Agreed, the AEK 2 is sorely missed. I used to have one at home and one at work. I've since upgraded to G4 based systems with the translucent plastic keyboards. Ulch.
The Apple Extended Keyboard II had an internal codename of Nimitz, which is particularly fitting once you look at how one is made. There's enough steel inside to make it last. The key travel is optimal, tactile feedback just right, and it weighs enough to stay put during the sessions I call "rabid prototyping."
The whole damn thing looks like it was designed by a typist, not the marketing department.
The eMac logotype font is Adrian Frutiger's namesake font, Frutiger. It's very elegant looking for a sans-serif cut, a good choice for the logo.
The eMac being targeted at educational markets, I guess they wanted also the logo to reflect the fresh new design. Apple's Garamond is, after all, almost straight out of Claude Garamond's wood type and hundreds of years old.
In chess, we're not ultimately hampered by storage or processing power, but the size of the universe itself. I remember reading that in chess, there are more valid positions than there are atoms in the known universe! This calculation even took account the fact that some positions aren't necessarily reached by any sequence of legal moves.
In either case, the storage requirements are so astoundingly huge that chess cannot be "solved" in that sense. Instead, the position at hand has to be evaluated from scratch each time, applying an "n-ply" tree lookup to determine the best move, leading to the best outcome.
Now, the best outcome is a moving target itself. Chess programs tend to emphasize advantage in raw materials, which is often directly transferable to a victory, if both players know what they're doing.
A human player, on a grandmaster level, may sport an ability to play in a "creative" way, wherein the computer is confused by a series of "non-op" moves that will pay off in 20 moves or so. A well known positional genius, Bobby Fischer, has played games that are intriguing to watch and analyze. A computer wouldn't rank some of his moves very high, but they all carry a meaning in the long run.
I remember reading a long long time ago about developments that were looking at moving cycles across to other processors (i.e., big nasty graphics cards) that could be used to offset workloads when they weren't being fully utilised (99% of the time you aren't game playing). Anybody know what happened?
This rings a bell. The phenomenon is nothing new (note the date below!) and known as Wheel of Reincarnation. Quoting the Jargon File 4.3.1:
wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland "On the Design of Display Processors", Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.
Tested on Mac OS X 10.1.3 (build 5Q110) and IE 5.1.4 (4415.2). The first three tests are moot (no C: on a Mac), and the Google cookie test doesn't work either.
Pressing Back after Google has loaded, the button dims out but nothing is loaded. A Google search worked though.
Quicksort is my personal favourite, and while I haven't ever implemented it in C (not reinventing the wheel etc.), I did code a MC68k assembly version in late 80s.
Radixsort looked a lot like magic at first sight. It was very common on the Amiga, mainly for sorting the Z buffer in one's l33t 3D routines.:)
Certainly a far fetched idea, given that Hahn and Strassman discovered uranium fission in 1938, which was a prerequirement for a fission-type nuclear bomb. Fusion bombs weren't tested until 1952 either.
Speculation of Russia having fission technology three decades prior to that is quite a quantum leap indeed.
How long until someone straps one of these to a 1967 Chevy Impala and attemps a Jet Assisted Take Off?
From snopes.com:
The Chevy remained on the straight highway for approximately 2.6 miles (15-20 seconds) before the driver applied the brakes, completely melting them, blowing the tires, and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface. The vehicle then became airborne for an additional 1.3 miles, impacted the cliff face at a height of 125 feet, and left a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.
There's quite a bit of room for improvement. Most individual characters look good as they are now, but kerning and tracking still need fixing. The letters are spaced unevenly and generally too close to each other.
Here's a screenshot showing OmniWeb b9 on Mac OS X Public Beta and the QT font renderer side by side. The difference in quality is obvious.
How to work around this problem in QT, I don't know. Maybe rendering text to an offscreen buffer one line at a time, and anti-aliasing it as whole would yield better results.
Also, judging from the screenshot, it seems that the QT engine doesn't do hinting properly or the fonts lack the hinting data to begin with. Assuming that those fonts are Truetype, that is.
However fast, small, and standards-compliant browser Opera might be, the company still has phenomenal trouble porting (or rather, "rewriting" it) for non-Wintel platforms.
I was mailed an invitation to beta-test the Macintosh version of Opera. The message is dated December 23, 1999. I've lost my faith and switched to IE 5, which is a surprisingly good browser on the Mac.
The Linux version also has a long way to go, and this item strikes me as particularly scary:
Opera crashes a bit more now than the previous version.
I started programming in Perl mere six months ago. I don't know, maybe I was just lucky to be guided at the most important resource of Perl right in the beginning: the online documentation packaged in the Perl distribution.
I remember reading about Perl's y2k compliance in the docs. From there, it was a no-brainer:
[blade@leela ~]$ perldoc -q 2000 =head1 Found in/usr/lib/perl5/pod/perlfaq4.pod [clip] The year returned by these functions [gmtime and localtime] when used in an array context is the year minus 1900. For years between 1910 and 1999 this happens to be a 2-digit decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't.
I have the habit to get indignant when my intelligence is insulted, also. It helps to learn just the right amount of humility to consult the documentation first to avoid the need to blush later. YMMV.
Hotline Server/Client provides quite BBS like features over a proprietary protocol. It includes chat, news, file serving, and private messages for example.
The server tracker feature is neat, but makes it clear that most Hotline servers are dedicated to trading VCD/MP3/warez. Some communities do have Hotline servers for the intended (IMHO) purpose: to have a place for people to gather together and have the appropriate amount of fun.:)
Some Hotline servers act as "metaservers" for collecting people together to play games online, if the game lacks a "lobby" or other convenient method to find fellow players.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, the AEK 2 is sorely missed. I used to have one at home and one at work. I've since upgraded to G4 based systems with the translucent plastic keyboards. Ulch.
The Apple Extended Keyboard II had an internal codename of Nimitz, which is particularly fitting once you look at how one is made. There's enough steel inside to make it last. The key travel is optimal, tactile feedback just right, and it weighs enough to stay put during the sessions I call "rabid prototyping."
The whole damn thing looks like it was designed by a typist, not the marketing department.
Sure, but can they be used for more than eight hours per day?
Ick, was that flamebait?
And a Perl one:
perl -we 'open F, ">silence.pcm"; print F "\x00\x00" x (60 * 44100)'(Filehandle is implicitly closed at exit)
The eMac logotype font is Adrian Frutiger's namesake font, Frutiger. It's very elegant looking for a sans-serif cut, a good choice for the logo.
The eMac being targeted at educational markets, I guess they wanted also the logo to reflect the fresh new design. Apple's Garamond is, after all, almost straight out of Claude Garamond's wood type and hundreds of years old.
In chess, we're not ultimately hampered by storage or processing power, but the size of the universe itself. I remember reading that in chess, there are more valid positions than there are atoms in the known universe! This calculation even took account the fact that some positions aren't necessarily reached by any sequence of legal moves.
In either case, the storage requirements are so astoundingly huge that chess cannot be "solved" in that sense. Instead, the position at hand has to be evaluated from scratch each time, applying an "n-ply" tree lookup to determine the best move, leading to the best outcome.
Now, the best outcome is a moving target itself. Chess programs tend to emphasize advantage in raw materials, which is often directly transferable to a victory, if both players know what they're doing.
A human player, on a grandmaster level, may sport an ability to play in a "creative" way, wherein the computer is confused by a series of "non-op" moves that will pay off in 20 moves or so. A well known positional genius, Bobby Fischer, has played games that are intriguing to watch and analyze. A computer wouldn't rank some of his moves very high, but they all carry a meaning in the long run.
This rings a bell. The phenomenon is nothing new (note the date below!) and known as Wheel of Reincarnation. Quoting the Jargon File 4.3.1:
Tested on Mac OS X 10.1.3 (build 5Q110) and IE 5.1.4 (4415.2). The first three tests are moot (no C: on a Mac), and the Google cookie test doesn't work either.
Pressing Back after Google has loaded, the button dims out but nothing is loaded. A Google search worked though.
Who took the kit?
Quicksort is my personal favourite, and while I haven't ever implemented it in C (not reinventing the wheel etc.), I did code a MC68k assembly version in late 80s.
:)
Radixsort looked a lot like magic at first sight. It was very common on the Amiga, mainly for sorting the Z buffer in one's l33t 3D routines.
Certainly a far fetched idea, given that Hahn and Strassman discovered uranium fission in 1938, which was a prerequirement for a fission-type nuclear bomb. Fusion bombs weren't tested until 1952 either.
Speculation of Russia having fission technology three decades prior to that is quite a quantum leap indeed.
Here is a nice read about the one's complement logic used in Univac.
Programmers used to add zero (an obvious no-op on today's computers) to weed the negative zeroes out before using bitwise operations. Smart.
Something's just bugging me in that -0 + +0 = +0, though...
Will they play "Also Sprach Zarathrustra" during the docking procedure?
There's quite a bit of room for improvement. Most individual characters look good as they are now, but kerning and tracking still need fixing. The letters are spaced unevenly and generally too close to each other.
Here's a screenshot showing OmniWeb b9 on Mac OS X Public Beta and the QT font renderer side by side. The difference in quality is obvious.
How to work around this problem in QT, I don't know. Maybe rendering text to an offscreen buffer one line at a time, and anti-aliasing it as whole would yield better results.
Also, judging from the screenshot, it seems that the QT engine doesn't do hinting properly or the fonts lack the hinting data to begin with. Assuming that those fonts are Truetype, that is.
... a Beowulf cluster of these puppies
However fast, small, and standards-compliant browser Opera might be, the company still has phenomenal trouble porting (or rather, "rewriting" it) for non-Wintel platforms.
I was mailed an invitation to beta-test the Macintosh version of Opera. The message is dated December 23, 1999. I've lost my faith and switched to IE 5, which is a surprisingly good browser on the Mac.
The Linux version also has a long way to go, and this item strikes me as particularly scary:
Egads.
I started programming in Perl mere six months ago. I don't know, maybe I was just lucky to be guided at the most important resource of Perl right in the beginning: the online documentation packaged in the Perl distribution.
/usr/lib/perl5/pod/perlfaq4.pod
I remember reading about Perl's y2k compliance in the docs. From there, it was a no-brainer:
[blade@leela ~]$ perldoc -q 2000
=head1 Found in
[clip]
The year returned by these functions [gmtime and localtime] when used in an array context is the year minus 1900. For years between 1910 and 1999 this happens to be a 2-digit decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't.
I have the habit to get indignant when my intelligence is insulted, also. It helps to learn just the right amount of humility to consult the documentation first to avoid the need to blush later. YMMV.
Hotline Server/Client provides quite BBS like features over a proprietary protocol. It includes chat, news, file serving, and private messages for example.
:)
The server tracker feature is neat, but makes it clear that most Hotline servers are dedicated to trading VCD/MP3/warez. Some communities do have Hotline servers for the intended (IMHO) purpose: to have a place for people to gather together and have the appropriate amount of fun.
Some Hotline servers act as "metaservers" for collecting people together to play games online, if the game lacks a "lobby" or other convenient method to find fellow players.
kauttaviiva piste