Well, maybe this will bolster the legitimacy of the previously-rejected proposal to allocate a block in the Unicode standard for the Klingon alphabet.
I'm guessing that in the mental health cases, sometimes, there has to be a written record of what the patient says -- so it could be construed as a real world need for a Klingon representation. =)
How is the Laotian government reacting to this? Any support or opposition? While I don't know much about Laos firsthand, I do know it's one of the last five remaining communist countries on Earth.
Other countries such as China and Vietnam have taken measures to regulate and censor the flow of information via the net -- will this be any different?
Wow -- I guess you had better tell Microsoft and all IHVs that, since all my DX9 docs all speak of a separate fixed-function pipeline, apart from the programmable shader model! Sheesh...
No matter how good your programmable shading hardware is, nothing beats implementing something in hardwired silicon, and since the FF pipeline is still used in 90+% of all apps and game rendering, it makes sense to make the common case as fast as possible...
In another fine showing of developer humor, Tim Sweeney, Epic's 3D mastermind behind the Unreal Tournament engine and current Unreal technologies was seen at the show running amok with a pad of Post-It notes poking some light fun at the GeForce 4 MX. Tim could be seen labeling a VW Beetle as a "Porsche MX", a stair-case as "Elevator MX", and finally turning the joke inward, he labeled himself "Carmack MX" in deference to the industry's most famous 3D programmer.
If 1 fps framerates are your idea of "running". then yes, DX9 will substitute for it using the software Reference Rasterizer.
Dawn uses pixel shaders, which (as the name implies) are programs that execute for EVERY pixel being rendered, There is NO way to emulate that in software and still get decent frame rates, no matter how good your CPU is.
Besides the lower memory bandwidth and other reasons in the article, it seems to me that the 5200 is implementing the fixed-function T&L pipeline as a vertex shader, to save transistors by foregoing a pure HW implementation, which of course means it'll be slower (although still faster than in software, of course), and of course, you'll incur a greater cost switching between shader and fix-function rendering too. This trick was also used by Trident in their sub-$100 "DX9 compatible" chipsets.
It's a good measure, but it invaribly means that you'll get lagging performance with these low-end cards, so it's something to be careful of. Maybe in a year or so, once shaders become the norm in games, perhaps Moore's law^3 will have enabled them to put those transistors back on and still hit their price target, but definitely not now.
I don't see why people still use USENET for any sort of large file sharing, copyright violations or no... it's a incredible hassle, dealing with missing uuencoded/MIME partial posts and whatnot.
it might have been the only option back in the UUCP days when live IP connectivity was limited, but now, IRC and P2P services seem to do the job quite well.
Does Hilary really think that the majority of Iraqis would be able to afford legal music/movies/software anyhow? Or that they have the hardware to play it?
As an example, look at East Asia -- piracy, for all its evils, helps build a base of demand for your products and fuels the sales of hardware, without which your stuff is useless anyhow.
What do I mean? There needs to be a established base of music listeners and owners of hardware, like CD players, etc first. Without evil piracy, sales of PCs/CD/DVD players in Asia would have been much less than what it is now, and most people would not have heard of most Western software movies or music, if they had not been ubiquitously available.
So, in developing countries like China, piracy, by fueling a demand that would not have otherwise been there, and ensuring a base of owners with hardware, thus laying the foundation for a consumer base. Then, as economic conditions improve, companies move in there and sell legit products at locally-affordable prices. Look at places like Japan and Korea that are considered "developed" now. There's still some piracy in those places -- you can't eradicate it completely, but because you have these people now clamoring for music/movies/software, you now have a thriving music industry and market, both for local artists and for foreign corporations. As a country moves from devloping to developed, so will piracy gradually decrease.
Without piracy, you would not have had that customer base to begin with. It's a win/win situation, for the people, for the hardware makers, and (while it may take time) for the software makers.
If this describes your CS program, then it would be a concern, but I don't think that your statement really applies for most.
Actually, most of the architecture classes at school I took used the MIPS architecture as an example -- an elegant, clean RISC design which makes it excellent for teaching. My work on other CS courses were done on platforms from Sun to Mac to SGI, but the X86 was conspicuously absent.
In fact, the only CS course involving any x86 programming whatsoever was a graphics class which used a cluster of Linux graphics workstations.
Yup, that would be cool if they had a Warcraft/Starcraft like interface where they just selected a unit, indicated the commands (move/attack/patrol/etc), and they get transmitted automatically to them. That would rock.:)
An idea to improve the automated collect calls
on
Phreaking Not Dead Yet
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If AT&T is too stingy to use live humans for collect call acceptance, here should be some randomly chosen sort of challenge/response mechanism asked by the voice recognition system (eg, asking a simple question like "what day of the week is it?") or even "please repeat the word I say" (randomly chosen) to ensure that a simple pre-recorded static greeting can't work.
Sort of like the "Turing tests" that services like Yahoo and even Slashdot itself set up to foil automated registrations.
Even the title of Privacy Czar for the Homeland Security department seems oxymoronic. Isn't the direction the USA is taking with Homeland Security towards giving up your privacy rights, with all these new laws passed?
The reason why Australia's filters are failing would be that: any computer saavy college student knows where all the latest proxy servers are, and soon disseminate them all over. There are many web sites that have lists of working proxies located overseas, outside the government's control, and new ones are found far faster than the government can block them.
Let's hope (probably dimly) that China will soon follow Australia's suit in dropping them.
Most DX bashers remember the old days pre-DX 7 (the first version I really used), with the horrible immediate/retained mode. It's come a long way since then. It's not really "technically superior" (after all, an API just exposes the functionality of the underlying hardware) but some broad areas where DX appeals to most game developers are:
* Standardized support for new hardware features such as vertex/pixel shaders, rather than kludgy vendor-specific extensions to expose the same functionality in OpenGL, and a graceful software fallback path to support vertex shaders in legacy hardware.
* Same for vertex/index buffers.
* Much better support library (D3DX vs GLU).
Yes, it's non-cross platform, and it takes the "everything and the kitchen sink approach". But for games, as another poster mentioned, often being first on the market to support the latest hardware features is more important than writing cross-platform.
Besides, any good software engineer will abstract out all the rendering/triangle-pushing code anyhow from the higher-level stuff (Scene graph management, visibility, AI, physics, etc.) which is independent of whatever API you use.
Re:Gas/Electric Hybrid cars are cool
on
10 Techno-Cool Cars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Honda Insight has a optional manual transmission, and it indeed does get higher gas mileage than the automatic.
The setup, as apparent from the photos consists of a horizontally mounted projector, which projects onto a mirror reflecting to a frosted-glass top surface.
The advantage over a top mounted projector is that you don't have to worry about shadows from your head/arms/objects blocking the projected image. The disadvantage is that you need a specially designed translucent countertop.
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating.
maybe--just maybe--we rally around national tragedies± because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been?
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating.
maybe--just maybe--we rally around national tragedies± because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been?
Most webserver setups run under a non-priveleged UID of 'nobody' or the like... which means that normally, the web server user would not be able to access files owned by YOUR own UID. Would there be some sort of set-UID involved here?
DVDs can have multiple language subtitles. And, many Asians use Hollywood movie DVDs' English subtitles to improve their English listening skills (it really does help a lot in language learning to read the original language text while listening to the movie).
Of course, this particular TTT DVD probably won't be too suitable for this particular purpose.;-)
Bloomberg says it's just a chance to LOOK at the code (by visiting Redmond perhaps or having them visit you?) But News.com reports that MS will let governments BUILD their own custom versions (doesn't say whether by MS or by themselves). Which is it? There's a big difference there.
And also is it access to ALL the source code, or just the security-related bits?
I'm in a similar position as you, although I'm slightly different: I come from a CS background, focusing a lot on graphics at my school. After I got my MSCS though in 2000, I went to work for a non-graphics related software company. This was during the height of the dot.com era, and I was sort of following the money instead of my main passions, I have to admit.;-) I don't regret working there though, learned a lot, met cool people, got a overview of the entire SW dev cycle and then some. Now though, I'm on the job market again, looking to get back into my main interests, graphics/rendering/games (anyone want to hire me? See my.sig...).
While this may not be directly applicable to your situation as a sysadmin where you're not churning out a deliverable product, for me, I've been writing my own little demo programs and even articles, which helps both my own learning, demonstrates a genuine interest to employers (you're willing to take the initiative to learn on your own, outside of requirements), and allows you to have a tangible "portfolio" of work to show employers.
Perhaps you could learn on your own and do your own exploring (in conjunction with "formal" traning) write articles about various sysadmin tasks, or various tricks that would be helpful in the task. Post them on a website, and put that in your resume, for instance.
I've sent/received hundreds of SMSes while in places like China, Hong Kong, and Singapore -- I've never experienced any lost messages. There are absolutely no problems with messaging between cellular companies, or even different countries, for me. It's much cheaper than making calls in many situations.
The seamless interoperability of GSM standard (which almost all Asian and European countries use) is to me, one of the few examples where competition in the marketplace (like in the US cellular world) is actually counterproductive.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe this will bolster the legitimacy of the previously-rejected proposal to allocate a block in the Unicode standard for the Klingon alphabet.
I'm guessing that in the mental health cases, sometimes, there has to be a written record of what the patient says -- so it could be construed as a real world need for a Klingon representation. =)
How is the Laotian government reacting to this? Any support or opposition? While I don't know much about Laos firsthand, I do know it's one of the last five remaining communist countries on Earth.
Other countries such as China and Vietnam have taken measures to regulate and censor the flow of information via the net -- will this be any different?
Wow -- I guess you had better tell Microsoft and all IHVs that, since all my DX9 docs all speak of a separate fixed-function pipeline, apart from the programmable shader model! Sheesh...
No matter how good your programmable shading hardware is, nothing beats implementing something in hardwired silicon, and since the FF pipeline is still used in 90+% of all apps and game rendering, it makes sense to make the common case as fast as possible...
In another fine showing of developer humor, Tim Sweeney, Epic's 3D mastermind behind the Unreal Tournament engine and current Unreal technologies was seen at the show running amok with a pad of Post-It notes poking some light fun at the GeForce 4 MX. Tim could be seen labeling a VW Beetle as a "Porsche MX", a stair-case as "Elevator MX", and finally turning the joke inward, he labeled himself "Carmack MX" in deference to the industry's most famous 3D programmer.
If 1 fps framerates are your idea of "running". then yes, DX9 will substitute for it using the software Reference Rasterizer.
Dawn uses pixel shaders, which (as the name implies) are programs that execute for EVERY pixel being rendered, There is NO way to emulate that in software and still get decent frame rates, no matter how good your CPU is.
It's a good measure, but it invaribly means that you'll get lagging performance with these low-end cards, so it's something to be careful of. Maybe in a year or so, once shaders become the norm in games, perhaps Moore's law^3 will have enabled them to put those transistors back on and still hit their price target, but definitely not now.
I don't see why people still use USENET for any sort of large file sharing, copyright violations or no... it's a incredible hassle, dealing with missing uuencoded/MIME partial posts and whatnot.
it might have been the only option back in the UUCP days when live IP connectivity was limited, but now, IRC and P2P services seem to do the job quite well.
Does Hilary really think that the majority of Iraqis would be able to afford legal music/movies/software anyhow? Or that they have the hardware to play it?
As an example, look at East Asia -- piracy, for all its evils, helps build a base of demand for your products and fuels the sales of hardware, without which your stuff is useless anyhow.
What do I mean? There needs to be a established base of music listeners and owners of hardware, like CD players, etc first. Without evil piracy, sales of PCs/CD/DVD players in Asia would have been much less than what it is now, and most people would not have heard of most Western software movies or music, if they had not been ubiquitously available.
So, in developing countries like China, piracy, by fueling a demand that would not have otherwise been there, and ensuring a base of owners with hardware, thus laying the foundation for a consumer base. Then, as economic conditions improve, companies move in there and sell legit products at locally-affordable prices. Look at places like Japan and Korea that are considered "developed" now. There's still some piracy in those places -- you can't eradicate it completely, but because you have these people now clamoring for music/movies/software, you now have a thriving music industry and market, both for local artists and for foreign corporations. As a country moves from devloping to developed, so will piracy gradually decrease.
Without piracy, you would not have had that customer base to begin with. It's a win/win situation, for the people, for the hardware makers, and (while it may take time) for the software makers.
If this describes your CS program, then it would be a concern, but I don't think that your statement really applies for most.
Actually, most of the architecture classes at school I took used the MIPS architecture as an example -- an elegant, clean RISC design which makes it excellent for teaching. My work on other CS courses were done on platforms from Sun to Mac to SGI, but the X86 was conspicuously absent.
In fact, the only CS course involving any x86 programming whatsoever was a graphics class which used a cluster of Linux graphics workstations.
Yup, that would be cool if they had a Warcraft/Starcraft like interface where they just selected a unit, indicated the commands (move/attack/patrol/etc), and they get transmitted automatically to them. That would rock. :)
If AT&T is too stingy to use live humans for collect call acceptance, here should be some randomly chosen sort of challenge/response mechanism asked by the voice recognition system (eg, asking a simple question like "what day of the week is it?") or even "please repeat the word I say" (randomly chosen) to ensure that a simple pre-recorded static greeting can't work.
Sort of like the "Turing tests" that services like Yahoo and even Slashdot itself set up to foil automated registrations.
Even the title of Privacy Czar for the Homeland Security department seems oxymoronic. Isn't the direction the USA is taking with Homeland Security towards giving up your privacy rights, with all these new laws passed?
The reason why Australia's filters are failing would be that: any computer saavy college student knows where all the latest proxy servers are, and soon disseminate them all over. There are many web sites that have lists of working proxies located overseas, outside the government's control, and new ones are found far faster than the government can block them.
Let's hope (probably dimly) that China will soon follow Australia's suit in dropping them.
Most DX bashers remember the old days pre-DX 7 (the first version I really used), with the horrible immediate/retained mode. It's come a long way since then. It's not really "technically superior" (after all, an API just exposes the functionality of the underlying hardware) but some broad areas where DX appeals to most game developers are:
* Standardized support for new hardware features such as vertex/pixel shaders, rather than kludgy vendor-specific extensions to expose the same functionality in OpenGL, and a graceful software fallback path to support vertex shaders in legacy hardware.
* Same for vertex/index buffers.
* Much better support library (D3DX vs GLU).
Yes, it's non-cross platform, and it takes the "everything and the kitchen sink approach". But for games, as another poster mentioned, often being first on the market to support the latest hardware features is more important than writing cross-platform.
Besides, any good software engineer will abstract out all the rendering/triangle-pushing code anyhow from the higher-level stuff (Scene graph management, visibility, AI, physics, etc.) which is independent of whatever API you use.
The Honda Insight has a optional manual transmission, and it indeed does get higher gas mileage than the automatic.
Also, what kind of equipment will have to be used to produce these so fast?
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of CD-R drives?
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/RWB/ has a good implementation of such a tabletop projection system.
The setup, as apparent from the photos consists of a horizontally mounted projector, which projects onto a mirror reflecting to a frosted-glass top surface.
The advantage over a top mounted projector is that you don't have to worry about shadows from your head/arms/objects blocking the projected image. The disadvantage is that you need a specially designed translucent countertop.
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating.
maybe--just maybe--we rally around national tragedies± because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been?
boy, this generation needs a hero.
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating.
maybe--just maybe--we rally around national tragedies± because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been?
boy, this generation needs a hero.
I think Aki must deserve a mention... it's probably the first digital celebrity featured in Maxim's Top 100 and to pose nude as well. Woo!
Most webserver setups run under a non-priveleged UID of 'nobody' or the like... which means that normally, the web server user would not be able to access files owned by YOUR own UID. Would there be some sort of set-UID involved here?
DVDs can have multiple language subtitles. And, many Asians use Hollywood movie DVDs' English subtitles to improve their English listening skills (it really does help a lot in language learning to read the original language text while listening to the movie).
;-)
Of course, this particular TTT DVD probably won't be too suitable for this particular purpose.
Bloomberg says it's just a chance to LOOK at the code (by visiting Redmond perhaps or having them visit you?) But News.com reports that MS will let governments BUILD their own custom versions (doesn't say whether by MS or by themselves). Which is it? There's a big difference there.
And also is it access to ALL the source code, or just the security-related bits?
While this may not be directly applicable to your situation as a sysadmin where you're not churning out a deliverable product, for me, I've been writing my own little demo programs and even articles, which helps both my own learning, demonstrates a genuine interest to employers (you're willing to take the initiative to learn on your own, outside of requirements), and allows you to have a tangible "portfolio" of work to show employers.
Perhaps you could learn on your own and do your own exploring (in conjunction with "formal" traning) write articles about various sysadmin tasks, or various tricks that would be helpful in the task. Post them on a website, and put that in your resume, for instance.
I've sent/received hundreds of SMSes while in places like China, Hong Kong, and Singapore -- I've never experienced any lost messages. There are absolutely no problems with messaging between cellular companies, or even different countries, for me. It's much cheaper than making calls in many situations.
The seamless interoperability of GSM standard (which almost all Asian and European countries use) is to me, one of the few examples where competition in the marketplace (like in the US cellular world) is actually counterproductive.