(I think the MacOS X trackpad drivers are open source in Darwin).
Have a look at the code the reads x and y values from the trackpad. If they values sent from the trackpad are absolute x,y locations then it's trivial to patch the code. If they're relative you may still be able to set the trackpad into absolute mode. (I wrote code to do this for the Versapad under FreeBSD after obtaining details on setting it to absolute mode from the manufacturers - but the Versapad may have been unusual to support absolute mode).
What features? How about things to make number crunching easier.
In C++ I can extend the existing functions (such as sin(), exp(), operator+()) to support infinitesimals as well as ordinary floats or doubles. Using that I can automatically differentiate functions written in C++ making it trivial to code things like 2nd order optimisation routines. Try the same in FORTRAN. The nearest thing I can find anyone doing is using preprocessors that differentiate your source code line by line. (1) it's hideous and (2) well it's hardly still FORTRAN if you have to preprocess your code.
Using C++ it becomes trivial to write code to compute second derivatives in applications where the textbooks say things like "traditionally we make do with first order approximations because evaluation of second order computations are complex to implement". Of course they're hard to evaluate if your ideas of how to program come from the 1960s.
...analysts have been studying revenue generated by sales of air. Apparently total US sales of breathable air is close to zero. On the other hand annual revenue for Coca Cola is around $20bn. Clearly the importance of air has been overrated in recent years. In fact sales execs at Coca Cola have already been in discussion with publishers of biology textbooks in an attempt to replace unimportant chapters on respiration with new chapters on the metabolisation of Coca Cola products.
You'd better be as good looking as Cruise. If everyone has to watch you waving your arms about all day long through a transparent screen you'd better not be ugly.
Wow! For just 2.5 times improvement I need an entire rack of Linux boxes.
Am I meant to be impressed?
on
IBM's Deep View
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· Score: 1, Troll
I use dual 21" monitors with an nvidia geforce4 900. Can't remember the exact resolution but it's around 3600x1500. Just standard parts you can get from CompUSA.
I thought it was hitting swap that was killing my wife's 64MB W2K installation. So I installed another 256MB and it still takes many minutes to boot. God knows what it's doing on boot. I managed to delete the RealCrap stuff and a few other startup items but it still takes ages to boot. We'd use hibernation if it didn't crash 50% of the time. I can't face reinstalling again from scratch - it took 5 iterations to install originally because of HP using all sorts of unusual devices for which there weren't drivers - as well as spontaneous lockups during the installation itself. Arrrggghhh!
Quicktime, Windows Media, RealWhatever. They always appear in the task bar and the little icon tray thing at the bottom right. No matter how many times I try to remove the startup items it's guaranteed they will have returned on reboot. Aarrgghh! They even have Control Panel entries. This is software at its most rude and obnoxious. Why does RealWhateverItsCalledThisTime need a goddamned 'Start Center'? What's so special about low quality streamed audio and video that ot needs this special treatment? If every application did this I'd need a 3rd monitor for all the itty bitty icons. No wonder I need 2Gb of RAM!
Well the thing that's most unlike a bug fix is Quartz Extreme and that's practically a bug fix - a fix for the super slow student project quality 2D engine they wrote for MacOS before 10.2. Well...maybe Rendezvous is cool.
Researchers at a leading US university have made an astounding discovery. They have found that the square length of the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle triangle can be found by adding the squares of the hypotenuses of the other two sides.
Dr. P Thagoras explains: "we've experimented with many kinds of right angled triangle it it seems to hold in all situations." Prof. E Clid is enthusiastic about the applications "for example a builder can predict the length of the diagonal of a plot of land withput actually measuring it. We can run the software to compute it from the sides on something as small as a laptop. A builder could easily have one of these on the actual building site."
Of course the discovery is not without skeptics. "They haven't tested every triangle", says Dr. P Appus, professor of post-modern sociology, a researcher who studies scientists themselves. "These researchers have only picked those triangles that fir the pattern. It's a kind of unconscious Freudian repression where triangles that don't fit are collaboratively eliminated from the field of view in a reactionary social construct".
But Thagoras isn't disheartened. He believes gis result might hold even for really big triangles. "I think you could use this when urban planning. I bet it'd hold for triangles miles across".
A bold claim, and only time will tell whether these claims will hold. But don't expect to see builder wielding those laptops any time soon!
If I burn your house down, well, arson carries a stiff penalty. If you lose your house because I defraud you, I might get a small fine and a nice minimum security break
But that, on the other hand, is a very valid point.
The people who write compositing software do not right fast code. They rarely make use of the vector processors on the hardware on which they run and the authors of said code frequently don't have the knoweldge to push hardware to its limit. In fact, if the authors of a compositing package wanted to do fast real time compositing they'd turn to Apple first to find out how to do it.
I know about Force Quit. Frequently it fails when my PowerBook is losing stability. And often I can't even run the Terminal when the damn thing decides it's gonna crash. (PS I might have a PB but I'm not some clueless Mac user!)
In Win2K you might not be able to bring the terminal up on crash but I find you can get the Task Manager up even when the rest of the OS is pretty hosed.
Are you sure about the lack of transfer rights? Do you know in detail how it was worded? I'm pretty sure that there is next to no Cineon code in Rayz, just the motion interpolation code.
Re:Hollywood's lack of imagination
on
Review: Insomnia
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· Score: 2
Who would anyone in Hollywood think, even for a moment, that they need fresh ideas, when they're making quite enough money already.
...the robustness of the OS. Since getting my PowerBook I've had a few kernel panics and many lockups that were as bad as kernel panics. They come and go with version. 10.1.4 was good, got a kernel panic with a day of installing 10.1.5. If I mount a Windows share and then disconnect from the network without unmounting it will usually bring the PowerBook to a halt starting with the Finder locking up.
I've used Windows 2000 for a year now. I've never had a kernel panic (no matter what I plug in) and I can't recall having any kind of lockup that couldn't be fixed with the Task Manager.
A proof is a proof is a proof. A proof is something that convinces someone that something is true. What is an 'extraordinary' proof? One using surprising methods? One that you didn't expect? One written in a pretty font? If it convinces it convinces. Whether it's extraordinary or not is completely irrelevant. There are no degrees of proof. Either it is a proof or it isn't.
Laws of Motion
Something makes me think that if I were to call your bluff you'd have no idea what these so called 'Laws of Motion' are.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at the code the reads x and y values from the trackpad. If they values sent from the trackpad are absolute x,y locations then it's trivial to patch the code. If they're relative you may still be able to set the trackpad into absolute mode. (I wrote code to do this for the Versapad under FreeBSD after obtaining details on setting it to absolute mode from the manufacturers - but the Versapad may have been unusual to support absolute mode).
In C++ I can extend the existing functions (such as sin(), exp(), operator+()) to support infinitesimals as well as ordinary floats or doubles. Using that I can automatically differentiate functions written in C++ making it trivial to code things like 2nd order optimisation routines. Try the same in FORTRAN. The nearest thing I can find anyone doing is using preprocessors that differentiate your source code line by line. (1) it's hideous and (2) well it's hardly still FORTRAN if you have to preprocess your code.
Using C++ it becomes trivial to write code to compute second derivatives in applications where the textbooks say things like "traditionally we make do with first order approximations because evaluation of second order computations are complex to implement". Of course they're hard to evaluate if your ideas of how to program come from the 1960s.
...analysts have been studying revenue generated by sales of air. Apparently total US sales of breathable air is close to zero. On the other hand annual revenue for Coca Cola is around $20bn. Clearly the importance of air has been overrated in recent years. In fact sales execs at Coca Cola have already been in discussion with publishers of biology textbooks in an attempt to replace unimportant chapters on respiration with new chapters on the metabolisation of Coca Cola products.
You'd better be as good looking as Cruise. If everyone has to watch you waving your arms about all day long through a transparent screen you'd better not be ugly.
And I ought to add that my card does 4096x1536.
Wow! For just 2.5 times improvement I need an entire rack of Linux boxes.
I use dual 21" monitors with an nvidia geforce4 900. Can't remember the exact resolution but it's around 3600x1500. Just standard parts you can get from CompUSA.
Oh my God! I'm wasting my life writing rendering code then.
So msconfig is in W98, not in W2K and in WXP. Damn!
msconfig.exe
Look in:
Local Harddrives (C:)
Search is complete.
And I remember using msconfig once upon a time.
I thought it was hitting swap that was killing my wife's 64MB W2K installation. So I installed another 256MB and it still takes many minutes to boot. God knows what it's doing on boot. I managed to delete the RealCrap stuff and a few other startup items but it still takes ages to boot. We'd use hibernation if it didn't crash 50% of the time. I can't face reinstalling again from scratch - it took 5 iterations to install originally because of HP using all sorts of unusual devices for which there weren't drivers - as well as spontaneous lockups during the installation itself. Arrrggghhh!
Quicktime, Windows Media, RealWhatever. They always appear in the task bar and the little icon tray thing at the bottom right. No matter how many times I try to remove the startup items it's guaranteed they will have returned on reboot. Aarrgghh! They even have Control Panel entries. This is software at its most rude and obnoxious. Why does RealWhateverItsCalledThisTime need a goddamned 'Start Center'? What's so special about low quality streamed audio and video that ot needs this special treatment? If every application did this I'd need a 3rd monitor for all the itty bitty icons. No wonder I need 2Gb of RAM!
Researchers at a leading US university have made an astounding discovery. They have found that the square length of the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle triangle can be found by adding the squares of the hypotenuses of the other two sides.
Dr. P Thagoras explains: "we've experimented with many kinds of right angled triangle it it seems to hold in all situations." Prof. E Clid is enthusiastic about the applications "for example a builder can predict the length of the diagonal of a plot of land withput actually measuring it. We can run the software to compute it from the sides on something as small as a laptop. A builder could easily have one of these on the actual building site."
Of course the discovery is not without skeptics. "They haven't tested every triangle", says Dr. P Appus, professor of post-modern sociology, a researcher who studies scientists themselves. "These researchers have only picked those triangles that fir the pattern. It's a kind of unconscious Freudian repression where triangles that don't fit are collaboratively eliminated from the field of view in a reactionary social construct".
But Thagoras isn't disheartened. He believes gis result might hold even for really big triangles. "I think you could use this when urban planning. I bet it'd hold for triangles miles across".
A bold claim, and only time will tell whether these claims will hold. But don't expect to see builder wielding those laptops any time soon!
But that, on the other hand, is a very valid point.
You can't murder work.
The people who write compositing software do not right fast code. They rarely make use of the vector processors on the hardware on which they run and the authors of said code frequently don't have the knoweldge to push hardware to its limit. In fact, if the authors of a compositing package wanted to do fast real time compositing they'd turn to Apple first to find out how to do it.
In Win2K you might not be able to bring the terminal up on crash but I find you can get the Task Manager up even when the rest of the OS is pretty hosed.
Are you sure about the lack of transfer rights? Do you know in detail how it was worded? I'm pretty sure that there is next to no Cineon code in Rayz, just the motion interpolation code.
Who would anyone in Hollywood think, even for a moment, that they need fresh ideas, when they're making quite enough money already.
I've used Windows 2000 for a year now. I've never had a kernel panic (no matter what I plug in) and I can't recall having any kind of lockup that couldn't be fixed with the Task Manager.
Something makes me think that if I were to call your bluff you'd have no idea what these so called 'Laws of Motion' are.
But this one's true. Cosmiverse was just the first hit I found when I did a web search.