One little thing concerning the bad midi-timing in windows. BeOS has an improvment to this because of a kernel feature. Besides the regular distribution of the cpu to different threads (which isnt always fine enough) it has a command called snooze (i think) which lets the kernel distribute the cpu to other threads until a specified number of microseconds has ellapsed. That way the midi-playing thread should get much more reliable timing.
However Im not at all an expert at this stuff, but this is the way i understood it works. You can check it out in the Be Book if you want more info..
determining drivers shouldnt take that long if the software isnt doing something stupid, look at BeOS, it detects hardware on each boot, and on my machine it takes about twelve seconds..
Because of the size of the pupil during daylight is about 2 millimeters, tha angular resolution is physically limited to 1.22 * wavelength / 0.002, and since purple light with 400 nanometers gives the smallest angle, well use that.
this gives a angle of 0.014 degrees, and if the eye has a field of vision of 90 degrees (this looks good in quake;), its just a guess ) that would give a resolution of about 6000 x 6000 pixels, and note that this is the absolutely maximal resolution the eye could ever get, im not saying it has that resolution, but its defenitely not above this..
also note that the fov is a guess, but it probably should be quite close to that, and it gives quite a approximation at least..
The human ear is limited to a dynamic range of about 120dB, and where 16-bit audio is theoretically limited to 96dB, and in reality the best consumer soundcards has a dynamic range of about 80dB due to noisy D/A converters...
I didnt say the parent post says that current soundcards is good enough for absolute sound realism, its just some of the replies that does..
Just because they done bad things before doesnt have to mean that they MUST do all new desicions bad..
Re:Ok let's look at you enthuasiasm.
on
3D Window Manager
·
· Score: 1
"Until people make this better for the average man on an average budget people will not buy this anyway; especially if microsoft gets into the game. Operations on a 3d world cost of LOT of CPU cycles and a TON of memory. Until quad Overclocked Merceed, or Beowulf systems with a Terabyte of ram in them this will be difficult."
Nah, it could even be faster than the current 2D windowmanagers if it is done right. (I call it a windowmanager even though it probably would be more than a combination of that and a X server)
Imagine having a 3D card with Transform & Lightning acceleration and 32 or 64 megs of RAM. The GeForce does this and S3 has a card on the way too.
The windowmanager would write to the texture memory instead of videomemory when updating the contents of a window, assuming it can be describe as a texture, but all current apps can. This would sress the just CPU as much as current 2D approach. But the memory only needs to be reloaded when the contents is refreshed, and not when the windows is moved or rotaded or whatever!
As long as it keeps within a reasonable amount of load on the Tranform & Lightning engine and the fill rate of the card, this would practically not load the CPU at all! This should be runned on a separate thread, and it would make such things that doesnt need the really smooth.
And it doesnt take much CPU time either if theres no geometry acceleration available. A window doesnt need to be more than two triangles, which means four vertexes, and one vertex need nine(i think) floating point calculations(one matrix multiplication, but the conversion matrix has to be calculated in advance, which takes a bit more time but not that much). Just as long as it doesnt use too many polygons, the CPU load is really load.
Note that this using 3D-acceleration could be really nice in 2D as well. All this funky animation and translucency effects could be done really fast instead of slowing things down..
This dude im replying to just seems to have WAY too much against some new ideas, but I agree with that software is getting slower and bloated, especially the microsoft crap, but that doesnt mean that the computer industry should stop to evolve. Having 3D windowmanagers can be really slow, but doesnt have to be. Should we ban all 3D windowmanager just because of that? I still believe that a properly done 3D windowmanager could be faster than the 2D windowmanagers we have today on current hardware..
I dont remember the exact number but its a little above 100 channels you can send to the card at once. The MIDI-synth on the card uses the host computers memory over the PCI-bus and it handles 64 voices simultainously, so theres quite a lot of bandwidth there. There can also be 32 wave streams sent to the card, all mixed and processed by creaties cute 3d effects if you want that..
So sending stuff to the card should be no problem, but I remeber reading an interview with E-mus chief technichian Dave Rossum, and when the asked him if the EMU10k1 dsp would be capable of doin things like MPEG-2 decoding, he said it could not be done because MPEG-2 decoding was done in the frequency domain and that the EMU10K1 is a time-domain processor. I think the same would apply to encoding MP3 files, not that i know that much a bout the algorithms behind but there is sure as hell a lot of frequency-domain stuff involved.
The comcept of having custom dsp algoritms would rock very much, but I dont think its gonna happen. Creative will probable ship the DSP-code as a binary as many users have stated before, and this is logical, because they probably dont want to "give away" the sourcecode of their nice reverbs and stuff, even if its quite dependant of the EM10K1 dsp, it could surely be rewritten to use on other processors..
But I really hope Im wrong, and there could be other possibilities too, that they provide their algorithms as precompiled libraries or something but keeping other parts of the DSP code open..
I dont think that Mozilla will be ready soon enough, and NetPositive 3 is still too buggy..
If they choose BeOS then Opera might be a choice. But there since AOL is involved there is also another possibility, Netscape.
Currently there is no BeOS version of Netscape as we all know, but since AOL has pumped in eight-hundred million bucks in gateway and owns Netscape, a port could be made real quick if needed. Netscape source is probably already quite portable because it has quite a few target platforms, so adding BeOS could be done quite quick if there is economical interest.
And Be has been talked a lot about internet appliances lately, and they probably know more about whats happening, so it might be a possibility after all.
Imposing standards can be give freedom sometimes..
An example would be that a government choose a specific document-format for the entire government and other public organizations. I dont know which format this should be, but absolutely not Microsafts ".doc"-format. An open-format would be the choice of course.
This would mean that people working with affected documents wouldnt be limited using a wordprocessor compatible with ".doc" if they hate Word. Because its a format designed with just one program and plaform in mind, and uses some embedding only used in windows. Which makes it hard to make other programs read and write it correctly..
I think goverments should work to get more standarized formats thats open. JPEG,PNG,MPEG,MP3 are nice examples of this.
I would have excpected Finland to force people to use Linux, the US to force people to use windows, and France to force people using BeOS, but this is so confusing...;)
Excuse me but this just sound plain stupid, if you ever would want to replace a musician because you dont have the money to have real ones, you probably would replace them with prerecorded pieces of music in appropriate lengths that you have on a CD or DAT.
I dont really know how their system would work, but i thought of some alternatives.:
If the thing is about dynamically created music content, I doubt that you could get any interesting music from it, you will get musically correct results that follows correct scales and such, but i doubt that you get anything that affect the listener or anything like that. It would only sound like a cheap home-multimedia hobby midifile.. Computers can not feel.
If its about ready made midi-style music thats "groove-quantitized" in real-time, then whats the deal? You can just have a digital recording of the music, and that would mean much better sound quality.. (by sound quality i dont mean the quality the music is made in, like cd-quality or such, but how professional the results sounds after mixing and mastering and all the other stuff)
All these ways of doing things would still only give you midi-style quality, since its realtime rendered sound, and just wont sound real enough for most instruments. Even if todays midi-intruments can sound real enough, you need very clever sequencing from the musicians to get it realistic, and its totally different on different instruments and is higly dependant of someone clever that can make it feel real, and a computer just cant do that until our computers have evolved a lot.. (think androids)
"While nanotechnoligy is just the minitureazation (sp?) of todays technology, quantum technology is totally diffrent, works on diffrent principals and will make nanotechnoligy obselete."
Nanotechnology ISN`T minitureazition, maybe this Dip Pen is, but real nanotechnology goes the other way around, building big things from single atoms.
Nanotechnology also is so much more than just making computers, nanocomputers is just one possible application. The technologys biggest potential is manufacturing of just about everything, from spacerockets to food, and the breaktrough is supposed to be when we can build self-replicating assemblers(a.k.a. nanobots) who can build items and dublicate themselfs from atoms, and therefore be able to grow exponetially in number. Quantum computing and nanotechnology is absolutely _not_ mutually exclusive, and quantum computing is probably going to be realised USING nanotechnology. It could also be a possibility that we have easier realising nanotechnology with help from the increased computing power of quantum computing, its all about which one comes first..
It seems like many of you/.-ers are a little too much focused on the computing possibilities of new technology and doesnt see the whole picture.
But it would be really groovy to make this big FAT16 partions as well if it was possible..
FAT16 allows 16 bits cluster adressing, meaning that you get 2^16. Divide 73GB with that and you get 1.06 MB per cluster... really efficient on your disk space!
Well, then this could easily be 10 dumb things BeOS users do if theyre dumb: =)
1) Forgetting to read the hardware compability list. 2) Putting the Install CD upside down in their cdrom. 3) Setting anything else than your be partition as default in the boot menu. 4) Creating a bootdisk, beos doesnt need it to be recovered, the cd is just fine 5) Using beos for x86 and ppc on the same machine 6) Trying to recompile the kernel 7) Using x86_R3 applications 8) Rebooting after setting up the network 9) Defragmenting their beos partition 10) Trying to exit the GUI to get to a fullscreen prompt
It should also be noted that this guitar isnt made with whats considered 'nanotechnology' but is created using regular 'bulk'-technology.
The real meaning of nanotechnology is the way you build it, not how big it is, and in nanotechnology it should be built using single atoms each seperately placed where it should be.
One significant difference is that in bulk-technology on the microscale you want to build as small as possible if you want to be cool, but in nanotechnology you want to build as large as possible, because you already have control over the induvidual atoms and want to build complex stuff...
Why dont you build yourself tour own scanning tunneling microscope instead? I read some time ago about a 18-year old student, Todd Gustavsson if i remember it correctly that built his own STM in his fathers basement..
Everybody could connectit to our Linux-boxen and write some GPL-software for it and everybody could spend all night building nanobots;)
Its really nice to see that nanotechnology research is getting more casual, but there should be more feedback(very good song by covenant btw) from slashdotters on this kind of article. You should realize that this probably will have much more impact ont the world than if linux beat NT in some webserver test within the next couple of decades and this is definitively related to computing, this would make beowulf clusters with millions of nodes rock. But its so much more than that.
This computer-age is nothing compared to the possibility of affecting atoms, ok i admit nanotech advocate, but if this technology leads to nanobots the way we think of them today, we could be in our favorite sci-fi movie really soon, with exceptions such as that we wont get repulsorlift and wont hear sound in space and wont have any mithoclorowhatever its called in our blood just to take starwars as an example.
I encourage all you sci-fi lovers out there to get into the subject.
Well, ive written far to much now =)
STM leads to 'control of atoms', 'control of atoms' leads to nanobots, nanobots leads to 'very funky things'.
"The timing might be slightly better in the Gibson spec, though. 1394 is great for stereo signals and would work well for source signals, but the timing is not quite good enough to seperate a mixed signal. You need picosecond resolution for that."
Well.. no you dont, youre really way off or you made a typo:)
microsecond resolution is more than enough when it comes to audio, and picosecond would mean a million times more precise than that. picoseconde resolution practically would mean that the audio hardware would be capable of sampling frequencies at a terahertz =), i would be really impressed if any other manufacturer pulled this off, besides you would need to uprgrade your computer to handle the load..;)
I think this dude should be moderated as funny. Either this or he doesnt have a clue what hes talking about.
Sweden do have free speech. Even censorship is illegal, which means that if you want to publish anything, nobody has any legal right to stop you. If you publish anything illegal it can be stopped afterwards but nobody can stop you from publishing it first. The ONLY exception to this movies when showed on the cinema. I dont really know why they have this exception. This is what our open-source constitution says.
Slashdot Mirror
One little thing concerning the bad midi-timing in windows. BeOS has an improvment to this because of a kernel feature. Besides the regular distribution of the cpu to different threads (which isnt always fine enough) it has a command called snooze (i think) which lets the kernel distribute the cpu to other threads until a specified number of microseconds has ellapsed. That way the midi-playing thread should get much more reliable timing.
However Im not at all an expert at this stuff, but this is the way i understood it works. You can check it out in the Be Book if you want more info..
determining drivers shouldnt take that long if the software isnt doing something stupid, look at BeOS, it detects hardware on each boot, and on my machine it takes about twelve seconds..
:)
ok, maybe a bit offtopic
Because of the size of the pupil during daylight is about 2 millimeters, tha angular resolution is physically limited to 1.22 * wavelength / 0.002, and since purple light with 400 nanometers gives the smallest angle, well use that.
;), its just a guess ) that would give a resolution of about 6000 x 6000 pixels, and note that this is the absolutely maximal resolution the eye could ever get, im not saying it has that resolution, but its defenitely not above this..
this gives a angle of 0.014 degrees, and if the eye has a field of vision of 90 degrees (this looks good in quake
also note that the fov is a guess, but it probably should be quite close to that, and it gives quite a approximation at least..
Just a note, 16-bit audio is not Good Enough...
The human ear is limited to a dynamic range of about 120dB, and where 16-bit audio is theoretically limited to 96dB, and in reality the best consumer soundcards has a dynamic range of about 80dB due to noisy D/A converters...
I didnt say the parent post says that current soundcards is good enough for absolute sound realism, its just some of the replies that does..
Just because they done bad things before doesnt have to mean that they MUST do all new desicions bad..
"Until people make this better for the average man on an average budget people will not buy this anyway; especially if microsoft gets into the game. Operations on a 3d world cost of LOT of CPU cycles and a TON of memory. Until quad Overclocked Merceed, or Beowulf systems with a Terabyte of ram in them this will be difficult."
Nah, it could even be faster than the current 2D windowmanagers if it is done right. (I call it a windowmanager even though it probably would be more than a combination of that and a X server)
Imagine having a 3D card with Transform & Lightning acceleration and 32 or 64 megs of RAM. The GeForce does this and S3 has a card on the way too.
The windowmanager would write to the texture memory instead of videomemory when updating the contents of a window, assuming it can be describe as a texture, but all current apps can. This would sress the just CPU as much as current 2D approach.
But the memory only needs to be reloaded when the contents is refreshed, and not when the windows is moved or rotaded or whatever!
As long as it keeps within a reasonable amount of load on the Tranform & Lightning engine and the fill rate of the card, this would practically not load the CPU at all! This should be runned on a separate thread, and it would make such things that doesnt need the really smooth.
And it doesnt take much CPU time either if theres no geometry acceleration available. A window doesnt need to be more than two triangles, which means four vertexes, and one vertex need nine(i think) floating point calculations(one matrix multiplication, but the conversion matrix has to be calculated in advance, which takes a bit more time but not that much). Just as long as it doesnt use too many polygons, the CPU load is really load.
Note that this using 3D-acceleration could be really nice in 2D as well. All this funky animation and translucency effects could be done really fast instead of slowing things down..
This dude im replying to just seems to have WAY too much against some new ideas, but I agree with that software is getting slower and bloated, especially the microsoft crap, but that doesnt mean that the computer industry should stop to evolve. Having 3D windowmanagers can be really slow, but doesnt have to be. Should we ban all 3D windowmanager just because of that? I still believe that a properly done 3D windowmanager could be faster than the 2D windowmanagers we have today on current hardware..
I dont remember the exact number but its a little above 100 channels you can send to the card at once. The MIDI-synth on the card uses the host computers memory over the PCI-bus and it handles 64 voices simultainously, so theres quite a lot of bandwidth there. There can also be 32 wave streams sent to the card, all mixed and processed by creaties cute 3d effects if you want that..
So sending stuff to the card should be no problem, but I remeber reading an interview with E-mus chief technichian Dave Rossum, and when the asked him if the EMU10k1 dsp would be capable of doin things like MPEG-2 decoding, he said it could not be done because MPEG-2 decoding was done in the frequency domain and that the EMU10K1 is a time-domain processor. I think the same would apply to encoding MP3 files, not that i know that much a bout the algorithms behind but there is sure as hell a lot of frequency-domain stuff involved.
The comcept of having custom dsp algoritms would rock very much, but I dont think its gonna happen. Creative will probable ship the DSP-code as a binary as many users have stated before, and this is logical, because they probably dont want to "give away" the sourcecode of their nice reverbs and stuff, even if its quite dependant of the EM10K1 dsp, it could surely be rewritten to use on other processors..
But I really hope Im wrong, and there could be other possibilities too, that they provide their algorithms as precompiled libraries or something but keeping other parts of the DSP code open..
Yes, the problem for BeOS is the web-browser.
I dont think that Mozilla will be ready soon enough, and NetPositive 3 is still too buggy..
If they choose BeOS then Opera might be a choice. But there since AOL is involved there is also another possibility, Netscape.
Currently there is no BeOS version of Netscape as we all know, but since AOL has pumped in eight-hundred million bucks in gateway and owns Netscape, a port could be made real quick if needed. Netscape source is probably already quite portable because it has quite a few target platforms, so adding BeOS could be done quite quick if there is economical interest.
And Be has been talked a lot about internet appliances lately, and they probably know more about whats happening, so it might be a possibility after all.
Imposing standards can be give freedom sometimes..
An example would be that a government choose a specific document-format for the entire government and other public organizations. I dont know which format this should be, but absolutely not Microsafts ".doc"-format. An open-format would be the choice of course.
This would mean that people working with affected documents wouldnt be limited using a wordprocessor compatible with ".doc" if they hate Word. Because its a format designed with just one program and plaform in mind, and uses some embedding only used in windows. Which makes it hard to make other programs read and write it correctly..
I think goverments should work to get more standarized formats thats open. JPEG,PNG,MPEG,MP3 are nice examples of this.
I would have excpected Finland to force people to use Linux, the US to force people to use windows, and France to force people using BeOS, but this is so confusing... ;)
Excuse me but this just sound plain stupid, if you ever would want to replace a musician because you dont have the money to have real ones, you probably would replace them with prerecorded pieces of music in appropriate lengths that you have on a CD or DAT.
:)
I dont really know how their system would work, but i thought of some alternatives.:
If the thing is about dynamically created music content, I doubt that you could get any interesting music from it, you will get musically correct results that follows correct scales and such, but i doubt that you get anything that affect the listener or anything like that. It would only sound like a cheap home-multimedia hobby midifile.. Computers can not feel.
If its about ready made midi-style music thats "groove-quantitized" in real-time, then whats the deal? You can just have a digital recording of the music, and that would mean much better sound quality.. (by sound quality i dont mean the quality the music is made in, like cd-quality or such, but how professional the results sounds after mixing and mastering and all the other stuff)
All these ways of doing things would still only give you midi-style quality, since its realtime rendered sound, and just wont sound real enough for most instruments. Even if todays midi-intruments can sound real enough, you need very clever sequencing from the musicians to get it realistic, and its totally different on different instruments and is higly dependant of someone clever that can make it feel real, and a computer just cant do that until our computers have evolved a lot.. (think androids)
just a thought
>That and I don't really think at all when I code.
do you work for microsoft?
:)
"While nanotechnoligy is just the minitureazation (sp?) of todays technology, quantum technology is totally diffrent, works on diffrent principals and will make nanotechnoligy obselete."
/.-ers are a little too much focused on the computing possibilities of new technology and doesnt see the whole picture.
Nanotechnology ISN`T minitureazition, maybe this Dip Pen is, but real nanotechnology goes the other way around, building big things from single atoms.
Nanotechnology also is so much more than just making computers, nanocomputers is just one possible application. The technologys biggest potential is manufacturing of just about everything, from spacerockets to food, and the breaktrough is supposed to be when we can build self-replicating assemblers(a.k.a. nanobots) who can build items and dublicate themselfs from atoms, and therefore be able to grow exponetially in number.
Quantum computing and nanotechnology is absolutely _not_ mutually exclusive, and quantum computing is probably going to be realised USING nanotechnology. It could also be a possibility that we have easier realising nanotechnology with help from the increased computing power of quantum computing, its all about which one comes first..
It seems like many of you
But it would be really groovy to make this big FAT16 partions as well if it was possible..
FAT16 allows 16 bits cluster adressing, meaning that you get 2^16. Divide 73GB with that and you get 1.06 MB per cluster... really efficient on your disk space!
Well, then this could easily be 10 dumb things
BeOS users do if theyre dumb: =)
1) Forgetting to read the hardware compability list.
2) Putting the Install CD upside down in their cdrom.
3) Setting anything else than your be partition as default in the boot menu.
4) Creating a bootdisk, beos doesnt need it to be recovered, the cd is just fine
5) Using beos for x86 and ppc on the same machine
6) Trying to recompile the kernel
7) Using x86_R3 applications
8) Rebooting after setting up the network
9) Defragmenting their beos partition
10) Trying to exit the GUI to get to a fullscreen prompt
ahh.. so it isnt java then..
Its evil Bills personal Java thats supposed to work only in IE..
I wont obey though, and wont even try to run it, ignoring Bills feeble attempts trying to make me run IE..
It should also be noted that this guitar isnt made with whats considered 'nanotechnology' but is created using regular 'bulk'-technology.
The real meaning of nanotechnology is the way you build it, not how big it is, and in nanotechnology it should be built using single atoms each seperately placed where it should be.
One significant difference is that in bulk-technology on the microscale you want to build as small as possible if you want to be cool, but in nanotechnology you want to build as large as possible, because you already have control over the induvidual atoms and want to build complex stuff...
like nanobots =)
guys, you do know that because of the very high speed light has, you have to consider the effects of einsteins theory of relativity. ;-)
;)
"Jupiter is supposed to be like .998 solar masses or something like that... so wouldn't that make it a star?"
;) )
nope, the sun is about 1000 times heavier than jupiter.
The sun has the same mass as 333340 times the earth, but jupiter only has the mass of 318 earths.. (poor jupiter
Why dont you build yourself tour own scanning tunneling microscope instead? I read some time ago about a 18-year old student, Todd Gustavsson if i remember it correctly that built his own STM in his fathers basement..
;)
Everybody could connectit to our Linux-boxen and write some GPL-software for it and everybody could spend all night building nanobots
Its really nice to see that nanotechnology research is getting more casual, but there should be more feedback(very good song by covenant btw) from slashdotters on this kind of article. You should realize that this probably will have much more impact ont the world than if linux beat NT in some webserver test within the next couple of decades and this is definitively related to computing, this would make beowulf clusters with millions of nodes rock. But its so much more than that.
This computer-age is nothing compared to the possibility of affecting atoms, ok i admit nanotech advocate, but if this technology leads to nanobots the way we think of them today, we could be in our favorite sci-fi movie really soon, with exceptions such as that we wont get repulsorlift and wont hear sound in space and wont have any mithoclorowhatever its called in our blood just to take starwars as an example.
I encourage all you sci-fi lovers out there to get into the subject.
Well, ive written far to much now =)
STM leads to 'control of atoms', 'control of atoms' leads to nanobots, nanobots leads to 'very funky things'.
"The timing might be slightly better in the Gibson spec, though. 1394 is great for stereo signals and would work well for source signals, but the timing is not quite good enough to seperate a mixed signal. You need picosecond resolution for that."
:)
;)
Well.. no you dont, youre really way off or you made a typo
microsecond resolution is more than enough when it comes to audio, and picosecond would mean a million times more precise than that. picoseconde resolution practically would mean that the audio hardware would be capable of sampling frequencies at a terahertz =), i would be really impressed if any other manufacturer pulled this off, besides you would need to uprgrade your computer to handle the load..
Well.. If we would make artificial life, well probably need artificial storks as well ;)
I think this dude should be moderated as funny. Either this or he doesnt have a clue what hes talking about.
Sweden do have free speech. Even censorship is illegal, which means that if you want to publish anything, nobody has any legal right to stop you. If you publish anything illegal it can be stopped afterwards but nobody can stop you from publishing it first. The ONLY exception to this movies when showed on the cinema. I dont really know why they have this exception. This is what our open-source constitution says.