Else when I got mod points tomorrow (at the current rate of one set every two days), you'd have a +1, Informative sitting in your lap.
The device itself is interesting. Triple display support is my ideal. One honking big screen landscaped in front of you with the main workpiece on it, and two smaller portraited panels either side for toolboxes and ancilliary stuff (like Googling for details, samples etc). You get something as useful as the whopping great big Apple panoramic displays, but with better DPI and for about 1/3 of the price.
The rules for building one or a handful of cars are completely different (at least in Oz) to the rules for building ten thousand at a run. An Open design which could be built by individuals would be significantly different from the same design aimed at factories.
Because this card is open, it would be temptingly easy to program the FPGA to solve non-display problems. Having the video hardware hanging off it would be merely convenient. In that context, being able to shove half a dozen stripped-down PCI versions of the card into a cheap motherboard might be exactly what a particular application demands.
Or perhaps a handful of PCI cards with four video outputs apiece might be handy for running a whole security room full of monitors from one box. I can imagine ATI or NVidia getting a bit... sticky, shall we say, about someone sawing up one of their own cards to the same end.
There are already a good number of driver developers involved in the project, some of whom have gotten funding from their employers to work on it.
...presumably said employers are hard-nosed businessmen, unaccustomed to throwing away money for wishful or altruistic reasons?
If that's a given, if they can see the value in the OGP to themselves, then it doesn't matter what someone who controls essentially $0 thinks about your project. As long as there is business value and mandated openness in the card, then the card will fly and the "freedom value" will quite happily ride for nix.
So essentially OGP's object is to interest enough of said hard-nosed businessmen to get to the first megabuck? Then you'll give the whingers what they say they want, because you wanted it available and not because of all the whining?
AFAICT, their cards have always sucked, from the zillion-different-versions Virges (which were often slower with hardware acceleration even under MS-Windows) through the lacklustre Savage to whatever they're calling it today.
I think OGP is worth supporting not so much for their first card as for showing other manufacturers that there is no secret sauce.
Really!
Each knows pretty much what the others are doing (phut went the "but they'll reverse-engineer us and drive us out of business argument), and any advantages one may hold over the others are temporary. That makes the competition expensive for both players and customers because they're competing on qualities not related to the utility of the product, qualities like advertising abilities and distributor channel reach.
With fully opened architectures they could compete on utility and price instead of greater amounts of meritless advertising or exciting-sounding but practically useless secret sauces.
...a TCP stack, 1280x1024x24 2D graphics display and X11 decoder with one of those, a stick of RAM and some interface chips?
I'm thinking of a little (few matchboxes) black box which you plug into a flatscreen's video connector and either run the power cable through or power over ethernet. With the addition of two or more USB sockets, you have an instant thin client.
...then why not buld a cheap CPU-and-glue-logic FPGA and give the world the USD$100 laptop by the end of this year?
Or if you could build a TCP stack and an X server directly into the hardware, you could fit the entire thing (plus ethernet plus 2x or 4x USB) inside the back of a standard 17" LCD screen and probably even power it from the screen's PSU without it noticing and it would still absolutely rock as a thin client.
Has been. Trust me on this one. But there is a mode before ploughing (which is basically the tyre bulldozing all before it) in which the tyre is not piling up (much) gravel in front of it, but is acting like a rudder.
Isotope ratios are observations. The dates derived from them are not observations. You can tell me exactly what the decay rate is now, but you can't tell me with certainty either what it was in the past nor what the starting conditions were. Either lack makes the derivations useless for dating.
Evolution is based on a huge series of non-observations.
At the risk of confusing you yet again, we could list some direct, physical non-observations like transitional fossils, but the whole point is that your "certainties" are extrapolations to unknown starting points through uncharted waters.
The original calibration for ancient radio-isotope dating was the geological column and its index fossils. The original geological column was pulled out of someone's ass, assigned arbitrary dates based on imagination and then modified based on field data to be less embarrassing. Meanwhile, the ranges of most index fossils (e.g. ammonites) have been extended and extended, often to uselessness.
The "age" assigned to Mary Schweitzer's fresh T Rex bone inside fossilised thigh bones was 68 million years. Fresh bone. After billions of days at (more or less) room temperature? Here, pull this one, it plays Jingle Bells.
Ring species offer a continuous series of variations leading back to the starting point. Think of a genetic Mobius strip. Species from opposite points on the ring typically won't (not necessarily "can't") interbreed.
That shows differentiation, the filtering and selection (reduction) of available information, but speaks not at all to the generation of the novel, useful traits (increase of information) required by evolution.
Er, we have no idea what the original conditions are like but we know that those molecules formed. How? An act of faith?
We have very strong evidence that complex organic molecules do form naturally.
Yes, that's correct. Velikovski would have been pleased.
Sadly, not just any old complex organics will do, they have to be the right ones; and complex is also relative. "Complex", in this case, is at the level of some of the simplest amino acids, which is light-years short of any significant part of anything living, and even so some of the simplest necessary aminos can't be formed "by accident".
After the Miller-Urey experiment, Stanley's so far spent the rest of his life trying to make the other necessaries, and has so far discovered that (1) you can't; and (2) the conditions for his original experiment have never existed.
All of these explanations fit either Creationism or Intelligent Design far better than they fit Naturalistic Evolution.
Mary: "It still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and it's not any more dense than modern bone; it's bone more than anything."
Translation: it's not fossilised at any level.
Dr Matthew Collins: "My suspicion is this process has led to the reaction of more resistant molecules with the normal proteins and carbohydrates which make up these cellular structures, and replaced them, so that we have a very tough, resistant, very lipid-rich material - a polymer that would be very difficult to break down and characterise, but which has preserved the structure," Translation: this can't be what it obviously is, so I'll speculate wildly in the hope of looking knowledgeable and Orthodox.
Don't be sad, you're the first person on any forum anywhere who has even tried to answer that one.
RC would cause endless onfusion ("this is rc-rc2") but I'd like it. Try pronouncing it, you'll get all sorts of jokes about good luck. Squeaker? Does it have to be a toy? The Andy release would be a candidate, if not. Does it have to be TS1? If not, Zurg is on the table (Debian could release a distro cored on KERNEL32.EXE?:-).
Slashdot Mirror
...with a journalling FS...
They seem to be fond of CPUs. (-:
Impressive to see [done] next to so many items. Complete systems on a chip, boards to host same, FFR, JTAG, AC97-on-a-chip, lots of stuff.
Else when I got mod points tomorrow (at the current rate of one set every two days), you'd have a +1, Informative sitting in your lap.
The device itself is interesting. Triple display support is my ideal. One honking big screen landscaped in front of you with the main workpiece on it, and two smaller portraited panels either side for toolboxes and ancilliary stuff (like Googling for details, samples etc). You get something as useful as the whopping great big Apple panoramic displays, but with better DPI and for about 1/3 of the price.
Is anyone selling a board or kit fo rthe suckers?
They have businesses already sponsoring some of their driver developers. Not geeks, hackers or "open source die-hards" (hi, Richard!).
And yes, they are doing the whole lot on FPGA. RTFA.
Silly coward, kicks are for twits!
The 9200SE's graphics performance is hardly something to write home about. I'm looking at the output of one now.
The rules for building one or a handful of cars are completely different (at least in Oz) to the rules for building ten thousand at a run. An Open design which could be built by individuals would be significantly different from the same design aimed at factories.
Because this card is open, it would be temptingly easy to program the FPGA to solve non-display problems. Having the video hardware hanging off it would be merely convenient. In that context, being able to shove half a dozen stripped-down PCI versions of the card into a cheap motherboard might be exactly what a particular application demands.
Or perhaps a handful of PCI cards with four video outputs apiece might be handy for running a whole security room full of monitors from one box. I can imagine ATI or NVidia getting a bit... sticky, shall we say, about someone sawing up one of their own cards to the same end.
If that's a given, if they can see the value in the OGP to themselves, then it doesn't matter what someone who controls essentially $0 thinks about your project. As long as there is business value and mandated openness in the card, then the card will fly and the "freedom value" will quite happily ride for nix.
So essentially OGP's object is to interest enough of said hard-nosed businessmen to get to the first megabuck? Then you'll give the whingers what they say they want, because you wanted it available and not because of all the whining?
AFAICT, their cards have always sucked, from the zillion-different-versions Virges (which were often slower with hardware acceleration even under MS-Windows) through the lacklustre Savage to whatever they're calling it today.
I think OGP is worth supporting not so much for their first card as for showing other manufacturers that there is no secret sauce.
Really!
Each knows pretty much what the others are doing (phut went the "but they'll reverse-engineer us and drive us out of business argument), and any advantages one may hold over the others are temporary. That makes the competition expensive for both players and customers because they're competing on qualities not related to the utility of the product, qualities like advertising abilities and distributor channel reach.
With fully opened architectures they could compete on utility and price instead of greater amounts of meritless advertising or exciting-sounding but practically useless secret sauces.
Apparently, the bag limit is now fifteen signs, limit of three per customer.
That will make at least one Western Australian business very happy.
The man in question being her Dad.
Naming each chunk in Saturn's rings should keep the hucksters busy for a while. Special on the 100m-500m range this week only.
...'coz the situation won't last since TrollTech improved the rules for the Win32 version of their Qt libraries.
...a TCP stack, 1280x1024x24 2D graphics display and X11 decoder with one of those, a stick of RAM and some interface chips?
I'm thinking of a little (few matchboxes) black box which you plug into a flatscreen's video connector and either run the power cable through or power over ethernet. With the addition of two or more USB sockets, you have an instant thin client.
...then why not buld a cheap CPU-and-glue-logic FPGA and give the world the USD$100 laptop by the end of this year?
Or if you could build a TCP stack and an X server directly into the hardware, you could fit the entire thing (plus ethernet plus 2x or 4x USB) inside the back of a standard 17" LCD screen and probably even power it from the screen's PSU without it noticing and it would still absolutely rock as a thin client.
Has been. Trust me on this one. But there is a mode before ploughing (which is basically the tyre bulldozing all before it) in which the tyre is not piling up (much) gravel in front of it, but is acting like a rudder.
Isotope ratios are observations. The dates derived from them are not observations. You can tell me exactly what the decay rate is now, but you can't tell me with certainty either what it was in the past nor what the starting conditions were. Either lack makes the derivations useless for dating.
Evolution is based on a huge series of non-observations.
At the risk of confusing you yet again, we could list some direct, physical non-observations like transitional fossils, but the whole point is that your "certainties" are extrapolations to unknown starting points through uncharted waters.
The original calibration for ancient radio-isotope dating was the geological column and its index fossils. The original geological column was pulled out of someone's ass, assigned arbitrary dates based on imagination and then modified based on field data to be less embarrassing. Meanwhile, the ranges of most index fossils (e.g. ammonites) have been extended and extended, often to uselessness.
The "age" assigned to Mary Schweitzer's fresh T Rex bone inside fossilised thigh bones was 68 million years. Fresh bone. After billions of days at (more or less) room temperature? Here, pull this one, it plays Jingle Bells.
Rings don't have ends.
Ring species offer a continuous series of variations leading back to the starting point. Think of a genetic Mobius strip. Species from opposite points on the ring typically won't (not necessarily "can't") interbreed.
That shows differentiation, the filtering and selection (reduction) of available information, but speaks not at all to the generation of the novel, useful traits (increase of information) required by evolution.
Er, we have no idea what the original conditions are like but we know that those molecules formed. How? An act of faith?Yes, that's correct. Velikovski would have been pleased.
Sadly, not just any old complex organics will do, they have to be the right ones; and complex is also relative. "Complex", in this case, is at the level of some of the simplest amino acids, which is light-years short of any significant part of anything living, and even so some of the simplest necessary aminos can't be formed "by accident".
After the Miller-Urey experiment, Stanley's so far spent the rest of his life trying to make the other necessaries, and has so far discovered that (1) you can't; and (2) the conditions for his original experiment have never existed.
All of these explanations fit either Creationism or Intelligent Design far better than they fit Naturalistic Evolution.
Dr Matthew Collins: "My suspicion is this process has led to the reaction of more resistant molecules with the normal proteins and carbohydrates which make up these cellular structures, and replaced them, so that we have a very tough, resistant, very lipid-rich material - a polymer that would be very difficult to break down and characterise, but which has preserved the structure," Translation: this can't be what it obviously is, so I'll speculate wildly in the hope of looking knowledgeable and Orthodox.
Don't be sad, you're the first person on any forum anywhere who has even tried to answer that one.
...it's precisely what Wickramasinghe & co did in codifying panspermia - in an attempt to avoid the intelligent design implied in abiogenesis.
RC would cause endless onfusion ("this is rc-rc2") but I'd like it. Try pronouncing it, you'll get all sorts of jokes about good luck. Squeaker? Does it have to be a toy? The Andy release would be a candidate, if not. Does it have to be TS1? If not, Zurg is on the table (Debian could release a distro cored on KERNEL32.EXE? :-).
...and you'll have no trouble remembering that "Sid is unstable".