Both rendered by, and featuring as the island's central computer, an SGI "Crimson" 100MHz MIPS 4000 minicomputer.
I know, I owned one. SGI sold them in the same configuration used by ILM (minus memory), in a numbered and signed set, as "Crimson, Jurassic Classic" models.
If you're a developer for that platform, use the development station that is built for that platform. Have it save BMPs, JPGs, or whatever other standard image format you want, straight from the video memory, at whatever point in the game you want.
Once you have a whole slew of screenshots, load them to your computer, and post-process them to bring back that good ol' crappy NTSC feel to them.
NTSC is the color encoding that actually reaches your television. (Or PAL for many countries.) The colors' saturation need to be bumped up a lot, put the whole image out of focus slightly and the brightnesses pushed more contrasty, and the black areas need to be boosted to a dull dark gray. Now, you've got a realistic screenshot for your computer.
Game artists have to consider this in reverse. They have to remember that the typical television can't handle really super-saturated reds and cyans and yellows the way that monitors can. [Many image editors can help you find colored areas that would speckle or scream on an NTSC display.] They have to remember that everything comes out more contrasty, yet still doesn't achieve real black. They have to remember that pixels on TV are round and blurry, not crisp like a monitor emulating the same resolution.
Colors are hard to reproduce exactly on NTSC. The initials NTSC don't really stand for Never The Same Color, but it's so common a joke that I've forgotten the actual words.
Seeing a console development station's screen side-by-side with a regular NTSC screen... same image but night and day.
Coding religion flame wars will probably be started by this, but...:)
I like my open curly braces UNDER the IF, thank you very much. It seems like all the rage in Java and Perl circles to put it at the right end of the screen, so you have to scan left and right AND down to see matches.
If I edit someone else's code, though, I put the curlies where THE AUTHOR would want them. I don't pretty-print/indent, and I don't touch more lines than I need to. Ugly or not.
When you read "up to X" in advertising literature, they are not guaranteeing that they'll be able to provide "X", just that they aren't able to provide "X+1".
You may have already won... (and then again, you may not have).
Reaching up to 43 MPG in the city! (unless they allow other traffic and stoplights to slow you down from a cruising 55).
Save up to 50% (unless it's a lucrative product, and we only mark off 5%).
Read the fine print. If it doesn't say "guarantee of at least Y", don't expect anything in terms of guarantees.
As for Port 25 blocks... 95% of those who want to host an SMTP server are doing it for relays or their own spamming enterprises. The other 5% are doing it as a part of their technical consulting, and that's against the "for home and personal use only" clauses of the terms of service. If you're a business, you are invited to use more professional-grade features. You're eating bandwidth, and they have to charge for it.
I think this may be preaching to the choir here, but this is my take. I'd love to hear any other refinements of this brief rant aimed at those less familiar with the concepts.
[stock rant on the subject]
Computers cannot be offended: it's not the censorware computer program that is doing the filtering of offensive material.
If it's not the censorware, it's the proponents of the censorware,
that chooses what to hide from you. What political slant or prejudices
are you entrusting with the filter?
Government-mandated filtering via a commercial product means a
private company becomes a government bureacracy: think of the complexity
of ensuring several million, if not billions, of websites are blocked or
allowed according to government-mandated standards.
If a government sets the standards for what to filter, then the
government opens itself for lawsuits. Millions of lawsuits where
website creators feels they are being censored unfairly.
[T]he Constitution of the United States Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of sXXXch,
or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the
government for a redress of grievances.
Um, duh, MacOS isn't one of their own trademarked Windows[tm] versions.
There are many groups at Microsoft. The numbers of the departments vary, but are generally along the lines of "Systems," "Applications," and "Tools;" they move the language guys around between Languages, Apps, Tools, and Internet, depending on the prevailing wind.
Inside the groups are Business Units, or BU's. Each product is its own BU, where it makes its own strategic decisions about how and what to develop. Of course there's the Windows platform strategy, since it's had more than 50% of the OS market for the last ten years. Of course it's good business sense to capture the MacOS market or the Linux market, if they look like they'll get significant market share.
There are a lot of cynical borgesque statements floating around. Some are true, some are false. One commonly touted one, Windows ain't done 'til Lotus won't run is false... in fact, Philippe Kahn of Borland (having already made several portable OS/2+Windows apps) even told the Windows-inexperienced Lotus flacks to stop whining and write some real code.
If a new version of Windows wouldn't run an app that had marketshare, then they'd lose that upgrade market. They had to go to great lengths to fix bugs while maintaining backward compatibility. Windows 3.1 had to create 'apphacks,' which were a list of 3.0 bugfixes that Windows would undo for certain best-selling applications, including Lotus 1-2-3W. If they fixed the bug, Lotus would crash even more than usual. About 1000 applications were analyzed.
On July 20, 1999 slashdot mentioned the 8 ball and the resulting traffic overwhelmed the server. The 8 ball can only serve about 400 visitors per hour, (about an 8 second cycle time) we were receiving 1200 visitors per hour. The waiting queue went over 70, the resulting system load caused the server to assume something was wrong and reboot. Timely intervention resulted in a modification to the nabber program to shun visitors when more than 20 people are already in the queue. This takes the form of a graphic informing them to try back later instead of the usual "You are 2345, now serving 2356" messages. Since this modification there has been no problem with system load. Even with the limit of 20 the ball remained saturated until hours after it had moved off the slashdot page, 2/3rds of the visitors waited more than 100 seconds for their turn at destiny.
For the record, I asked the Public 8Ball "Is this for real?" and the answer I got back was along the lines of "definitely, yes."
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble,
and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.
One, Hemos just okayed the writeup someone else submitted to the queue. He didn't add any comments to it, except the "dept" tag and possibly the title.
Two, Hemos' job can be stated as publishing stories on the front page that will generate lots of page visits. To troll, in the fishing sense, is to put bait out that will generate lots of bites on the hook. Thus, Hemos is a troll, but that's his job.
If you don't want to be baited, don't go somewhere that constantly and loudly claims to have nothing to do with professional journalism. They intend to get people to talk, even if it's on a gut-reaction level, as that is what pays the rent.
The story is right, but you have the wrong computer.
Apple's ROMs had entrypoints that were all over the ROMs' address range, because they didn't want to dedicate any area as a jump table. Franklin copied the ROM verbatim, as rewriting it would screw up the entrypoints. Apple sued Franklin, and WON.
IBM made the BIOS (with function numbers instead of haphazard entry vectors) specifically so that it could be re-written, extended, improved over time. They PUBLISHED the source code to the whole BIOS, and knew that this put them in the risk of being cloned. COMPAQ rewrote the BIOS, function by function, complying with the data interfaces only. IBM sued COMPAQ, and LOST.
Re:I built a simpler one with a BASIC STAMP...
on
Illusionary LED clock
·
· Score: 2
Last time I checked, the Stamp used a PIC.
Yep, and you could probably do a lot more if you knew what you were doing with PICs. I didn't, so I opted for the Stamp, which added a massive layer of abstraction on top of the PIC internals that made it much easier for me to experiment. That's what makes Stamps great for beginners: no need for anything but a parallel cable, a battery and a few LEDs before you can get your first project running.
It's like saying, "Last time I checked, Linux used a microprocessor." If you wanna write your own code directly on the iron without an OS on it, sure, go for it. If you prefer to have a little bit more support added, allowing for device I/O and such, well, use a microprocessor+software combination.
Re:I built a simpler one with a BASIC STAMP...
on
Illusionary LED clock
·
· Score: 2
No, it's not a misprint. 1.0F, not picoFarad, not microFarad, but one whole damned Farad.
I don't have any at the moment, so I can't read the can. Serious electronics shops have them (i.e., not Radio Shack). Barring that, see if there are any local HAM radio enthusiasts... someone'll sell them along with the mythical blue LEDs at a table.
The ones I got were a regular electrolytic can shape, with two leads poking out one of the flat bottom of the can. The can was a squat 1" diameter by 0.5" length, not including the leads, which were spaced at 0.1", the same pin spacing as most hobby boards (and the BASIC Stamp's pinout).
With the bidirectional 5-12V DC regulator on the BASIC Stamp, you can set up solar/capacitor projects easily. The solar cell can power the Stamp all day through one pin, and excess goes to trickle into the capacitor on the other pin. When the cell is in shadow, the voltage flips the other way, draining power from the capacitor instead. The total energy WILL drain the capacitor before dawn, for all but the smallest projects, but the Stamp will just resume or reboot when the solar energy starts up again.
In 1995 or so, I built a simpler model using a Parallax, Inc. v1 BASIC Stamp circuit.
(For those of you who haven't toyed with a BASIC Stamp, it's a 14 pin SIPP circuit board (1.4" x 0.5") with a 5-12V DC voltage regulator, clock, 8 programmable I/O pins, 256 bytes EEPROM memory, and TTL/RS232 control lines. You download programs that are tokenized BASIC, and the program is run whenever power is available.)
My clock and silent-radio didn't have a spatial sync, but did drive five LEDs to scroll through a message. I trickle-charged a small 1 Farad capacitor to power the circuit for about ten minutes, and spun the whole apparatus around on the end of a pencil to read the display.
I recommend the BASIC Stamps (v1 or the more capable v2s) for anyone who wants to play with digital programmable circuits for the first time.
My other 1.0-Farad-powered project was a small sound-effects generator that rode inside a slotcar racer. It used four tilted mercury switches as a crude accelerometer, to provide screech and revving sounds for my racecar.
One, this discusses some channels and surface features of craters, not of the whole surface of Mars.
Two, as many people have discussed, CO2 would not be viable as liquid for almost any time at all, in the Martian atmosphere.
However, since they appear in the walls of craters, these channel markings may not have always been surface features. If formed while rock was still overhead, underground pressures may have indeed been high enough to support liquid CO2. A crater is a surface defect caused by a collision.
For all we know, this is the Martian geological equivalent of termite tunnels through ironwood: we don't see the damage until we crack open the outer layers.
I don't have the liberty to check the whole set of data and findings that the scientists have gathered. And neither do 99% of us. Rather than jump to say, on limited information, "gee, that's impossible," I invite people to think about what may be possible. Critical thinking doesn't have to be destructive of theories.
All in all, poorly presented--especially since this is a technical forum, you damned idiot, not a pulpit for you to expound your personal political views..
immediately followed by your sig:
I'm voting for Nader because I'd rather be right than win.,
and topped with your introduction,
I do not support Bush. I think he is an idiot. I don't particularly like Gore, either.
The only official claims to Slashdot's topic that anyone within the organization has made are,
News for Nerds
"It's my site, I post the stuff I'm interested in" --CmdrTaco
Adding the word 'idiot' to the beginning and end of your post took away all the teeth to your argument. You turned it from a reasoned rebuttal into a flame. Flames are juvenile, and don't lend credence to your point of view.
'Flames' are not synonymous with 'Devil's Advocate'. The Devil's Advocate strategy of debate is to bring up a socratic hypothetical, usually using the other party's own stated reasoning, to show how the opposite conclusion may be reached.
Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association[,] also said he believes it is "hypocritical" for Cisco to take this "massive tax break" and at the same time support Proposition 39, which would make it easier to raise property taxes on California homeowners. Prop 39 would allow local school bonds to be approved by a vote of 55 percent instead of the current two-thirds.
I'd like to see a situation where a Corporation was only allowed to donate as much money as they paid in State or Federal taxes. A sort of 'matching funds' if you will. Your company pays $100k state taxes, it's allowed to spend $100k into the coffers of any state political party.
Maybe put the same sort of cap on paid lobbying activities, too.
It is scary that the largest corporation in the United States is able to get away with not paying federal taxes while you and I, mere citizens, have to pay taxes every year.
From the article,
Cisco Systems, the second-most valuable company in America, paid no federal income taxes for its latest fiscal year thanks to a little-known corporate tax break on employee stock options.
Microsoft, which ranks No. 4 in market value, did not pay any federal taxes either, it seems.
Little-known, maybe to the typical man on the street, but *well known* to pretty much any tech startup or tech corporation of any size.
The tax code in the USA is more complex than the Win2000 codebase, and has twice as many bugs. I have lost any hope of a simplified tax code, because representatives cut out special tax incentives and benefits for their constituents. In essence, it's their job to make the tax code more complicated, favoring the represented people AND corporations.
Most of the classics are in there, and they update this on a mostly useful schedule. I include this in the reply whenever one of my less-clued-in remote relatives asks "Is this legit?"
The CPUID instruction looks at a "function" number in a register. (EAX, if I recall). If it's one value, it returns what processor type it is. If it's another value, it returns a bitflag of known capabilities. If it's other values, it returns the range of legal values for this function index. New functions can be added by different processors.
In the Piii, CPUID supported a function to return a unique per-chip number. They later recanted, returning identical garbage or zeros on all Piiis.
To be compatible, Athlons followed suit: they made a damaged CPUID function akin to Pentiums.
The article SEEMS to be saying that the Transmeta emulates the Athlon's implementation, but that a NEW function is available to get unique per-cpu numbers.
Another interesting fact is that the Crusoe processor supplies a serial number via CPUID... The "true" CPUID command (compatible with the AMD Athlon) does not yield a serial number.
I don't get it. They want to appear "privacy friendly" by not implementing the Intel Pentium III CPUID serial number code, but they are still per-cpu identifiable.
Which will come first, the big Linux-world outcry that Linus Torvalds works for a privacy sellout, or a piece of software that sniffs the Crusoe's cpuid-stained butt to target ads more effectively?
When the Washington Monument, National Mall, Washington, D.C. was completed, a one-pound chunk of aluminum formed the very tip of the monument. Reasoning: it was a precious metal at that time. It was akin to placing a gemstone there.
Slashdot Mirror
The term is UCITA.
Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act.
Learn it, know it, conquer it.
Jurassic Park.
Both rendered by, and featuring as the island's central computer, an SGI "Crimson" 100MHz MIPS 4000 minicomputer.
I know, I owned one. SGI sold them in the same configuration used by ILM (minus memory), in a numbered and signed set, as "Crimson, Jurassic Classic" models.
If you're a developer for that platform, use the development station that is built for that platform. Have it save BMPs, JPGs, or whatever other standard image format you want, straight from the video memory, at whatever point in the game you want.
Once you have a whole slew of screenshots, load them to your computer, and post-process them to bring back that good ol' crappy NTSC feel to them.
NTSC is the color encoding that actually reaches your television. (Or PAL for many countries.) The colors' saturation need to be bumped up a lot, put the whole image out of focus slightly and the brightnesses pushed more contrasty, and the black areas need to be boosted to a dull dark gray. Now, you've got a realistic screenshot for your computer.
Game artists have to consider this in reverse. They have to remember that the typical television can't handle really super-saturated reds and cyans and yellows the way that monitors can. [Many image editors can help you find colored areas that would speckle or scream on an NTSC display.] They have to remember that everything comes out more contrasty, yet still doesn't achieve real black. They have to remember that pixels on TV are round and blurry, not crisp like a monitor emulating the same resolution.
Colors are hard to reproduce exactly on NTSC. The initials NTSC don't really stand for Never The Same Color, but it's so common a joke that I've forgotten the actual words.
Seeing a console development station's screen side-by-side with a regular NTSC screen... same image but night and day.
Coding religion flame wars will probably be started by this, but... :)
I like my open curly braces UNDER the IF, thank you very much. It seems like all the rage in Java and Perl circles to put it at the right end of the screen, so you have to scan left and right AND down to see matches.
If I edit someone else's code, though, I put the curlies where THE AUTHOR would want them. I don't pretty-print/indent, and I don't touch more lines than I need to. Ugly or not.
Plane tickets for ESR to forget to use: $350
Unsold t-shirts made to hype the event: $300
Gas and chow to fetch nobody at the airport: $150
Damage to your group's reputation: priceless.
Sorry, but I'd side with RoadRunner in this case.
When you read "up to X" in advertising literature, they are not guaranteeing that they'll be able to provide "X", just that they aren't able to provide "X+1".
Read the fine print. If it doesn't say "guarantee of at least Y", don't expect anything in terms of guarantees.
As for Port 25 blocks... 95% of those who want to host an SMTP server are doing it for relays or their own spamming enterprises. The other 5% are doing it as a part of their technical consulting, and that's against the "for home and personal use only" clauses of the terms of service. If you're a business, you are invited to use more professional-grade features. You're eating bandwidth, and they have to charge for it.
I think this may be preaching to the choir here, but this is my take. I'd love to hear any other refinements of this brief rant aimed at those less familiar with the concepts.
[stock rant on the subject]
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of sXXXch, or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances.
[end of stock rant on the subject]
Um, duh, MacOS isn't one of their own trademarked Windows[tm] versions.
There are many groups at Microsoft. The numbers of the departments vary, but are generally along the lines of "Systems," "Applications," and "Tools;" they move the language guys around between Languages, Apps, Tools, and Internet, depending on the prevailing wind.
Inside the groups are Business Units, or BU's. Each product is its own BU, where it makes its own strategic decisions about how and what to develop. Of course there's the Windows platform strategy, since it's had more than 50% of the OS market for the last ten years. Of course it's good business sense to capture the MacOS market or the Linux market, if they look like they'll get significant market share.
There are a lot of cynical borgesque statements floating around. Some are true, some are false. One commonly touted one, Windows ain't done 'til Lotus won't run is false ... in fact, Philippe Kahn of Borland (having already made several portable OS/2+Windows apps) even told the Windows-inexperienced Lotus flacks to stop whining and write some real code.
If a new version of Windows wouldn't run an app that had marketshare, then they'd lose that upgrade market. They had to go to great lengths to fix bugs while maintaining backward compatibility. Windows 3.1 had to create 'apphacks,' which were a list of 3.0 bugfixes that Windows would undo for certain best-selling applications, including Lotus 1-2-3W. If they fixed the bug, Lotus would crash even more than usual. About 1000 applications were analyzed.
From the website,
For the record, I asked the Public 8Ball "Is this for real?" and the answer I got back was along the lines of "definitely, yes."
[stock rant on the subject]
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.
[end of stock rant on the subject]
One, Hemos just okayed the writeup someone else submitted to the queue. He didn't add any comments to it, except the "dept" tag and possibly the title.
Two, Hemos' job can be stated as publishing stories on the front page that will generate lots of page visits. To troll, in the fishing sense, is to put bait out that will generate lots of bites on the hook. Thus, Hemos is a troll, but that's his job.
If you don't want to be baited, don't go somewhere that constantly and loudly claims to have nothing to do with professional journalism. They intend to get people to talk, even if it's on a gut-reaction level, as that is what pays the rent.
The story is right, but you have the wrong computer.
Apple's ROMs had entrypoints that were all over the ROMs' address range, because they didn't want to dedicate any area as a jump table. Franklin copied the ROM verbatim, as rewriting it would screw up the entrypoints. Apple sued Franklin, and WON.
IBM made the BIOS (with function numbers instead of haphazard entry vectors) specifically so that it could be re-written, extended, improved over time. They PUBLISHED the source code to the whole BIOS, and knew that this put them in the risk of being cloned. COMPAQ rewrote the BIOS, function by function, complying with the data interfaces only. IBM sued COMPAQ, and LOST.
Last time I checked, the Stamp used a PIC.
Yep, and you could probably do a lot more if you knew what you were doing with PICs. I didn't, so I opted for the Stamp, which added a massive layer of abstraction on top of the PIC internals that made it much easier for me to experiment. That's what makes Stamps great for beginners: no need for anything but a parallel cable, a battery and a few LEDs before you can get your first project running.
It's like saying, "Last time I checked, Linux used a microprocessor." If you wanna write your own code directly on the iron without an OS on it, sure, go for it. If you prefer to have a little bit more support added, allowing for device I/O and such, well, use a microprocessor+software combination.
No, it's not a misprint. 1.0F, not picoFarad, not microFarad, but one whole damned Farad.
I don't have any at the moment, so I can't read the can. Serious electronics shops have them (i.e., not Radio Shack). Barring that, see if there are any local HAM radio enthusiasts... someone'll sell them along with the mythical blue LEDs at a table.
The ones I got were a regular electrolytic can shape, with two leads poking out one of the flat bottom of the can. The can was a squat 1" diameter by 0.5" length, not including the leads, which were spaced at 0.1", the same pin spacing as most hobby boards (and the BASIC Stamp's pinout).
With the bidirectional 5-12V DC regulator on the BASIC Stamp, you can set up solar/capacitor projects easily. The solar cell can power the Stamp all day through one pin, and excess goes to trickle into the capacitor on the other pin. When the cell is in shadow, the voltage flips the other way, draining power from the capacitor instead. The total energy WILL drain the capacitor before dawn, for all but the smallest projects, but the Stamp will just resume or reboot when the solar energy starts up again.
In 1995 or so, I built a simpler model using a Parallax, Inc. v1 BASIC Stamp circuit.
(For those of you who haven't toyed with a BASIC Stamp, it's a 14 pin SIPP circuit board (1.4" x 0.5") with a 5-12V DC voltage regulator, clock, 8 programmable I/O pins, 256 bytes EEPROM memory, and TTL/RS232 control lines. You download programs that are tokenized BASIC, and the program is run whenever power is available.)
My clock and silent-radio didn't have a spatial sync, but did drive five LEDs to scroll through a message. I trickle-charged a small 1 Farad capacitor to power the circuit for about ten minutes, and spun the whole apparatus around on the end of a pencil to read the display.
I recommend the BASIC Stamps (v1 or the more capable v2s) for anyone who wants to play with digital programmable circuits for the first time.
My other 1.0-Farad-powered project was a small sound-effects generator that rode inside a slotcar racer. It used four tilted mercury switches as a crude accelerometer, to provide screech and revving sounds for my racecar.
One, this discusses some channels and surface features of craters, not of the whole surface of Mars.
Two, as many people have discussed, CO2 would not be viable as liquid for almost any time at all, in the Martian atmosphere.
However, since they appear in the walls of craters, these channel markings may not have always been surface features. If formed while rock was still overhead, underground pressures may have indeed been high enough to support liquid CO2. A crater is a surface defect caused by a collision.
For all we know, this is the Martian geological equivalent of termite tunnels through ironwood: we don't see the damage until we crack open the outer layers.
I don't have the liberty to check the whole set of data and findings that the scientists have gathered. And neither do 99% of us. Rather than jump to say, on limited information, "gee, that's impossible," I invite people to think about what may be possible. Critical thinking doesn't have to be destructive of theories.
Not too keen on following your own advice, hm?
immediately followed by your sig:
I'm voting for Nader because I'd rather be right than win.,
and topped with your introduction,
I do not support Bush. I think he is an idiot. I don't particularly like Gore, either.
The only official claims to Slashdot's topic that anyone within the organization has made are,
Adding the word 'idiot' to the beginning and end of your post took away all the teeth to your argument. You turned it from a reasoned rebuttal into a flame. Flames are juvenile, and don't lend credence to your point of view.
'Flames' are not synonymous with 'Devil's Advocate'. The Devil's Advocate strategy of debate is to bring up a socratic hypothetical, usually using the other party's own stated reasoning, to show how the opposite conclusion may be reached.
From the article,
I'd like to see a situation where a Corporation was only allowed to donate as much money as they paid in State or Federal taxes. A sort of 'matching funds' if you will. Your company pays $100k state taxes, it's allowed to spend $100k into the coffers of any state political party.
Maybe put the same sort of cap on paid lobbying activities, too.
It is scary that the largest corporation in the United States is able to get away with not paying federal taxes while you and I, mere citizens, have to pay taxes every year.
From the article,
Cisco Systems, the second-most valuable company in America, paid no federal income taxes for its latest fiscal year thanks to a little-known corporate tax break on employee stock options.
Microsoft, which ranks No. 4 in market value, did not pay any federal taxes either, it seems.
Little-known, maybe to the typical man on the street, but *well known* to pretty much any tech startup or tech corporation of any size.
The tax code in the USA is more complex than the Win2000 codebase, and has twice as many bugs. I have lost any hope of a simplified tax code, because representatives cut out special tax incentives and benefits for their constituents. In essence, it's their job to make the tax code more complicated, favoring the represented people AND corporations.
Looks like they reorganized last week. The new, more memorable address:
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
Here's the standard US Dept of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capacity (CIAC) website for tracking common Internet hoaxes.
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
Most of the classics are in there, and they update this on a mostly useful schedule. I include this in the reply whenever one of my less-clued-in remote relatives asks "Is this legit?"
I can't believe they'd bring back GWAR!
Heck, can you imagine delivering those spiny outfits the band members wore? Can you say cesaerian section?
Okay, slow day. So sue me. :)
The CPUID instruction looks at a "function" number in a register. (EAX, if I recall). If it's one value, it returns what processor type it is. If it's another value, it returns a bitflag of known capabilities. If it's other values, it returns the range of legal values for this function index. New functions can be added by different processors.
In the Piii, CPUID supported a function to return a unique per-chip number. They later recanted, returning identical garbage or zeros on all Piiis.
To be compatible, Athlons followed suit: they made a damaged CPUID function akin to Pentiums.
The article SEEMS to be saying that the Transmeta emulates the Athlon's implementation, but that a NEW function is available to get unique per-cpu numbers.
Another interesting fact is that the Crusoe processor supplies a serial number via CPUID... The "true" CPUID command (compatible with the AMD Athlon) does not yield a serial number.
I don't get it. They want to appear "privacy friendly" by not implementing the Intel Pentium III CPUID serial number code, but they are still per-cpu identifiable.
Which will come first, the big Linux-world outcry that Linus Torvalds works for a privacy sellout, or a piece of software that sniffs the Crusoe's cpuid-stained butt to target ads more effectively?
When the Washington Monument, National Mall, Washington, D.C. was completed, a one-pound chunk of aluminum formed the very tip of the monument. Reasoning: it was a precious metal at that time. It was akin to placing a gemstone there.