At the time of posting, anonymous comments about horses outnumbered real comments by 11:1. Now it's 11:2...
Can we please stop anonymous comments for the first X (10, 20...) comments?
That said, I'm still interested in what's going to happen at this year's E3, hopefully it'll still be worth hearing about. If not, the GDC is looking to be a promising substitute.
I like how you've got a "read the rest of this comment" link when only your sig is chopped:)
But I agree, the underground tanks have so little temperature variance that you're likely to lose more money from the difference in the cost of transporting the fuel from one region to another than from the difference in temperature of the fuel from one region to another.
Yes, but you generally can't get an image of a single field.
Looking at the images, I see no interlacing problems, so either dvds are stored in progressive, they use the common conversion of 24/25fps film to 50/60fps interlaced that a decoder can detect and restitch, or his decoder has a immensely good deinterlace algorithm.
The quality of an interlaced picture is very near that of a progressive picture (especially for film whose source was half the framerate), so it's close enough to get a progressive still to compare the quality with.
Or at least I think so, feel free to watch a HD-DVD on an SDTV for yourself and tell me if it looks better than a DVD:)
Though personally I haven't bought anything with "HD" as its marketing point, so I don't know why I seem to be on the side defending HD.
The DVD capture used a better capture method (raw digital output from the player), yet still looks worse. Though I kind of agree that maybe he should have used a hardware player to downscale the HD-DVD.
He didn't upscale the DVD to HD and then downscale it back to DVD, he kept just kept the original DVD capture. Nowhere does he say anything about downscaling the DVD. Scaling it up and then back down to the original would have been stupid, though with any good scaling algorithm (and he does say he used bicubic) it shouldn't make any noticeable difference.
The images on the front page are downscaled to DVD, click on them to get the upscaled to HD-DVD versions.
This page features the HD image sampled down to the DVD's resolution of 852x480. [...] You can see the full-size comparisons by clicking on the images on this page.
That page shows images from "The Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship of the ring" from the DVD version and from the HD-DVD version downscaled to the same resolution as the DVD version (480p Widescreen).
You should be surprised that even after downscaling to DVD resolution the HD-DVD images are still obviously better.
That's why you'd use multiple independent ultracaps, each with its own failure prevention / short detection circuits. That way you only lose one cap, not the entire lot, which is a lot less dangerous.
9 Volt battery, wired into a relay and a button. Connect the Battery to the coil, the coil return to the switch side of the relay, and the "normally true" side of the switch to the button, and the button back to the battery. Connect a couple of metal pins to either side of the coil. Press the button, and you have a complete ciruit. It charges the coil, and breaks the switch, breaking the circuit. The coil then discharges through whatever's touching the pins (the air if they're close enough together, nice sparks). The switch then returns to its "normally true" position, closing the circuit, and repeating the process with a nice buzz. I made a more powerful version using 3 9V batteries and a 24V rated relay, which registered on the volt meter at thousands of volts of AC when it was active (though it drained the batteries damn fast).
Of course my mate Mark had to go one step better and bring in an old 3A power supply he had at home. 24V at 3A stings a lot, especially when converted to AC by a relay contraption.
And then our Physics teacher went one better still. Mounted on a smallish wooden board hidden somewhere was something he'd made before, fundamentally similar to our relay but made by hand with a comparatively HUGE coil. And to make it even worse, it had a second coil (with the pins connected to) around the first, which acted like a transformer and increased the voltage to such levels that it was creating a continuous (well, flipping on and off many times a second due to the relay design) spark between the pins when they were an inch or two apart.
It's amazing how dangerous a device can be made with just a power supply (eg battery), a couple of small bits of metal and a LOT of wire.
No, the main reason is that Windows x64 users don't need a 64-bit browser plugin because they still use a 32-bit browser, meaning the only people who need a 64-bit version are running linux x64, and they both: are a very small market share and have that workaround.
Windows x64 does run 32-bit applications. However to plug something in you need a 64-bit DRIVER, and that's a whole other story.
It's also annoying when you find out that a game has licensed a copy protection system that doesn't work on 64-bit Windows, and so stops you playing. In some cases without any message or anything, leaving you guessing about the problem. The last game that I got that did this also had a no-dvd crack out before release, so it seems to me that the companies should give up on copy protection.
Java uses a just-in-time bytecode recompiler, placing it among one of the few groups of software that are HARD to port to a different cpu architecture. That and "why is a 64-bit version of java needed? Can't you just run the 32-bit version?" = 0% effort into converting it.
List of things difficult to port: Compilers JIT Recompiling Emulators Drivers OS (Kernel or Shell) plugins
For any other kinds of software, it SHOULD be as easy as changing the arch, as long as the software has been written right in the first place (eg, doesn't store pointers in fixed 32-bit variables).
Flash hasn't been ported to x86_64 because the 32-bit version runs fine. Even if you are running Linux with the x86_64 version of Firefox there's a wrapper tool to let it use the 32-bit flash plugin.
Furthermore, the chip should have backwards compatibility, either through JIT-support or through a small (not necessarily hugely efficient) instruction set translator in the chip. You mean like how cpus already transform x86 into cpu-specific microcode? In theory it's possible to have a system with more than one instruction set to microcode converter, but there are more serious problems, like TLB, memory page size, number of registers etc. Essentially to be compatible the new instruction set would have to be x86 with different codes for each instruction, and maybe some extra "new" instructions. Sounds like SSE, x86-64...
And the fact that you are suggesting a PPC-like instruction set is funny, considering Apple switched _away_ from PPC to x86 recently, and you want to go the other way.
Sometimes I think people on slashdot don't know what they're talking about.
Sounds like you want something like this: http://www.ciao.co.uk/Sony_Ericsson_R250s_Pro__872 46
[...]bulky design and tough as a brick. This phone is mainly designed for those in the building industry who need to communicate in conditions that aren't really suitable for a cheap, 'drop once - break forever' phone. It is shock, dust and water resistant[...] Unfortunately it's from 2000, so I doubt you can get it any more. There might be a newer replacement though.
You know, this thing is cute and it does lots of wiz-bang stuff. So do all of these "smart phones" out there.
But what I would pay money for (not this much) is a phone I could sit on, get soaking wet with sweat (it's 95 degrees with >70% humidity here), drop on concrete, etc... and still have the thing work.
I, and most folks I know, need a phone to do two things: Make phone calls and survive my day. I had a Sony Ericson (sp?) T610, just a bog-standard brick phone, no folding, sliding or rotating nonsense. I'd been going around for ages telling people that it was practically invincible, and one day someone decided to test it. Without asking me they took it out of my hands and threw it as hard as they could at the wall. The corner of the battery cover popped off, but the phone was still working. I just reseated the battery cover and it was as good as new.
I still don't know why I got rid of it, but any solid-block-shaped phone should be the same.
You _could_ port DX10 to XP, but you'd have to emulate some of the functions (due to the previously mentioned change in driver model) and it would be randomly incompatible and randomly slower than the real thing. Maybe after a few years of dedicated work it would be usable, but by then XP would probably be just a memory.
Much like trying to add DX9 support to wine for linux.
Even worse are the files on P2P networks. Legal issues aside, most of them are ripped by 15-year olds that have no clue as to how to rip a high quality file (i.e. with high bitrates). I couldn't agree more, they are all ripped with different encoders, to different bitrates, even different volumes. Half of the album downloads aren't even ripped by one person and are assembled hodge-podge from other people. The same goes for some of the rarer tv series on p2p networks, 200MB mpegs mixed with 350MB xvid/divx avis...
On the other hand there's a lot to be said for the newer "high quality" drm-free songs on itunes now.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time of posting, anonymous comments about horses outnumbered real comments by 11:1. Now it's 11:2...
Can we please stop anonymous comments for the first X (10, 20...) comments?
That said, I'm still interested in what's going to happen at this year's E3, hopefully it'll still be worth hearing about. If not, the GDC is looking to be a promising substitute.
Maybe they saw your post and that's how they got the idea...
How do you feel now?
And the distance between the wheels on a Roman chariot is how many horses arses?
I like how you've got a "read the rest of this comment" link when only your sig is chopped :)
But I agree, the underground tanks have so little temperature variance that you're likely to lose more money from the difference in the cost of transporting the fuel from one region to another than from the difference in temperature of the fuel from one region to another.
Yes, but you generally can't get an image of a single field.
:)
Looking at the images, I see no interlacing problems, so either dvds are stored in progressive, they use the common conversion of 24/25fps film to 50/60fps interlaced that a decoder can detect and restitch, or his decoder has a immensely good deinterlace algorithm.
The quality of an interlaced picture is very near that of a progressive picture (especially for film whose source was half the framerate), so it's close enough to get a progressive still to compare the quality with.
Or at least I think so, feel free to watch a HD-DVD on an SDTV for yourself and tell me if it looks better than a DVD
Though personally I haven't bought anything with "HD" as its marketing point, so I don't know why I seem to be on the side defending HD.
The DVD capture used a better capture method (raw digital output from the player), yet still looks worse. Though I kind of agree that maybe he should have used a hardware player to downscale the HD-DVD.
He didn't upscale the DVD to HD and then downscale it back to DVD, he kept just kept the original DVD capture. Nowhere does he say anything about downscaling the DVD. Scaling it up and then back down to the original would have been stupid, though with any good scaling algorithm (and he does say he used bicubic) it shouldn't make any noticeable difference.
Actually... http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html
That page shows images from "The Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship of the ring" from the DVD version and from the HD-DVD version downscaled to the same resolution as the DVD version (480p Widescreen).
You should be surprised that even after downscaling to DVD resolution the HD-DVD images are still obviously better.
That's why you'd use multiple independent ultracaps, each with its own failure prevention / short detection circuits. That way you only lose one cap, not the entire lot, which is a lot less dangerous.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=railgu n&search=
Youtube has quite a few videos of real test railgun weapons. They're all huge at the moment though.
Heh, I built a taser in high school.
9 Volt battery, wired into a relay and a button. Connect the Battery to the coil, the coil return to the switch side of the relay, and the "normally true" side of the switch to the button, and the button back to the battery. Connect a couple of metal pins to either side of the coil. Press the button, and you have a complete ciruit. It charges the coil, and breaks the switch, breaking the circuit. The coil then discharges through whatever's touching the pins (the air if they're close enough together, nice sparks). The switch then returns to its "normally true" position, closing the circuit, and repeating the process with a nice buzz. I made a more powerful version using 3 9V batteries and a 24V rated relay, which registered on the volt meter at thousands of volts of AC when it was active (though it drained the batteries damn fast).
Of course my mate Mark had to go one step better and bring in an old 3A power supply he had at home. 24V at 3A stings a lot, especially when converted to AC by a relay contraption.
And then our Physics teacher went one better still. Mounted on a smallish wooden board hidden somewhere was something he'd made before, fundamentally similar to our relay but made by hand with a comparatively HUGE coil. And to make it even worse, it had a second coil (with the pins connected to) around the first, which acted like a transformer and increased the voltage to such levels that it was creating a continuous (well, flipping on and off many times a second due to the relay design) spark between the pins when they were an inch or two apart.
It's amazing how dangerous a device can be made with just a power supply (eg battery), a couple of small bits of metal and a LOT of wire.
As I said, because everyone uses a 32-bit browser on Windows.
Yes it's a cyclic argument, no they don't care.
No, the main reason is that Windows x64 users don't need a 64-bit browser plugin because they still use a 32-bit browser, meaning the only people who need a 64-bit version are running linux x64, and they both: are a very small market share and have that workaround.
Essentially, they don't matter.
It didn't know flash was JIT too (haven't had much to do with it myself).
Thanks for the info.
Windows x64 does run 32-bit applications. However to plug something in you need a 64-bit DRIVER, and that's a whole other story.
It's also annoying when you find out that a game has licensed a copy protection system that doesn't work on 64-bit Windows, and so stops you playing. In some cases without any message or anything, leaving you guessing about the problem. The last game that I got that did this also had a no-dvd crack out before release, so it seems to me that the companies should give up on copy protection.
Java uses a just-in-time bytecode recompiler, placing it among one of the few groups of software that are HARD to port to a different cpu architecture. That and "why is a 64-bit version of java needed? Can't you just run the 32-bit version?" = 0% effort into converting it.
List of things difficult to port:
Compilers
JIT Recompiling Emulators
Drivers
OS (Kernel or Shell) plugins
For any other kinds of software, it SHOULD be as easy as changing the arch, as long as the software has been written right in the first place (eg, doesn't store pointers in fixed 32-bit variables).
Flash hasn't been ported to x86_64 because the 32-bit version runs fine. Even if you are running Linux with the x86_64 version of Firefox there's a wrapper tool to let it use the 32-bit flash plugin.
We may not have a robot but a hell of a lot of people eat ready meals nowadays, and they might as well have been made by a robot.
A microcode interpreter can be patched too, Intel have been doing it since the Pentium Pro.
JIT is obviously not that slow.
And the fact that you are suggesting a PPC-like instruction set is funny, considering Apple switched _away_ from PPC to x86 recently, and you want to go the other way.
Sometimes I think people on slashdot don't know what they're talking about.
Video games, or just console games?
I pre-ordered "Overlord" at the weekend, and it was £25 for pc ($50) or £40 for xbox 360 (a massive $80).
It's the same game!
But what I would pay money for (not this much) is a phone I could sit on, get soaking wet with sweat (it's 95 degrees with >70% humidity here), drop on concrete, etc... and still have the thing work.
I, and most folks I know, need a phone to do two things: Make phone calls and survive my day. I had a Sony Ericson (sp?) T610, just a bog-standard brick phone, no folding, sliding or rotating nonsense. I'd been going around for ages telling people that it was practically invincible, and one day someone decided to test it. Without asking me they took it out of my hands and threw it as hard as they could at the wall. The corner of the battery cover popped off, but the phone was still working. I just reseated the battery cover and it was as good as new.
I still don't know why I got rid of it, but any solid-block-shaped phone should be the same.
You _could_ port DX10 to XP, but you'd have to emulate some of the functions (due to the previously mentioned change in driver model) and it would be randomly incompatible and randomly slower than the real thing. Maybe after a few years of dedicated work it would be usable, but by then XP would probably be just a memory.
Much like trying to add DX9 support to wine for linux.
We get "RE" (Religious Education) in schools here in England. It used to become optional at GCSE level, but I think it's compulsory now.
It's one thing we seem to get right anyway.
On the other hand there's a lot to be said for the newer "high quality" drm-free songs on itunes now.