Length: 4 in. / 10 cm closed -- 6.3 in / 16 cm open Weight: 8.5 ounces / 264 grams Materials: 100% stainless steel (Optimum grade hardness for each tool/blade)
Sounds far too complicated when compared with my standard-issue Universal Fixing Tool. Works on everything, from delicate computer equipment to petrol engines.
Well, yes, I do indeed. a 12Meg Voodoo 2 i hijacked from work for a while to complement my lowly S3 Virge...quite an improvement indeed:)
The old 3dfx 'SLI' thing involved not one but two Voodoo 2 cards, in addition to the conventional 2D graphics card - unless you happened to hijack a second, matching 3D card, you won't have had SLI...:-)
What about those of us who want to spend a sane amount of money on their computers? Gamers are getting almost as bad as audiophiles these days.
Agreed - and, in a manner similar to those audiophiles, these 'hardcore gamers' seem to spend far more time discussing framerates and hardware upgrades than they do on the games themselves...
Although I do have to thank them for making medium-range PC kit affordable for the rest of them. Early adopters with bottomless wallets, we salute you!;-)
God that must have been hilarious, trying to toss toilets (and votes) at a file cabinet to make them stop. I do think the engine and games are far too open in terms of allowing these things.
To prove that I know far too much about Half-Life mapping - there's a monster_furniture entity for the original's single-player game. You get to see it crush a headcrab, in the guise of a filing cabinet...;-)
But I wouldn't take the presence of anything in a game's data files as indicative of that content as being functional or due for completion. Half-Life: Source, for example, has a few too many datafiles in it, including skins for a female scientist and numerous extra enemies, as well as a working model of Gordon Freeman as the hyper-beardy, ultra-low-polygon 'doctor.mdl'.
I've no idea which existing character any expansion pack for HL2 might follow, if any. But poking around the entrails of game datafiles is unlikely to reveal anything much, even if it is the infamous 'Alyxgun', capable of morphing from handgun to SMG to sniper rifle...
Actually in the UK now they have wireless machines into which you slot your card, the chip in the card authorises itself and the machine, then you type in a pin after confirming the amount.
It's still possible to get by with just a signature, as before - I only know this because I can never remember my PIN.
Still works in continental Europe as well, fortunately, where they've had the PIN system for a while.:-)
Funny indeed, but it also raises a point - how do these astronomers know that it's not just some intervening (and likely much, much closer) object that's opaque to visible light but permits radio wavelengths to pass through?
In space, it's unlikely for something that large to be dense enough to significantly block incoming light - instead, I gather it was detected through the emission of radio waves by gas clouds in this 'galaxy'.
I presume the process of discovery was that they found a large, rotating disc of cold hydrogen gas (you can measure velocities through the red- and blue-shifts of a particular emission frequency). The distance, angular size and radio strength of the disc gives you its approximate mass, and you can compare that with the mass it should have for that particular speed of rotation, thanks to gravity holding it all together. With that, you can calculate the amount of 'dark matter' - subtract the mass of hydrogen from the total mass, and what's left is presumably still there, just in an undetectable form.
A disclaimer: IANARABIDAUEAJBAPTAS*.
(* I am not a radio astronomer, but I did an undergraduate experiment at Jodrell Bank and pointed telescopes and stuff!)
2) The connectors are HUGE. You have to make a quite physically large card to accomadate that, even if the electronics don't justify it. ESpically a problem in small cases.
In case people haven't seen a conventional PCI-Express connector, I can tell you they're tiny!
My new PC has them, and I wasn't sure what they were at first. The PCIe-16x connector thingy for the graphics card is a sensible length (about the size of an old AGP slot, I'd say) but the 1x connectors are about 3cm long. I don't know what size PCIe-1x cards are going to be, but they could potentially be far shorter than a typical PCI card of today...
Vaguely on-topic - in terms of screen resolution independence, Half-Life 2 is pretty nifty. For the HUD numbers and weapon icons, instead of needing different bitmap images of different scales for different screen sizes, it uses a Truetype font.
It's a somewhat... unexpected solution, but it does make some kind of sense. And it means peculiar new resolutions are fine, and as long as the first-person weapon models work in the aspect ratio being used, things will look just as good. No need to redesign or messily rescale the whole user interface for a new display resolution (as would probably be the case with Halo 2), it's all done with vectors...
It isn't if you turn off the TV and turn on the radio. There is much humour on BBC Radio 4. I've been in paroxysms of laughter from some of the stuff they have on. Trouble is I was driving at the time...
Yup, loads of the good BBC comedies of recent years have come via Radio 4, including the aforementioned Little Britain. A lot of it is repeated on the digital-and-interweb-only BBC 7, which is an utterly ingenious trawling of the BBC radio archives for drama and comedy.
Fortunately, unless you've got a DAB radio in your car, there should be less risk of comedy-induced accidents...;-)
I love it: IBM's putting $100 Million into Linux software, and their premier desktop groupware appliacation [Lotus Notes] still doesn't have a Linux client.
To which I say - hooray!
It's awful, and while I don't actually use it myself, I pity those who do...;-)
It doesn't say a whole lot (and the victim agrees) when a serial burglar who had been imprisoned for burglary before and who was out on bail for yet another attempt only gets 11 months in prison.
Don't forget that he's had his identity (that would be Benjamin Park, 19, of Cambridge, fact fans!) and rather high-quality photos of his fine person conducting in criminal activity on the national news and spread around the world.
I think that's a remarkably fitting punishment...;-)
Great little tips, but only one problem, and that's that you're breaking servers by doing this. 3-5 requests is fine, but trying to do 30 requests at once puts some strain on the server.
Hmm... Y'know, I've got an idea.
One meellion maximum connections!
* Puts little finger to mouth and points Firebadger at Microsoft. *
Other than cost, the other apparent drawback to the dual-head nvidia card is that the relatively cheap ones (~$150) only have 64M of RAM, which can barely drive one 1600x1200 monitor at 32bpp. And the 128M versions are around $500.
I bought a 128MB PCI-Express Nvidia 6600 with DVI and VGA recently for a little over a hundred quid (including VAT) - it's now very happy driving two elderly 17in monitors at 1280x960 each. Came with a DVI-to-VGA converter, too!:-)
Quite a lot of fairly cheap cards seem to have the two ports, but do double-check that it's the case - the cheaper ones may have all the relevant gubbins in the chips but no actual DVI or S-Video ports.
Hmm... I would also appear to have a pile of PCI Matrox Millennia. Anyone for quintuple-head?
Actually, I typed up my mini-summary without reading your last, particularly informative post - it seems I was on the right track! While I do use an Apple iBook for loads of (non-graphical) programming stuff, I hadn't really understood why Quartz was so different, and your previous posts really informed me.
I think it's more that Quartz is another graphics API, where many of the rendering features ever-so-conveniently map on to PDF 1.4's rendering model.
In other words, it's easy to go from one to the other - it's trivial to convert a bunch of Quartz instructions to an equivalent PDF document and vice versa, even though the internal representations of the data are completely different.
Quartz isn't about applications sending actual PDF data across a pipe or socket into a renderer, it's a bit more sensible than that.:-)
Ford is really an alien doing research for an updated edition of the universe's ultimate travel companion, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
Belgium, my cover's blown. That's it, I'm off home. Your planet sucked anyway, monkeymen!
Except for the ale, of course. And the cheese biscuits, you know those octagonal ones with the sesame seeds on, they were quite nice too. Still, anyway, I'm back to Betelgeuse...
I'm sure there must be some... they'll be in a backroom somewhere, stacked next to the perpetual motion machines and the random noise compression algorithms.:-)
wow, an operating system that doesnt let you play media files. maybe once they make an OS which doesnt have a browser, they can further gut it by forcing MS to ship an OS without networking capabilities, or the ability to run any programs.
Actually, for business purposes, removing 'frivolous' functionality like Windows Media Player could be really useful. I suppose it's one way of reducing the number of 'hilarious' videos and TV adverts being forwarded by office workers...
Myself, I spent a few hours last week beating WinXP Professional into a less intrusive, non-ugly mode. There are only a few Windows apps I actually need to run on my home PC (namely, games and the Source mapping SDK stuff!) and most of the included Windows applications are junk to me. If this Reduced Media thing had been available when I ordered my stuff, I would have got it...;-)
Oops - nv is just the basics, and seems a fair bit slower than the proprietary nvidia driver - but there is the slight improvement in that it now actually works on my new PC.:-)
... and, it works! Now I can escape from the login-forgetting w3m...
Currently I've only got single-head going, but everything's gloriously accelerated, including OpenGL. Even the open nv driver now works for the basics. Hurrah!
If you want the SuSE 9.2 RPMs for 6.8.2 RC3, read this. You'll need to manually copy a SaX2-produced XF86Config to xorg.conf unless you upgrade SaX2 as well - I haven't found pre-compiled x86-64 RPMs for that yet, so I think I'm going to have to compile some myself.
Slashdot Mirror
the mac mini 2 is intended to have an ipod dock.
Actually, what with the relative sizes and all, it's believed that the next iPod will have a Mac Mini dock.
Length: 4 in. / 10 cm closed -- 6.3 in / 16 cm open
;-)
Weight: 8.5 ounces / 264 grams
Materials: 100% stainless steel (Optimum grade hardness for each tool/blade)
Sounds far too complicated when compared with my standard-issue Universal Fixing Tool. Works on everything, from delicate computer equipment to petrol engines.
Yup, it's a large, stout hammer...
Well, yes, I do indeed. a 12Meg Voodoo 2 i hijacked from work for a while to complement my lowly S3 Virge...quite an improvement indeed :)
:-)
The old 3dfx 'SLI' thing involved not one but two Voodoo 2 cards, in addition to the conventional 2D graphics card - unless you happened to hijack a second, matching 3D card, you won't have had SLI...
What about those of us who want to spend a sane amount of money on their computers? Gamers are getting almost as bad as audiophiles these days.
;-)
Agreed - and, in a manner similar to those audiophiles, these 'hardcore gamers' seem to spend far more time discussing framerates and hardware upgrades than they do on the games themselves...
Although I do have to thank them for making medium-range PC kit affordable for the rest of them. Early adopters with bottomless wallets, we salute you!
God that must have been hilarious, trying to toss toilets (and votes) at a file cabinet to make them stop. I do think the engine and games are far too open in terms of allowing these things.
;-)
To prove that I know far too much about Half-Life mapping - there's a monster_furniture entity for the original's single-player game. You get to see it crush a headcrab, in the guise of a filing cabinet...
But I wouldn't take the presence of anything in a game's data files as indicative of that content as being functional or due for completion. Half-Life: Source, for example, has a few too many datafiles in it, including skins for a female scientist and numerous extra enemies, as well as a working model of Gordon Freeman as the hyper-beardy, ultra-low-polygon 'doctor.mdl'.
I've no idea which existing character any expansion pack for HL2 might follow, if any. But poking around the entrails of game datafiles is unlikely to reveal anything much, even if it is the infamous 'Alyxgun', capable of morphing from handgun to SMG to sniper rifle...
Also, it's a Sunday. Does anyone think PR departments are considered particularly active about now?
Actually in the UK now they have wireless machines into which you slot your card, the chip in the card authorises itself and the machine, then you type in a pin after confirming the amount.
:-)
It's still possible to get by with just a signature, as before - I only know this because I can never remember my PIN.
Still works in continental Europe as well, fortunately, where they've had the PIN system for a while.
I presume the process of discovery was that they found a large, rotating disc of cold hydrogen gas (you can measure velocities through the red- and blue-shifts of a particular emission frequency). The distance, angular size and radio strength of the disc gives you its approximate mass, and you can compare that with the mass it should have for that particular speed of rotation, thanks to gravity holding it all together. With that, you can calculate the amount of 'dark matter' - subtract the mass of hydrogen from the total mass, and what's left is presumably still there, just in an undetectable form.
A disclaimer: IANARABIDAUEAJBAPTAS*.
(* I am not a radio astronomer, but I did an undergraduate experiment at Jodrell Bank and pointed telescopes and stuff!)
2) The connectors are HUGE. You have to make a quite physically large card to accomadate that, even if the electronics don't justify it. ESpically a problem in small cases.
In case people haven't seen a conventional PCI-Express connector, I can tell you they're tiny!
My new PC has them, and I wasn't sure what they were at first. The PCIe-16x connector thingy for the graphics card is a sensible length (about the size of an old AGP slot, I'd say) but the 1x connectors are about 3cm long. I don't know what size PCIe-1x cards are going to be, but they could potentially be far shorter than a typical PCI card of today...
Great!. My f?#k4!g VCR is still can't tell the correct time.
;-)
<blink>12:00</blink>
Bah. Why did they have to deprecate that tag?
Vaguely on-topic - in terms of screen resolution independence, Half-Life 2 is pretty nifty. For the HUD numbers and weapon icons, instead of needing different bitmap images of different scales for different screen sizes, it uses a Truetype font.
... unexpected solution, but it does make some kind of sense. And it means peculiar new resolutions are fine, and as long as the first-person weapon models work in the aspect ratio being used, things will look just as good. No need to redesign or messily rescale the whole user interface for a new display resolution (as would probably be the case with Halo 2), it's all done with vectors...
:-)
It's a somewhat
Steam\SteamApps\your@email.address\half-life 2\hl2\resource\ - fonts!
It isn't if you turn off the TV and turn on the radio. There is much humour on BBC Radio 4. I've been in paroxysms of laughter from some of the stuff they have on. Trouble is I was driving at the time...
;-)
Yup, loads of the good BBC comedies of recent years have come via Radio 4, including the aforementioned Little Britain. A lot of it is repeated on the digital-and-interweb-only BBC 7, which is an utterly ingenious trawling of the BBC radio archives for drama and comedy.
Fortunately, unless you've got a DAB radio in your car, there should be less risk of comedy-induced accidents...
I love it: IBM's putting $100 Million into Linux software, and their premier desktop groupware appliacation [Lotus Notes] still doesn't have a Linux client.
;-)
To which I say - hooray!
It's awful, and while I don't actually use it myself, I pity those who do...
It doesn't say a whole lot (and the victim agrees) when a serial burglar who had been imprisoned for burglary before and who was out on bail for yet another attempt only gets 11 months in prison.
;-)
Don't forget that he's had his identity (that would be Benjamin Park, 19, of Cambridge, fact fans!) and rather high-quality photos of his fine person conducting in criminal activity on the national news and spread around the world.
I think that's a remarkably fitting punishment...
Great little tips, but only one problem, and that's that you're breaking servers by doing this. 3-5 requests is fine, but trying to do 30 requests at once puts some strain on the server.
Hmm... Y'know, I've got an idea.
One meellion maximum connections!
* Puts little finger to mouth and points Firebadger at Microsoft. *
Mwuhahahaha!
Other than cost, the other apparent drawback to the dual-head nvidia card is that the relatively cheap ones (~$150) only have 64M of RAM, which can barely drive one 1600x1200 monitor at 32bpp. And the 128M versions are around $500.
:-)
I bought a 128MB PCI-Express Nvidia 6600 with DVI and VGA recently for a little over a hundred quid (including VAT) - it's now very happy driving two elderly 17in monitors at 1280x960 each. Came with a DVI-to-VGA converter, too!
Quite a lot of fairly cheap cards seem to have the two ports, but do double-check that it's the case - the cheaper ones may have all the relevant gubbins in the chips but no actual DVI or S-Video ports.
Hmm... I would also appear to have a pile of PCI Matrox Millennia. Anyone for quintuple-head?
I like how 'Harrods' in the summary's URL is misspelt, but that it's a redirect to the real 'harrods.com'. Pre-emptive Slashdot Editor protection! :-)
Actually, I typed up my mini-summary without reading your last, particularly informative post - it seems I was on the right track! While I do use an Apple iBook for loads of (non-graphical) programming stuff, I hadn't really understood why Quartz was so different, and your previous posts really informed me.
:-)
So, thanks to you!
Interestingly, and more on-topic, I note that the new X rendering system, Cairo, "provides a stateful user-level API with capabilities similar to the PDF 1.4 imaging model". I've no idea how similar it is to Quartz, but it still sounds vastly superior to the existing X way of doing things. Even my old Atari ST's VDI is better than that...
I think it's more that Quartz is another graphics API, where many of the rendering features ever-so-conveniently map on to PDF 1.4's rendering model.
:-)
In other words, it's easy to go from one to the other - it's trivial to convert a bunch of Quartz instructions to an equivalent PDF document and vice versa, even though the internal representations of the data are completely different.
Quartz isn't about applications sending actual PDF data across a pipe or socket into a renderer, it's a bit more sensible than that.
Ford is really an alien doing research for an updated edition of the universe's ultimate travel companion, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
Belgium, my cover's blown. That's it, I'm off home. Your planet sucked anyway, monkeymen!
Except for the ale, of course. And the cheese biscuits, you know those octagonal ones with the sesame seeds on, they were quite nice too. Still, anyway, I'm back to Betelgeuse...
Hasn't IE been in beta since, well, it was released?
;-)
Doesn't 'beta' mean feature-complete?
I even tried Ebay, but no luck. Any ideas?
wow, an operating system that doesnt let you play media files. maybe once they make an OS which doesnt have a browser, they can further gut it by forcing MS to ship an OS without networking capabilities, or the ability to run any programs.
;-)
Actually, for business purposes, removing 'frivolous' functionality like Windows Media Player could be really useful. I suppose it's one way of reducing the number of 'hilarious' videos and TV adverts being forwarded by office workers...
Myself, I spent a few hours last week beating WinXP Professional into a less intrusive, non-ugly mode. There are only a few Windows apps I actually need to run on my home PC (namely, games and the Source mapping SDK stuff!) and most of the included Windows applications are junk to me. If this Reduced Media thing had been available when I ordered my stuff, I would have got it...
'nv' now does OpenGL? Woo!
:-)
Oops - nv is just the basics, and seems a fair bit slower than the proprietary nvidia driver - but there is the slight improvement in that it now actually works on my new PC.
... and, it works! Now I can escape from the login-forgetting w3m...
;-)
Currently I've only got single-head going, but everything's gloriously accelerated, including OpenGL. Even the open nv driver now works for the basics. Hurrah!
If you want the SuSE 9.2 RPMs for 6.8.2 RC3, read this. You'll need to manually copy a SaX2-produced XF86Config to xorg.conf unless you upgrade SaX2 as well - I haven't found pre-compiled x86-64 RPMs for that yet, so I think I'm going to have to compile some myself.
Ah, life on the bleeding edge.