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RenderMan is a language to get modellers talking to renderers, just like PostScript is a language to get typesetters talking to printers. You're not supposed to work in raw RenderMan any more than you're supposed to work in raw PostScript.

Having said that, probably the closest system to what you're looking for is Steve May's AL. If you can get it to work, it will probably do exactly what you want.

Remember, though, that RenderMan is primarily an API. The bytestream version came later. It was originally a C API, but there are now bindings for many languages including Java, Perl, Python and ML. Why don't you pick one and use that?

None of this should dissuade you from using a real animation system, though. If you have some money to spend, it's well worth it, particularly if you're planning to do this a lot.

Good luck.

Is it bad that I'm working on a BS in GIS so that I can go on and work in IT?

E.G., technically, I'm a GIS person, but in actuality, I'm a failed engineer who's GPA wasn't high enough to get into CIS, so I was directed to GIS "because computers are involved." GAH!

Oh well, just getting the paper. I guess it is interesting sometimes.

It's covered in RFC 1738. Look for section 3.1 Common Internet Scheme Syntax.

Basically, it allows you to specify a username and possibly a password as part of a URL. http://w:x@y.com says to connect to y.com with username w, password x. The URL http://w@x.com means to connect to x.com with username w. This is not in particularly common use for HTTP, but it can be useful for sites that use HTTP authentication.

Web servers ignore the username and password if you connect to a page that doesn't require authentication, so for most sites, everything before the @ is simply ignored.

So this really is part of a standard, and it exists for a good reason. It's not a redirection at all, but simply a part of the URL standard that isn't used often enough for people to know what it means. The whole spoofing this is a completely unintended consequence of that.

It's the wrong tool for the job, in my opinion. Powerpoint (or MS) can be partially blamed because it's marketed as a communication package, but is unsuited for a lot (perhaps most) of the things that organisations need such a package to be able to do. If you have time, have a read of this for a more coherent argument against PPT as a tool.

I finally took the CCNA class. Been working with the Cisco hardware for years, but finally took a class. I couldn't get the routers to assign class E addresses.

But, for those that don't know, the CCNA book says:

Class A 0.0.0.0 to 127.255.255.255
Class B 128.0.0.0 to 191.255.255.255
Class C 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255
Class D 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255
Class E 240.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255

Class D are multi-cast, which I don't believe very many people use..

Class E are "Scientific Purposes" or "Research".

I was running a little personal project a while back, to try to find logical distances from various points (places I had access to machines) to other places, and try to map them, to determine if there were more advantagous places to put servers, or redirect customers on particular networks to particular servers.

A whole bunch of those first /8's don't have anything in them, or at least nothing reachable by a couple different methods. My tests weren't completely exhaustive. I didn't try every port on every IP. I just did a sampling of IP's for a few different ports and packet types. So, there are a whole lot of unused IP's out on the Internet.. Looking at the logs of some of our sites, with over 1 million uniques/day, you can see where the IP's are clumped up, and huge gaps in the usages.

Of course, if I was the network god of 3.0.0.0/8 (General Electric), and I was only using say 100,000 IP's, they'd be hard pressed to make me give up any part of that, especially in knowing that they've had that block since the first days of the Internet. Whois says they registered 3.0.0.0/8 in 1988. I definately wouldn't want to be the admin that had to change 50,000 IP's.

I guess it does help with the old estimates, that people are using NAT more frequently. The stories I heard years ago said we would have run out long before Y2k, but since people run NAT's at home and many offices. Nextel has assigned IP's to every phone (ahhh, the wonders of the Internet), but they're all 10.0.0.0/8 .

For example, on my phone, I select

Menu -> More -> My Info -> Carrier IP

And it shows me 10.154.85.xxx

Using a Nextel im1100, I also get assigned an IP in the 10.0.0.0/8 network.

For those that don't know, 10.0.0.0/8 is a private network. You can use it any way you'd like, but it's completely useless to you on the Internet unless there's a NAT or something between you and the rest of the Internet.

And the recent high temps have nothing to do with it at all.
nothing to see here, the sun is not going nova, please move along....

The google news article is here and a picture of the vehicle is here.

But there isn't any such difference. I think the concept you are looking for is feasibility, i.e. whether something is possible. And as to feasibility, gardeners have been doing something not unlike cloning for hundreds of years-- they call it "asexual propagation". So I don't know that the biological sciences community could not have conceived of doing this with "higher" life forms... just that their experiments would have been doomed to failure. Not that their experiments seem all that successful to me even now.

• The process of knocking the opposition was thus clear. Active opposition would be reported by the sales agent in a region,competition men would be dispatched, reports would be made to discover the customers of the rival,and those customers would be visited in an attempt to "disgust "them with the products of the rival,all to the end of inducing the buyer to renege on its contract with the rival.These tactics could leave the prospect of a National register sale to a potentially satisfied customer. But if persuasion did not work,other, stronger actions were available. The purchaser could be threatened with a lawsuit for the use of a machine that allegedly infringed on N.C.R.'s patents. Those patents included accessories for machines of rivals that National developed in order to prevent such features being added to the rival devices.

There was an antitrust suit. NCR lost at trial.

• On February 13, 1913, a jury convicted Patterson and 28 of the 29 executives (excepting the shadowy Park,who had left the company's employ) were convicted.Patterson was sentenced to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. Other executives received lesser sentences,but many,including Thomas J.Watson, were sentenced to three months in jail.

This is more like Microsoft than SCO.

I don't get the big deal with this.

You are exactly correct. You obviously do not get the big deal of this. It is a big deal. I suspect you need to read all the +4 and +5 moderated posts in this and all other related articles Slashdot. Then go read up on RFCs 811 and 1034

I don't get the big deal with this.

You are exactly correct. You obviously do not get the big deal of this. It is a big deal. I suspect you need to read all the +4 and +5 moderated posts in this and all other related articles Slashdot. Then go read up on RFCs 811 and 1034

_ is not legal in DNS. Please to read RFC's before posting incorrect information. Legal characters in domain names are letters, digits, and the hyphen.

Did you even read the RFC you referred to (RFC 1035)? The section about character restrictions is talking about hostnames, not any possible DNS record type. That would mean names of A and CNAME records.

Specifically, it says (paraphrasing) that you can name anything whatever you want, but unless you want to experience hardship, you should follow existing conventions for the type of object you are naming. It then cites following RFC 822 for mail domains and the old HOSTS.TXT file for hostnames, which is where the character set restrictions come from.

Specifically, in section 3.1 of the RFC you cited, you will find the following quotation:

Although labels can contain any 8 bit values in octets that make up a label, it is strongly recommended that labels follow the preferred syntax described elsewhere in this memo, which is compatible with existing host naming conventions.

How much clearer could they have been that any character is acceptable? They only recommend that existing standards be followed for hostnames. It's not just that "underscores are now okay" as the article says. They were always okay for purposes other than host names.

For more info and examples, please see:

RFC 2181(especially section 11)

RFC 1123(especially sections 2.1 and 6.1.3.5)

Later RFCs frequently supercede or clarify earlier ones. Just because you read something once in an RFC and think you understood it correctly, doesn't mean that you are right. In this case, you are wrong. Did you realize the RFC you cited is 16 years old? Did you read or search for any newer ones before you posted?

"Please to [sic] read RFC's before posting incorrect information."

_ is not legal in DNS. Please to read RFC's before posting incorrect information. Legal characters in domain names are letters, digits, and the hyphen.

Did you even read the RFC you referred to (RFC 1035)? The section about character restrictions is talking about hostnames, not any possible DNS record type. That would mean names of A and CNAME records.

Specifically, it says (paraphrasing) that you can name anything whatever you want, but unless you want to experience hardship, you should follow existing conventions for the type of object you are naming. It then cites following RFC 822 for mail domains and the old HOSTS.TXT file for hostnames, which is where the character set restrictions come from.

Specifically, in section 3.1 of the RFC you cited, you will find the following quotation:

Although labels can contain any 8 bit values in octets that make up a label, it is strongly recommended that labels follow the preferred syntax described elsewhere in this memo, which is compatible with existing host naming conventions.

How much clearer could they have been that any character is acceptable? They only recommend that existing standards be followed for hostnames. It's not just that "underscores are now okay" as the article says. They were always okay for purposes other than host names.

For more info and examples, please see:

RFC 2181(especially section 11)

RFC 1123(especially sections 2.1 and 6.1.3.5)

Later RFCs frequently supercede or clarify earlier ones. Just because you read something once in an RFC and think you understood it correctly, doesn't mean that you are right. In this case, you are wrong. Did you realize the RFC you cited is 16 years old? Did you read or search for any newer ones before you posted?

"Please to [sic] read RFC's before posting incorrect information."

_ is not legal in DNS. Please to read RFC's before posting incorrect information. Legal characters in domain names are letters, digits, and the hyphen.

Did you even read the RFC you referred to (RFC 1035)? The section about character restrictions is talking about hostnames, not any possible DNS record type. That would mean names of A and CNAME records.

Specifically, it says (paraphrasing) that you can name anything whatever you want, but unless you want to experience hardship, you should follow existing conventions for the type of object you are naming. It then cites following RFC 822 for mail domains and the old HOSTS.TXT file for hostnames, which is where the character set restrictions come from.

Specifically, in section 3.1 of the RFC you cited, you will find the following quotation:

Although labels can contain any 8 bit values in octets that make up a label, it is strongly recommended that labels follow the preferred syntax described elsewhere in this memo, which is compatible with existing host naming conventions.

How much clearer could they have been that any character is acceptable? They only recommend that existing standards be followed for hostnames. It's not just that "underscores are now okay" as the article says. They were always okay for purposes other than host names.

For more info and examples, please see:

RFC 2181(especially section 11)

RFC 1123(especially sections 2.1 and 6.1.3.5)

Later RFCs frequently supercede or clarify earlier ones. Just because you read something once in an RFC and think you understood it correctly, doesn't mean that you are right. In this case, you are wrong. Did you realize the RFC you cited is 16 years old? Did you read or search for any newer ones before you posted?

"Please to [sic] read RFC's before posting incorrect information."

Legal characters in domain names are letters, digits, and the hyphen ... rfc1035

From the site:

Apparently underscores are now okay. See RFC2181 section 11.

For one thing, these DNS entries are not A or CNAME entries and do not name hosts.

Still pretty popular. This project is to create a bunch of little sensors that folks can scatter about. They'll then form a sort of redundant mesh. Don't know much about it, their posters on the wall look pretty neat :). More Info

In fact, distributed computing and "grids" are older than you are.

I'm 76, you insensitive clod!

but according to ICDCS, it is older than my lesbian granddaughter.

... Recordings of Prof. Raj Jain's lectures on a variety of networking topics including ATM, Optical Networking, Telecommunications, and Internet Protocols.

Where I come from most [libraries] don't have much internet access

Even when they do, no matter how many PCs they have set up every damn one is in use. Ever stop by a public computer lab to grab driving directions off Mapquest, only to find that homeless people are monopolizing all the PCs? I don't really have a point...just complaining.

Also, mad props to the OSU Sci/Eng library for being open 24 hrs/day, baby!

• Nuclear proliferation through coal burning (PDF)
• Voyager radioactivity problem
• Natural radioactivity

Notice that cinder blocks may include...cinders. Ash from coal. Concentrated minerals.

The thing to remember about .NET is that it's really Microsoft's Java repackaged in a form that Sun can't sue them over. It has most of the JDK 1.1 libraries pretty much intact but with package and method names changed. But they did a very nice job in fixing a lot of issues that Java has. ...
In particular .NET's assembly management beats the heck out of collections of jar files.

There's many other differences between .NET & Java than just this one. If you look closely at .NET you can see where it evolves from. For example the assembly system you mention evolves from Fusion.

Really the right way to think of .NET is Microsoft's evolution of COM/COM+". Part of .NET is the COM+ Runtime. One of the great things about .NET mentioned here is metadata. Metadata is what makes .NET web services rock.

A good consice article discusses Visual Studio 7, COM+2.0, Fusion 2.0, etc...

What isn't ever mentioned in any of these articles of course is a JIT. And of course IL is a stack based language just like Java bytecodes, so it appears Microsoft took a page from Sun on this.

And of course anyone familar with Microsoft's UI (WFC) for Java will know that WinForms is very similar. But once again this is something that's pure Microsoft.

So really when you get down to it the similarities between the two just consist of the JIT and many of the base class libraries. But how much can console I/O, sockets, files, and other basic things differ? Everything else in .NET is pure Microsoft.

There probably aren't too many people out there that know whether there's any actual code shared, and of course no one at Microsoft is saying. But when you look at the publicly documented evolution, and you look at the pretty significant differences, it becomes obvious that .NET has it's own unique history despite superficial appearances of similarity.

This isn't directly related to viruses, but Resnet at OSU seems to have some incompetence problems of its own. Try going to their website in Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird.

Well, I'm sure my school is one of those select schools.

It is interesting to see CWRU do this, as Ohio State likely would never dare try this. At Ohio State, all systems connected to the network must authenticate their users. If a system is unable to do so, the network switches typically force users onto a logon server in order to verify whom they are.

This is a result of OSU's network policy (PDF file - see item #13). There are a few exceptions, but for the most part this is true.

OSU's wireless 802.11 service requires users to login, and pay for some sort of dialup plan. Even the $1.95/month one counts.

It is interesting to see CWRU do this, as Ohio State likely would never dare try this. At Ohio State, all systems connected to the network must authenticate their users. If a system is unable to do so, the network switches typically force users onto a logon server in order to verify whom they are.

This is a result of OSU's network policy (PDF file - see item #13). There are a few exceptions, but for the most part this is true.

OSU's wireless 802.11 service requires users to login, and pay for some sort of dialup plan. Even the $1.95/month one counts.

I RTFRFC (RFC1918) and it suggested the private nonroutable addresses are 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16.

Nutz, I hit submit by accident. Here's the second link I cited.

But to your point, my comment wasn't intended to be good science - it was an editorial comment on Slashdot for pete's sake - my point was that by picking a small sample of issues that are pet peeves of the Senator, the site in question is bad science, and thinkly veiled politics. My example was to illustrate that policy is rarely influenced by science - usually religion, emotion, and politics are far more infulential factors.

You're kidding right. Never heard of bloom county? THIS is oliver wendell jones.

There are some cool examples of similar things...
Humdrum
or
folkfull

Rob

How much current can you survive? physics.mps.ohio-state.edu

That's right as little as 0.1 amps can be fatal. A standard wall socket can supply 20 amps.
Now off you go to build your very own lifter.

For those of you who read the article and see that yes it is possible and no it's not anti-gravity; you might want to do a quick calculation of the breakdown voltage of air. (Lookup Paschen's Law in a physics textbook.) So you have an estimate of how far your high voltage supply can arc and how close you can let the cats get to your lifter.

That should be relatively close. To be any more accurate would require stuff that I didn't really even understand when I actually knew Latin.

This isn't just an EE thing, but The Ohio State University claims to have the best freshman engineering program in the country.

What about a few summer books, as well as books for fall, winter and spring???

I don't mean to troll, but c'mon one book for the whole summer? I know schooling systems are getting worse everywhere, but I expected more of the /. crowd.

Reading is good for you. Books stimulate your brain, improve your writing skills, and good ones are fun as hell to read! (Even the not so good ones can be fun, sometimes).

My picks would be anything by Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov. Maybe also Phillip J. Farmer or Gordon Dickson. Don't want Sci-Fi, how about Umberto Eco? Feeling esoteric? Try Fritjof Capra. If you're also onto trippy stuff, how about Carlos Castaneda (he's just passed away, so let's pay him homage).

On a final note, take some suggestions you find in this thread, spare a couple of hours and go to a local library or book store (used or new). Get a few books and enjoy. Oh, and please don't watch the movies (like these: RAH, FH, PJF) instead of the books. Only afterwards... maybe.

But it makes such a pretty colour!

Well, according to Ponappa, Brzozowski and Finer Transient expression and stable transformation of soybean using the jellyfish green fluorescent protein anyway...

Well...growing anything--grapes included--will always require the grower to go outside and look at the plants periodically. If a grower gets messages from his plants saying they need water, and this happens while it's raining, he would probably be suspicious.

There's lots of feedback in this system--the grower can use the wireless network to monitor very closely the conditions in the vineyard, but he has to go out and physically examine the grapes.

The only way to sabotage a vineyard is to walk into the field and poison the plants. Or bribe someone who works the fields to do it. Or employ biological warfare. Ontario wineries have had to discard roughly a million liters of wine from the 2001 vintage because of an infestation of Asian ladybugs. (The ladybugs took shelter from the cold nestled among the bunches of grapes. They ended up pressed and vinified with the grape juice. Though nontoxic, they add an unpleasant aftertaste.) Someone bent on sabotage might be smarter to raise ladybugs.

I can't help but point out that the Interix/SFU link above (also posted by NZheretic) is a complete and utter fabrication. In fact, it is a direct plagiarism from RMS's own writings about GNU/Linux. It's hard to believe a post was moderated to a score 5 when all it had was links to obvious urls and a link to this surreal alternate reality.

Einstein's theories of relativity have had almost zero influence on the World. It has no practical applications that I can think of off hand (maybe interplanetary space probes?).

One application that I happen to know about is our GPS system, whose satelites rely on the general theory of relativity to give accurate results. Read all about it here.

Perhaps ignorance about this kind of thing is a result of misunderstanding what exactly relativity is... my high school physics teacher told me that he didn't "buy it."

I was merely stating a fact. I have never attempted to embed Perl into C or C into Perl. And yes, I have only used Perl for relatively simple programs, most of which could be done in C as well, but would take longer to code. It'll take a lot to convince me that there's a better language than Perl for simple text processing. But for complicated programs I think i'd have to stick with C or C++. As for plugins for applications, generally the application supports plugins best in one language, which is the language I'd try to use to write plugins for it.

And so far, the only languages I've been exposed to are C, C++, Perl and RESOLVE/C++, so I cannot make many comparisons. I don't know a thing about Python, except that whitespace matters--I do plan to take the time to learn it at some point.

Again, I was merely stating a fact. As far as I can see, nearly every language has it's pros and cons. I am not experienced enough to know many of them.

You mean besides this and these? And you thought you were being funny...

A math professor at the school I go to (OSU) also has a page about math and origami. I think she gave a talk over this subject not too long ago at our math club. Anyway, the page has some pictures, notes, and a bunch of relevant links at the bottom.

I don't think so. Evidently, it can even make coffee.

Just like when prohibition tried to stop people from drinking in the 1920's and people went back to consuming alcohol and prohibition was repealed, the same thing is occurring with the recording industry. They know that the inevitability of song swapping will continue, people will "consume" music illegally and *real* broadband isn't even here yet! When it is (or the current broadband options continue to become more ubiquitous) they're entire industry will be toast.

Even Best Buy has seen the light and is trying to sell of Musicland/Sam Goody...an organization they purchased just two years earlier in February of 2001. Certainly due to plummeting sales of CD's and the cost of mall locations.

Steve Jobs clearly setup a win-win-win (record companies -> Apple -> Consumer). While not perfect nor set to please everyone, it's generous while protecting everyone's interest.

Goof-off has neither.

There's also a Goof-off-2, but it's getting pointless.

Goof-off has neither.

There's also a Goof-off-2, but it's getting pointless.

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Bruce Weide of the Computer Science Department of the Ohio State University has been working for several years on a way to introduce software engineering principles to first year computer science students. It's an interesting read (albeit one that was forced on me for my classes) and is available for download here in pdf format.

Actually, now you can have the best of both worlds. Look at FrontMan which provides a common front end for Octave, Singular, Macaulay2, Yacas and support planned for R, Maxima, GAP, etc. It is in the KDE CVS repository under kdenonbeta/frontman.