Bloomberg says it's just a chance to "look" at the code, by visiting Redmond perhaps. But News.com reports that MS will let governments build their own versions (doesn't say whether by MS or by themselves).
Which is it? There's a big difference there. And is it access to ALL the code, or just the security-related bits?
I just thought of this.... Could it be a point of argument that removing pay phones reduces access to 911 emergency services for those economically disadvantaged who don't have cell phones? Have there been any studies done to test the validity of this (eg, crime rates vs. pay phone presence?)
I assume that the hardware/software necessary would fall under UN sanctions, which I assume have been in effect since the end of the first Persian Gulf War. This is pretty curious to me... where does Iraq hook up to the net -- what countries does it peer up with? What's their total bandwidth?
Can private citizens even get on the Internet at all there?
I'm focusing on graphics/games as my main interest... and I've got a lot of academic/theoretical knowledge, but everyone wants commercial industry experience. And apparently the former doesn't count for much these days. =P
Oh well, I'm currently trying to build some demos to show to companies -- sort of like being my own company.;)
RCA pretty much doesn't make their own stuff anymore... they just repackage generic stuff from OEMs in places like China and Korea. It's nothing more than just a marketing brand.
Also, advanced dynamically computed sound algorithms are still too complex for game machines. The crap coming out of game machines is very primitive and sounds like simple modulations of samples and FM-synthesizer algorithms. But so far there isn't the same sort of hardware acceleration for these complex sound algorithms; at least not to the degree that OpenGL is implemented in hardware.
Where have you beeen the past few years? Every current generation console, and any new PC with a decent aftermarket sound card for that matter, uses DSP-based physical model or wavetable-based synthesis, with 3-D positional audio. The Xbox even has enough power to encode a 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS surround stream in real time, on the fly, while playing a game.
It actually wasn't the Italians, but a team from my alma mater, Stanford University, lead by professor Marc Levoy. While I wasn't directly involved in the project myself, I knew many of the folks behind it.
While many people rightfully view South Korea as a up and coming techno-paradise, with cell phones, email, and the world's best game players, beneath this veneer that the Koreans project to the west lie a society with serious fundamental problems.
I'm an American businessman in the import- export business, so as you might guess, my frequent travels take me to many places around the world, on every continent. Anyhow, I wanted to share my experience in the "great" country of Korea.
So, I was in Seoul Korea last October for about a week on business. A bit of background: Seoul is the capital and showcase of Korea, set up to try and give foreigners the illusion that Korea really ISN'T a drab, decaying third-world state that's economically languishing behind the rest of the world. Well, let me tell you this, if this is Korea's best, then I'd hate to see the worst.
Anyways, when I stepped off the bus from Incheon (which was no paradise itself, as that place has gone down the shitter since they built that @$#@$@# airport there) I was shocked. The whole place smelled like a combination of fish and dog rotting vegetables that had been left out in the sun for a day or so. And it was probably BECAUSE that's what those nasty Koreans eat! Take for instance, kimchee, the stable of the Korean diet. That shit is fermented vegatables, thrown in a jar and left to rot for several days! Blech! I almost retched, and I've certainly been in some sketchy places in my travels but NOTHING like this.
People spit everywhere. Trash litters the streets. I found myself looking DOWNWARD much more than looking FORWARD when I walked.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear. How do they speak and listen to that shit without going crazy all day long is beyond me.
Anyways, Koreans stink -- literally. There is no concept of personal hygiene whatsoever. Meetings with even top officials were hourlong sessions of having to endure hot sweaty bodies and rancid breath eminating from mouths missing a few teeth. Geez, at least use deodorant for crying out loud.
The hypocrisy, corruption, and double-standards from the highest levels of government on over are the norm at the same time South Korea opens up to the world. Foreigners get charged as much as five times for transportation, lodging, food, and everything else.
Traffic is horrible. Rules are non-existent except for at traffic lights: red means to go fast, green means to go REALLY REALLY fast.
The Korean people themselve are pretty apathetic and everyone just wants to get out of that hell hole, so you see people desparately trying to escape their lives by hudding up in PC bangs, and idling away in fantasy game worlds for days at a time, all too often with tragic results, as was reported by/. a few months ago. With nearly the entire young generation doing nothing better than playing PC games, it does not bode well for the continued existance of Korea as a viable nation in the global economy.
The whole country, in my assessment is a lost case. Even the cheap labor can be found in Southeast Asia or China. As for advanced technology, they are still much behind the US,Europe, or Japan, and are still in perpetual "catch-up" mode, producing cheap knockoffs (eg, Hyundai cars, which are cheap clones of Hondas, down to the very similar sounding names).
Anyways, the one redeeming quality were the girls. I was shopping around the streets of Itaewon, trying to find something to buy that wasn't cheap crap, and I saw this HOT Korean chick on the street. Even though chonun hangukmal anio malhaeyo, she couldn't resist my American physique, and I paid 20000 won (about $18 US) for a great fuck, with a 16 year old who seemed quite new and "unblemished" if you get my drift. Boy, was she tight, made all the right noises, sucked and fucked all night long, took in my whole American cock, all 8 inches of it, and let me cum all over her. Much better than even the vaunted Thai whores, and worlds apart from anything in Las Vegas or in Europe. Best bargain I have EVER found in my life!
So yeah, screw the hell hole that's Korea. It's a lost cause of a country suspsended by a hollow facade of so-called new capitalism that's just show more than anything.
I worked in a Office product group as an intern. MSFT does NOT translate products themselves, but outsources it to third parties (big players in this service market include Uniscape, etc).
MS handles the I18N (internationalization) aspect of their product (support for different character sets/code pages, formatting, right-to-left input, etc... this is the stuff that needs to be handled in the program code itself) but the actual translation (L10N -- localization... this stuff can be handled by simply editing resource files, as pointed out earlier) is done by a outside translation house.
I can't imagine that Nynorsk would have many new I18N issues that haven't been dealt with already in previous international versions of office (it uses Roman script, right?), and therefore the burden of translation would be up to whichever company is interested in translating Office. So, the Norwegians should identify a company, and get Microsoft to give the translation business to that company, rather than having MSFT do it themselves, which is not the way it works.
I'm sure the Norwegians can handle the English version of Office just fine.
Having worked with many Scandanavians, I am truly impressed by their command of English -- many people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, speak it better than many US people do, and definitely better than people from any other (non-native English speaking) country.
I think the fluency in English for Scandanavians arises from the similarity of English to the Scandavian languages, so picking it up is natural, much more so than other European languages, and of course, better than any non-Western language.
But in any case, not having Norwegian Office is not as a big of a cripple to productivity as the article may lead you to think.
Re:Possible for transparent x86 emulation on Linux
on
Bochs 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Yes, most Linux software is open source... but there is lots of closed-source Linux programs as well. For instance, many high-end graphics programs, such as Maya and Renderman are available on Linux, but aren't open source.
Possible for transparent x86 emulation on Linux?
on
Bochs 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One thing Linux on non-x86 platforms lacks is transparent X86 emulation, like on the Macintosh with its transparent 68K emulation, you click on a 68K app and it just works. I should be able to run a X86 ELF image on a non-X86 Linux box and have it just WORK! The Bochs approach is not the best way, since it's a virtual machine and emulates everything. A better way would be for X86 emulation only when needed, such as the application program code itself (syscalls continue to use the native library)
Anyone look at the possibility of incorporating such emulation into the Linux kernel? It would be a enormous boost for acceptance of Linux on non-X86 platforms.
That has got to be one of the rarities out there, at least in terms of finding an original boxed version. I remember being absolutely engrossed by that game back in 1986 when it firsrt game out. Even though it had to run on primitive hardware of the time (CGA graphics, PC speaker sound), it was still a both a design and a technical masterpiece (they fit a whole universe of 300+ star systems, 20 sentinent alien races, 1000+ planets, each individually mapped, with unique terrain, artifacts, economies, etc.) on two 360K floppy discs. It was amazingly open ended and non linear, and yet had a completely fleshed out history, storyline, and universe.
I remember many happy hours spent mining, trying to get the most money, upgrade my ship, find out all the secrets, make alliances with alien races, etc. Very fun, and almost impossible to find now (not counting downloading it from a abandonwarez site, of course.)
I do agree that education is the root cause, but test scores, etc. are only one part of the story. I'm an American, but I've spent a lot of time in many Asian countries, and have worked with many people over there. The educational system there emphasizes discipline, conformity, rote practice and drilling and unity, in accordance with societal values that traditionally pervase Asian societies.
This may sound good on paper, but there's a sad human side to it as well, in the form of students spending days and nights outside of class in outside of school courses, known as juku in Japan or hagwon in Korea, in a furious rat-race attempt to succeed. All emphasis is placed on getting into the top schools, to preserve the all-so-important face prevalent in Asian society. It's no coincidence that the suicide rate amongst teenagers in Asia is much higher than the general population over there.
Corporal punishment is practiced in classrooms. The curriculum is homogenous across all schools and teaching method is rote memorization and practice, practice, and more practice, which does not encourage the development of free thinking, and all this talked about "innovation" is generally spawned at the industrial rather than the academic level.
While Asia is indeed impressive, all this comes at a price, and blindly following their methods is. IMHO, not the way for the US to go.
I'm really not surprised by this. Those conniving Chinese -- they turn a blind eye to piracy of foreign content (even the government and military-owned factories are in on it), but zealously crack down on their domestic stuff. Just another example of their double standard and hypocricy that pervades the entire society. I'm an American businessman in the import- export business, so as you might guess, my frequent travels take me to many places around the world, on every continent. Anyhow, I wanted to share my experience in the "great" country of China, in the very part described by the article.
So, I was in Shenzhen China last December for about a week on business. A bit of background: Shenzhen, like Hong Kong and a few other places, is a "Special Economic Zone" that the Chinese government set up to try and give foreigners the illusion that China really ISN'T a drab, decaying fascist state that's economically languishing behind the rest of the world. Here, rules are relaxed and capitalism is encouraged, not surppressed. Well, let me tell you this, if this is China's best, then I'd hate to see the worst.
Anyways, when I stepped off the train from Hong Kong (which was no paradise itself, as that place has gone down the shitter since the Brits left) I was shocked. The whole place smelled like a combination of vomit and dog shit that had been left out in the sun for a day or so. And it was probably BECAUSE there was vomit and dog shit all over. I almost retched, and I've certainly been in some sketchy places in my travels but NOTHING like this.
People spit everywhere. Trash litters the streets. I found myself looking DOWNWARD much more than looking FORWARD when I walked.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear. How do they speak and listen to that shit without going crazy all day long is beyond me.
Anyways, Chinamen stink -- literally. There is no concept of personal hygiene whatsoever. Meetings with even top officials were hourlong sessions of having to endure hot sweaty bodies and rancid breath eminating from mouths missing a few teeth. Geez, at least use deodorant for crying out loud.
The hypocrisy, corruption, and double-standards from the highest levels of government on over are the norm at the same time China opens up to the world. Foreigners get charged as much as five times for transportation, lodging, food, and everything else.
Traffic is horrible. Rules are non-existent except for at traffic lights: red means to go fast, green means to go REALLY REALLY fast.
The Chinese people themselve are pretty apathetic and everyone just wants to get out of that hell hole, so you see smuggling rings shipping people out hidden in truck beds and ships, all too often with tragic results.
The whole country, in my assessment is a lost case. Even the cheap labor can be found in Southeast Asia or Mexico. Same goes for pirated stuff -- SE Asia and Eastern Europe will keep on churning them out.
Anyways, the one redeeming quality were the girls. I paid 100 yuan (about $12 US) for a great fuck, with a 16 year old who seemed quite new and "unblemished" if you get my drift. Boy, was she tight, made all the right noises, sucked and fucked all night long and let me cum all over her. Much better than even the vaunted Thai whores, and worlds apart from anything in Las Vegas or in Europe. Best bargain I have EVER found in my life!
So yeah, screw the hell hole that's China. It's a lost cause of a country suspsended by a hollow facade of so-called new capitalism that's just show more than anything.
More of an error on the part of Trident marketing
on
Trident XP4 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Historically, for the last 6-7 years, Trident has always focused on the mobile graphics market, and in that space, they are much more dominant. The XP4 is basically an evolution of Trident's mobile GPUs, and is really intended for use in mobile systems, hence the considerations such as reduced transistor count, etc. There's little difference between the mobile XP4 and the desktop XP4, and yet Trident is marketing it as a desktop one.
For a laptop, the 3D benchmark scores are actually quite decent.
But for them to call it a desktop GPU is just asking for trouble, as the article clearly describes.
IBM and others have demonstrated the ability of mainframes to act as virtual machines, using hardware monitor techniques a la VMWare, to simultaneously run thousands of copies of Linux, AIX, or other OSes. Because each OS is running ON TOP of virtualized hardware, the security is pretty much airtight, and it's just like having thousands of actual machines without dealing with the space, etc. issues.
This technology seems quite promising for data centers, etc, and will probably ensure the mainframe stays around for a long time to come.
How about that big parabolic solar reflector featured in 007: Die Another Day. Would that be a form of "weather control"? If not permissible for war, is something like that even feasible? (serious question, I'm not a weather person or aerospace engineer)
All in one game systems are really common in Asian countries, particularly China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. If you go to stores in any of those places, you can find systems (generally, clones of the NES/Famicom) with literally hundreds of games in ROM. The coolest system I saw had the entire system+games built into the form factor of a controller, which had RCA video output to plug in directly to your TV.
Of course, it's unauthorized, but still, many classic games have their endearing value, and it's easier than carrying around all those carts, or messing around with a emulator on your PC.
The analyst almost for certain meant Linux, since Lindows is primarily a desktop oriented distro, and most business Linux migration is on the server side.
Don't be surprised, most "analysts" are marketroids with no technical background whatsoever, and really know little of what they cover, besides what they read in the press releases and company calls.
For mass-market products like Windows, Office, etc, (ie, those where the users themselves are not computer science people), I'm sure 99% or so are absolutely unqualified to look at the source code and make informed decisions about code quality, so they'd have to trust some third party. And even if there is some software "Ralph Nader", how much influence it would have over those users who haven't got any idea of the importance of "good" code is doubtful.
Incidentally, the mass market products are those most likely to cause a security risk like worms or viruses, because of the very fact they are used so much by clueless folks.
I'm not saying it won't work, but it may not be as effective as it seems.
If you drive along Highway 280 from SJ to SF, a few miles past the intersection of 280 and 92, if you look to the right, you'll see a curious white hill-looking house made out of foamlike material. A almost identical replica to the "Hobbit Hole" described therein (in form, not in color, I mean).
My high school bio teacher's parents live (or lived) in there, IIRC.
True, that's something to consider, although with modern graphics hardware, the gain by using points is pretty negligible compared to the time rendering using actual voxels.
The article did say that the viewer could choose to drill down and selectively render the scene in detail using a more "realistic" method, though.
Essentially, they are just using a different primitive (point) instead of splat or voxel, traditionally used in volume rendering visualizations.
Most of the complexity in volume rendering consists of preprocessing the data (alpha testing would be a simple way, other methods involve transformations into the frequency domain, etc.) to reduce the asymptotic complexity of the set to be rendered from the naive O(n^3) to something which corresponds to the actual visible set, not the actual rendering itself.
I don't think they are doing anything different in this stage -- it's still the same dataset that needs to be worked with, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Bloomberg says it's just a chance to "look" at the code, by visiting Redmond perhaps. But News.com reports that MS will let governments build their own versions (doesn't say whether by MS or by themselves).
Which is it? There's a big difference there. And is it access to ALL the code, or just the security-related bits?
I just thought of this.... Could it be a point of argument that removing pay phones reduces access to 911 emergency services for those economically disadvantaged who don't have cell phones? Have there been any studies done to test the validity of this (eg, crime rates vs. pay phone presence?)
I assume that the hardware/software necessary would fall under UN sanctions, which I assume have been in effect since the end of the first
Persian Gulf War. This is pretty curious to me... where does Iraq hook up to the net -- what countries does it peer up with? What's their total bandwidth?
Can private citizens even get on the Internet at all there?
I'm focusing on graphics/games as my main interest... and I've got a lot of academic/theoretical knowledge, but everyone wants commercial industry experience. And apparently the former doesn't count for much these days. =P
;)
Oh well, I'm currently trying to build some demos to show to companies -- sort of like being my own company.
RCA pretty much doesn't make their own stuff anymore... they just repackage generic stuff from OEMs in places like China and Korea. It's nothing more than just a marketing brand.
Also, advanced dynamically computed sound algorithms are still too complex for game machines. The crap coming out of game machines is very primitive and sounds like simple modulations of samples and FM-synthesizer algorithms. But so far there isn't the same sort of hardware acceleration for these complex sound algorithms; at least not to the degree that OpenGL is implemented in hardware.
Where have you beeen the past few years? Every current generation console, and any new PC with a decent aftermarket sound card for that matter, uses DSP-based physical model or wavetable-based synthesis, with 3-D positional audio. The Xbox even has enough power to encode a 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS surround stream in real time, on the fly, while playing a game.
It actually wasn't the Italians, but a team from my alma mater, Stanford University, lead by professor Marc Levoy. While I wasn't directly involved in the project myself, I knew many of the folks behind it.
The project site is http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/
While many people rightfully view South Korea as a up and coming techno-paradise, with cell phones, email, and the world's best game players, beneath this veneer that the Koreans project to the west lie a society with serious fundamental problems.
/. a few months ago. With nearly the entire young generation doing nothing better than playing PC games, it does not bode well for the continued existance of Korea as a viable nation in the global economy.
I'm an American businessman in the import- export business, so as you might guess, my frequent travels take me to many places around the world, on every continent. Anyhow, I wanted to share my experience in the "great" country of Korea.
So, I was in Seoul Korea last October for about a week on business. A bit of background: Seoul is the capital and showcase of Korea, set up to try and give foreigners the illusion that
Korea really ISN'T a drab, decaying third-world state that's economically languishing behind the rest of the world. Well, let me tell you this, if this is Korea's best, then I'd hate to see the worst.
Anyways, when I stepped off the bus from Incheon (which was no paradise itself, as that place has gone down the shitter since they built that @$#@$@# airport there) I was shocked. The whole place smelled like a combination of fish and dog rotting vegetables that had been left out in the sun for a day or so. And it was probably BECAUSE that's what those nasty Koreans eat! Take for instance, kimchee, the stable of the Korean diet. That shit is fermented vegatables, thrown in a jar and left to rot for several days! Blech! I almost retched, and I've certainly been in some sketchy places in my travels but NOTHING like this.
People spit everywhere. Trash litters the streets. I found myself looking DOWNWARD much more than looking FORWARD when I walked.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear. How do they speak and listen to that shit without going crazy all day long is beyond me.
Anyways, Koreans stink -- literally. There is no concept of personal hygiene whatsoever. Meetings with even top officials were hourlong sessions of having to endure hot sweaty bodies and rancid breath eminating from mouths missing a few teeth. Geez, at least use deodorant for crying out loud.
The hypocrisy, corruption, and double-standards from the highest levels of government on over are the norm at the same time South Korea opens up to the world. Foreigners get charged as much as five times for transportation, lodging, food, and everything else.
Traffic is horrible. Rules are non-existent except for at traffic lights: red means to go fast, green means to go REALLY REALLY fast.
The Korean people themselve are pretty apathetic and everyone just wants to get out of that hell hole, so you see people desparately trying to escape their lives by hudding up in PC bangs, and idling away in fantasy game worlds for days at a time, all too often with tragic results, as was reported by
The whole country, in my assessment is a lost case. Even the cheap labor can be found in Southeast Asia or China. As for advanced technology, they are still much behind the US,Europe, or Japan, and are still in perpetual "catch-up" mode, producing cheap knockoffs (eg, Hyundai cars, which are cheap clones of Hondas, down to the very similar sounding names).
Anyways, the one redeeming quality were the girls. I was shopping around the streets of Itaewon, trying to find something to buy that wasn't cheap crap, and I saw this HOT Korean chick on the street. Even though chonun hangukmal anio malhaeyo, she couldn't resist my American physique, and I paid 20000 won (about $18 US) for a great fuck, with a 16 year old who seemed quite new and "unblemished" if you get my drift. Boy, was she tight, made all the right noises, sucked and fucked all night long, took in my whole American cock, all 8 inches of it, and let me cum all over her. Much better than even the vaunted Thai whores, and worlds apart from anything in Las Vegas or in Europe. Best bargain I have EVER found in my life!
So yeah, screw the hell hole that's Korea. It's a lost cause of a country suspsended by a hollow facade of so-called new capitalism that's just show more than anything.
I worked in a Office product group as an intern. MSFT does NOT translate products themselves, but outsources it to third parties (big players in this service market include Uniscape, etc).
MS handles the I18N (internationalization) aspect of their product (support for different character sets/code pages, formatting, right-to-left input, etc... this is the stuff that needs to be handled in the program code itself) but the actual translation (L10N -- localization... this stuff can be handled by simply editing resource files, as pointed out earlier) is done by a outside translation house.
I can't imagine that Nynorsk would have many new I18N issues that haven't been dealt with already in previous international versions of office (it uses Roman script, right?), and therefore the burden of translation would be up to whichever company is interested in translating Office. So, the Norwegians should identify a company, and get Microsoft to give the translation business to that company, rather than having MSFT do it themselves, which is not the way it works.
I'm sure the Norwegians can handle the English version of Office just fine.
Having worked with many Scandanavians, I am truly impressed by their command of English -- many people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, speak it better than many US people do, and definitely better than people from any other (non-native English speaking) country.
I think the fluency in English for Scandanavians arises from the similarity of English to the Scandavian languages, so picking it up is natural, much more so than other European languages, and of course, better than any non-Western language.
But in any case, not having Norwegian Office is not as a big of a cripple to productivity as the article may lead you to think.
Yes, most Linux software is open source... but there is lots of closed-source Linux programs as well. For instance, many high-end graphics programs, such as Maya and Renderman are available on Linux, but aren't open source.
One thing Linux on non-x86 platforms lacks is transparent X86 emulation, like on the Macintosh with its transparent 68K emulation, you click on a 68K app and it just works. I should be able to run a X86 ELF image on a non-X86 Linux box and have it just WORK! The Bochs approach is not the best way, since it's a virtual machine and emulates everything. A better way would be for X86 emulation only when needed, such as the application program code itself (syscalls continue to use the native library)
Anyone look at the possibility of incorporating such emulation into the Linux kernel? It would be a enormous boost for acceptance of Linux on non-X86 platforms.
That has got to be one of the rarities out there, at least in terms of finding an original boxed version. I remember being absolutely engrossed by that game back in 1986 when it firsrt game out. Even though it had to run on primitive hardware of the time (CGA graphics, PC speaker sound), it was still a both a design and a technical masterpiece (they fit a whole universe of 300+ star systems, 20 sentinent alien races, 1000+ planets, each individually mapped, with unique terrain, artifacts, economies, etc.) on two 360K floppy discs. It was amazingly open ended and non linear, and yet had a completely fleshed out history, storyline, and universe.
I remember many happy hours spent mining, trying to get the most money, upgrade my ship, find out all the secrets, make alliances with alien races, etc. Very fun, and almost impossible to find now (not counting downloading it from a abandonwarez site, of course.)
I do agree that education is the root cause, but test scores, etc. are only one part of the story. I'm an American, but I've spent a lot of time in many Asian countries, and have worked with many people over there. The educational system there emphasizes discipline, conformity, rote practice and drilling and unity, in accordance with societal values that traditionally pervase Asian societies.
This may sound good on paper, but there's a sad human side to it as well, in the form of students spending days and nights outside of class in outside of school courses, known as juku in Japan or hagwon in Korea, in a furious rat-race attempt to succeed. All emphasis is placed on getting into the top schools, to preserve the all-so-important face prevalent in Asian society. It's no coincidence that the suicide rate amongst teenagers in Asia is much higher than the general population over there.
Corporal punishment is practiced in classrooms. The curriculum is homogenous across all schools and teaching method is rote memorization and practice, practice, and more practice, which does not encourage the development of free thinking, and all this talked about "innovation" is generally spawned at the industrial rather than the academic level.
While Asia is indeed impressive, all this comes at a price, and blindly following their methods is. IMHO, not the way for the US to go.
These tests seem to be all visual in nature. Could this be a point of contention on the part of blind/visually impaired users of web sites?
Or alternatively, are they perhaps working on, say, a audio version? Wonder how would that work.
I'm really not surprised by this. Those conniving Chinese -- they turn a blind eye to piracy of foreign content (even the government and military-owned factories are in on it), but zealously crack down on their domestic stuff. Just another example of their double standard and hypocricy that pervades the entire society. I'm an American businessman in the import- export business, so as you might guess, my frequent travels take me to many places around the world, on every continent. Anyhow, I wanted to share my experience in the "great" country of China, in the very part described by the article.
So, I was in Shenzhen China last December for about a week on business. A bit of background: Shenzhen, like Hong Kong and a few other places, is a "Special Economic Zone" that the Chinese government set up to try and give foreigners the illusion that China really ISN'T a drab, decaying fascist state that's economically languishing behind the rest of the world. Here, rules are relaxed and capitalism is encouraged, not surppressed. Well, let me tell you this, if this is China's best, then I'd hate to see the worst.
Anyways, when I stepped off the train from Hong Kong (which was no paradise itself, as that place has gone down the shitter since the Brits left) I was shocked. The whole place smelled like a combination of vomit and dog shit that had been left out in the sun for a day or so. And it was probably BECAUSE there was vomit and dog shit all over. I almost retched, and I've certainly been in some sketchy places in my travels but NOTHING like this.
People spit everywhere. Trash litters the streets. I found myself looking DOWNWARD much more than looking FORWARD when I walked.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear. How do they speak and listen to that shit without going crazy all day long is beyond me.
Anyways, Chinamen stink -- literally. There is no concept of personal hygiene whatsoever. Meetings with even top officials were hourlong sessions of having to endure hot sweaty bodies and rancid breath eminating from mouths missing a few teeth. Geez, at least use deodorant for crying out loud.
The hypocrisy, corruption, and double-standards from the highest levels of government on over are the norm at the same time China opens up to the world. Foreigners get charged as much as five times for transportation, lodging, food, and everything else.
Traffic is horrible. Rules are non-existent except for at traffic lights: red means to go fast, green means to go REALLY REALLY fast.
The Chinese people themselve are pretty apathetic and everyone just wants to get out of that hell hole, so you see smuggling rings shipping people out hidden in truck beds and ships, all too often with tragic results.
The whole country, in my assessment is a lost case. Even the cheap labor can be found in Southeast Asia or Mexico. Same goes for pirated stuff -- SE Asia and Eastern Europe will keep on churning them out.
Anyways, the one redeeming quality were the girls. I paid 100 yuan (about $12 US) for a great fuck, with a 16 year old who seemed quite new and "unblemished" if you get my drift. Boy, was she tight, made all the right noises, sucked and fucked all night long and let me cum all over her. Much better than even the vaunted Thai whores, and worlds apart from anything in Las Vegas or in Europe. Best bargain I have EVER found in my life!
So yeah, screw the hell hole that's China. It's a lost cause of a country suspsended by a hollow facade of so-called new capitalism that's just show more than anything.
Historically, for the last 6-7 years, Trident has always focused on the mobile graphics market, and in that space, they are much more dominant. The XP4 is basically an evolution of Trident's mobile GPUs, and is really intended for use in mobile systems, hence the considerations such as reduced transistor count, etc. There's little difference between the mobile XP4 and the desktop XP4, and yet Trident is marketing it as a desktop one.
For a laptop, the 3D benchmark scores are actually quite decent.
But for them to call it a desktop GPU is just asking for trouble, as the article clearly describes.
IBM and others have demonstrated the ability of mainframes to act as virtual machines, using hardware monitor techniques a la VMWare, to simultaneously run thousands of copies of Linux, AIX, or other OSes. Because each OS is running ON TOP of virtualized hardware, the security is pretty much airtight, and it's just like having thousands of actual machines without dealing with the space, etc. issues.
This technology seems quite promising for data centers, etc, and will probably ensure the mainframe stays around for a long time to come.
How about that big parabolic solar reflector featured in 007: Die Another Day. Would that be a form of "weather control"? If not permissible for war, is something like that even feasible? (serious question, I'm not a weather person or aerospace engineer)
All in one game systems are really common in Asian countries, particularly China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. If you go to stores in any of those places, you can find systems (generally, clones of the NES/Famicom) with literally hundreds of games in ROM. The coolest system I saw had the entire system+games built into the form factor of a controller, which had RCA video output to plug in directly to your TV.
Of course, it's unauthorized, but still, many classic games have their endearing value, and it's easier than carrying around all those carts, or messing around with a emulator on your PC.
The analyst almost for certain meant Linux, since Lindows is primarily a desktop oriented distro, and most business Linux migration is on the server side.
Don't be surprised, most "analysts" are marketroids with no technical background whatsoever, and really know little of what they cover, besides what they read in the press releases and company calls.
For mass-market products like Windows, Office, etc, (ie, those where the users themselves are not computer science people), I'm sure 99% or so are absolutely unqualified to look at the source code and make informed decisions about code quality, so they'd have to trust some third party. And even if there is some software "Ralph Nader", how much influence it would have over those users who haven't got any idea of the importance of "good" code is doubtful.
Incidentally, the mass market products are those most likely to cause a security risk like worms or viruses, because of the very fact they are used so much by clueless folks.
I'm not saying it won't work, but it may not be as effective as it seems.
If you drive along Highway 280 from SJ to SF, a few miles past the intersection of 280 and 92, if you look to the right, you'll see a curious white hill-looking house made out of foamlike material. A almost identical replica to the "Hobbit Hole" described therein (in form, not in color, I mean).
My high school bio teacher's parents live (or lived) in there, IIRC.
True, that's something to consider, although with modern graphics hardware, the gain by using points is pretty negligible compared to the time rendering using actual voxels.
The article did say that the viewer could choose to drill down and selectively render the scene in detail using a more "realistic" method, though.
Essentially, they are just using a different primitive (point) instead of splat or voxel, traditionally used in volume rendering visualizations.
Most of the complexity in volume rendering consists of preprocessing the data (alpha testing would be a simple way, other methods involve transformations into the frequency domain, etc.) to reduce the asymptotic complexity of the set to be rendered from the naive O(n^3) to something which corresponds to the actual visible set, not the actual rendering itself.
I don't think they are doing anything different in this stage -- it's still the same dataset that needs to be worked with, after all.