint the target, active means that the missile got a radar of it's own), but in either case you have to get reliable targeting data when you're shooting. Unless the missile got some kind of mid-course update (the missile get updated target info from the radar while flying towards the target (the AMRAAM-missile (by Raytheon) got this), shooting at a long range means that the target has plenty of time doing some countermeasures, like turning in another direction. Tracking a target also usually means that you're telling the aircraft 'Here I am, and I'm looking at you' which also means that the target will do some countermeasures. However, the russian military doctrine may allow shooting down targets which just may be hostile. This may work when defending Mother Russia from bombers coming from all directions, but todays battlefield is much more complex.
It would have been more interesting with a program that plays blackjack. In blackjack it's actually possible to win. There are people who're able to to this (without computers), I read about one guy in a norwegian book about games by the sci-fi writer Tor Aage Bringsvaerd, and that guy was banned from several casinos. Doing this requires extraordinary memory and math skills. You have to remember how many of each card that has been drawn during the game and calculate probabilities in your head (well, it's actually a bit easier since a lot of the cards are worth 10 points, so you don't have to remember everything). The clue is that in blackjack the dealer uses more than one deck of cards (which are all shuffled together), and he doesn't shuffle the cards until there is only one deck (52 cards) left (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure about the exact numbers).
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OK, thanks for your info. This seems like really crappy hardware :)
Well, I got an SBLive with SPDIF output, and am under impression that the mixer is all digital (at 48 kHz), and that was the reason everything got resampled. Converting everything to analog and then converting it do digital again seems more expensive, which certainly isn't reasonable (but for some reason it wouldn't surprise me if Creative did just that if they somehow managed to cut the manufacturing costs by doing so :). I thought the reason the sound is supposed to be so crappy is that the 44.1kHz->48kHz conversion is plain bad.
Check out this for a nice page about other things Microsoft has done.
It's nice to see this thing got SPDIF output. Finally I can use my laptop as MP3 player without using the headphone-output. But I'm wondering, are there other USB-devices with SPDIF output?
I live in a town in Norway with approximately 30000 people, and here most people got 3 alternatives (Telenor ADSL (the former state telephone company), Nextgentel ADSL and a company called sdsl.no).
The Telenor ADSL is shitty PPPoE for about $50/month for 704k downstream/128k upstream with no possibility for static IP.
Nextgentel ADSL is plain ADSL with a NAT'ing router at about the same price as Telenor but with 704k downstream/384k upstream. Static IP is available for about $11/month.
sdsl.no on the other hand is a bit more expensive but is the solution I chose. They target "high-end users", and 1Mbit up and down (at the same time, not asynchronous as ADSL) costs about $110/month. What you get is an sdsl<->ethernet converter, and you have to plug it into a pc/router and configure the pc/router yourself. No DHCP at all, no mandatory NAT. They are not trying to sell you other stuff such as video-on-demand and other things, they just give you a kick-ass connection to the internet and that's it. Do you want to run a server? No problem, just don't run a commercial web server. I wanted to change the reverse dns entry, and mailed them (at 8PM). It was fixed in 30 minutes. In the last months there have been some problems with DOS'ing, but they've sent mails telling us that. This is the ultimate ISP for (wealthy) geeks.
The real problem with the GBA screen was that the screen on the early developer version was much brighter. That's why those first games were so dark. In one issue of Game Developer Magazine one of the creators of Rayman Advance says that just a few days before the release they got a "real" GBA and was horrified because the game was too dark. Since the GBA has quite a limited video system, they had handtuned all the palettes, and now they had to change the palette to make it look OK.
I've done a little bit of GBA coding myself, and to make images look fine I had to adjust the brightness a bit.
(The GBA uses a 15 bit palette. Each sprite can be either 16 color or 256 color, where the data for 16-color sprites uses half the space and is therefore a good idea given the limited amount of sprite memory (32kb). For each sprite you can select between 16 different palettes. The GBA also has several layers of tiled backgrounds, where each layer can be either 256 or 16 color, and with 16-color tiles you can select the palette for each tile).
In case you didn't know, the PS2 got two USB ports. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 supports USB-modems and USB-ethernet adapters for online play and USB-keyboard for chatting.
You have to remember that the student actually spends some hours writing the code too. A 100 hour project at $20 is actually (using the hyper-advanced salary calculation algorithm) $2000.
Anyway, I went to college for 3 years in Norway, and in the last semester we had a large project. Usually the groups got tasks from the local industry, and one of the agreements the company had to sign was that all documents (including code) should be freely available (except classified military stuff). The company my group had a project for (and which is now my employer) still uses some of the software we wrote back then (we wrote a tool for internal use only though).
I think it's important that stuff developed at schools and universities are free. This enables other students from all over the world to check out previous work. However, if the school/university cooperates with local industry, that company allowed to use that code to whatever they want (but the code should still be free).
Well, getting used NICs with AUI should be a problem I think. I've bought quite a few at large garage sales. If it is a problem getting one however, just get a Sun Sparcstation 5 or some other machine with built-in AUI. :)
I haven't got a single one neither, but my webserver log is full of Codered, Codered II and Nimda attacks. I think the reason is that most of my friends who got my email in their address books don't use Outlook (or are too smart to get these virii).
We've been having some attacks at work though, but since I'm one of the lucky ones reading my mail on a Sun I wasn't directly affected (but the mail server (Exchange of course :( )) was shut down though. The problem is that the it staff are planning to move all mail-stuff over to Windows and Outlook. I have absolutely no idea why they're doing this considering the vulnerability.
Another thing about Exchange. After we moved from some unix mail-server to Exchange we get mail maybe every other week telling us that the mail server has to be shut down because of a reboot or maintenance. I'm not sure if it really is a problem, but are all mail servers like this?
Check here for more info (in norwegian only, sorry) on the Skjold-class MTBs. I'm not sure when they will be ready though. The boats are propelled by water jets which means they can turn really really fast. The swedish navy is also getting stealthy boats, and they got water jets too.
It is possible to turn off the use of IE (or whatever) for displaying mail in Eudora. In Tools->Options->Viewing Mail just uncheck the "Use Microsoft's Viewer" checkbox. (I'm using Eudora 5.1 btw.)
The last few months I've downloaded games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Civilization 3. I've played them for a couple of hours just to test them. My computer is a bit too slow for RTCW, and I just don't have the time to play Civ3, so I didn't buy them.
On the other hand, a few days ago I bought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for Playstation 2. It's a really great game. I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't downloaded the Playstation version and tested it though. I've never played the previous versions at all (except THPS2 on Gameboy Advance, which I've tested about 30 minutes (pirated of course)), so I didn't really know kind of game it was until I tested it on Playstation.
There is also another reason why I usually download the games before I buy them. There aren't any good software/games-stores in the town where I live. You can't try the latest games in any of the stores, not even on PS2, and usually they don't get the games on the release date.
48 hours after release? That's a long time in the warez scene.
Well, I can't wait for LOTR The Book.
In the standard X11 mouse cursor set there is a Enterprise-icon. :)
A few years ago, a company I know of had ordered an SGI Onyx 2 from SGI. By some strange reason it got shipped in the afternoon. When the delivery-guy arrived, nobody was at work, and he just put the box outside the doorstep. They couldn't believe their own eyes when they arrived the next morning. They called SGI and they had never seen an SGI Engineer come so fast (because of the wet weather they had to make sure it was dry before booting it).
I've got a dual P4 Xeon 1.7 box at work (high-end workstation with Geforce 3 :), and the cpus got 256k (or maybe 512k?) L2 cache each.
I don't think many 64k's today are written using much assembler. I won the TG2001 64k compo with this and it is written in 100% C++. Assembler is now usually used for tight innerloops in polyfillers and stuff like that, but with OpenGL/Direct3D you obviously don't need that anymore.
What's the problem? Just use reply-to to get replies to another account.
In most cases, you are correct. What I was referring to is the recent obsession with "hit-to-kill" technology. Specifically, Patriot (PAC-3) and THAAD missiles are kinetic-kill rather than explosive. This means that they actually have to slam into the target to make a kill. That is one of the reasons that making THAAD usable is so difficult! Amazing how technology goes backwards, sometimes...
:)
Well, trying to hit a quite small warhead coming from above at mach 10 is probably easier with a kinetic-kill weapon than explosive. I think this is the reason why they try this approach.
You are also right about the doctrine that states "shoot everything down" - the SA-X range even have nuclear options to make sure that you hit the target. (Small nukes, so really not as dramatic as it sounds - but still an impressive hit radius).
The US have actually developed a nuclear air-to-air missile called Genie, and I think it was France who had an nuclear surface-to-air missile (check the "Worst Weapon System"-thread in the sci.military.moderated newsgroup.
(This is probably waaay off-topic :)
You said "Admittedly, part of their success may be attributed to a willingness to detonate an explosive near the target - rather than just trying to hit it, but their systems are very advanced."
In case you didn't know, this is how all air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles work. Hey, even flak from WW2 didn't need a direct hit. Some even had proximity fuses which made the shells go off when an aircraft was nearby instead of using a timer.
But Russia do have some kick-ass long range air defence systems, but the problem such systems is target identification. What's the point in shooting down a target far away if you don't know if it's a friend or foe? Another problems is detection vs tracking. To be able to detect an aircraft at a long range doesn't mean that you can track it, and tracking is needed to be able get a good shot. I'm not sure if the double-digit russian SA-systems (NATO classification) uses active or semi-active radar in the missiles (semi-active requires an illumination radar to paint the target, active means that the missile got a radar of it's own), but in either case you have to get reliable targeting data when you're shooting. Unless the missile got some kind of mid-course update (the missile get updated target info from the radar while flying towards the target (the AMRAAM-missile (by Raytheon) got this), shooting at a long range means that the target has plenty of time doing some countermeasures, like turning in another direction. Tracking a target also usually means that you're telling the aircraft 'Here I am, and I'm looking at you' which also means that the target will do some countermeasures. However, the russian military doctrine may allow shooting down targets which just may be hostile. This may work when defending Mother Russia from bombers coming from all directions, but todays battlefield is much more complex.
It would have been more interesting with a program that plays blackjack. In blackjack it's actually possible to win. There are people who're able to to this (without computers), I read about one guy in a norwegian book about games by the sci-fi writer Tor Aage Bringsvaerd, and that guy was banned from several casinos. Doing this requires extraordinary memory and math skills. You have to remember how many of each card that has been drawn during the game and calculate probabilities in your head (well, it's actually a bit easier since a lot of the cards are worth 10 points, so you don't have to remember everything). The clue is that in blackjack the dealer uses more than one deck of cards (which are all shuffled together), and he doesn't shuffle the cards until there is only one deck (52 cards) left (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure about the exact numbers).