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There's a post on the WWW-Talk mailing list in which Marc proposes the <IMG> tag in pretty much exactly the form in which it exists today, and asks for suggestions on how it might be done better. Some suggestions are made and Marc then ignores all of them and goes ahead with his original proposal.

The <IMG> tag is one of the worst parts of HTML. The alt attribute is an unpleasant hack to compensate for its poor design. If Marc had given it a little more thought then we would've had something like the <OBJECT> tag from the start, and we'd have probably never needed frames.

So yes, Marc was largely responsible for the <IMG> tag. And he completely cocked it up.

Although I cannot find a specific-cool link at their site, the Human Performance Lab in the Department of Kinesthetics has been doing some mightly cool motion capture and analysis of atheletes, normal people and people with physical limitations for years. Very cool Sun based motion tracking system. My climbing partner in Uni used to be the technician for the capture / analysis systems. They were SPARC systems at the time, from sun.
As other posters have mentioned, motion capture and motion synthesis tend to be very different problems, although in an end product (if it is a rendering) may contain elements of both.
Alias' tools still tend to be some of the better products out there for synthesis. If you are serious about capture, I know that the U of C department would at least be a starting place for software sources. I know that it wasn't an inexpensive setup.

Although I cannot find a specific-cool link at their site, the Human Performance Lab in the Department of Kinesthetics has been doing some mightly cool motion capture and analysis of atheletes, normal people and people with physical limitations for years. Very cool Sun based motion tracking system. My climbing partner in Uni used to be the technician for the capture / analysis systems. They were SPARC systems at the time, from sun.
As other posters have mentioned, motion capture and motion synthesis tend to be very different problems, although in an end product (if it is a rendering) may contain elements of both.
Alias' tools still tend to be some of the better products out there for synthesis. If you are serious about capture, I know that the U of C department would at least be a starting place for software sources. I know that it wasn't an inexpensive setup.

Don Bitzer is the true unsung hero of computer science - his work as head of the University Of Illinois' PLATO project touched virtually everything people love today about computers and the Internet!

Check out his 1965! patent - bitmapped graphics, audio and photographic quality images back in the sixties!

Other (pre-1975!) PLATO innovations included instant messaging, near zero latency multiplayer network gaming, distance learning, groupware, newsgroups, online newspapers, animated email, network delivery of music, client/server computing, touch screen interfaces, flat-panel displays (the basis for the ones you're just now seeing at Circuit City!), and multimedia that were delivered across a worldwide educational network with satellite and cable communications.

In his ACM article on the early days of Smalltalk, Alan Kay states that he had no idea how to implement his Dynabook concept before seeing a demo of Bitzer's patented plasma display.

Search some of the early WWW documents, and you'll be surprised to see PLATO's influence. Here's e-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson and Ethernet papa Robert Metcalfe attending a 1971 conference that included a demo of Bitzer's PLATO system before their breakthrough work. And there's communication from none less than Tim Berners-Lee encouraging early Internet pioneers to try to meet Professor Daniel Sleator's challenge to try to provide the Web with easy-to-use PLATO features from two decades earlier.

Prominent users of Bitzer's PLATO system at the University of Illinois included Groove's Ray Ozzie (who credits PLATO with giving him the idea for Lotus Notes) and Brand Fortner, a founder of Spyglass, which produced the original Internet Explorer for Microsoft.

At the risk of overestimating PLATO's profound influence, it certainly is an odd coincidence that "ground zero" of PLATO just happened to be across the street from Netscape founder Mark Andreesen's NSCA gig (where Fortner also worked at one time).

For more info on PLATO, check out David Woolley's excellent PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community.

After reading it, you'll see that Bitzer's PLATO of the early '70s had far more in common with today's popular Internet that Berners-Lee's Web of the early '90s.

Don Bitzer's been the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet for far too long - it's time to give the guy the proper respect he deserves!

You could use planets but thats not enough. Why not use star names or constallations. For a list check out Here

Stars (constellations, too)!

You could sort all of your company's machines into multiple bins based on which room they're in. Then, let's say you have two main rooms of machines -- one room will have machines with star or constellation names starting with A-K, the other, L-Z.

Here's a helpful listing: http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~gibson/starnames/starn ames.html

So, you would know automatically which room to head to if someone called for help saying that "Orion" just crashed :-)

MONOLINUX :: Imagine There's No Windows. It's Easy If You Try.

Before anyone even starts with the Jurassic park stuff, it is not possible.

260 Million years is long enough for every carbon atom in a piece of bone several feet thick to exchange for silicon. Time(absolute) =~ 20,000 Million yrs.; we're talking about 1% of the age of the universe here, guys. It is a very, very long time.

So, even if you did recover something that looked like a biological molecule from a sample of this thing, all of the information content would have been destroyed long, long ago.

Scorpion growth factors, on the other hand, are well understood. In a strict sense, genetically modified scorpions are more like a modern scorpion that the one in the article. However, they are nearly as cool, they give you some idea of how such a creature may have lived, and you can feed fools to them when they've foiled your plans for the last time.

So, if anyone wants an eight foot long scorpion, I've started making them and I - Get away! No, no, I am your master! Aieeeee!

Anyway, this critter is weird but it pales in comparison to the real freaky shit in the burgess shale. If you want to know what body types evolution has abandoned (but might take up elsewhere in the galaxy?) check this out. It is a must read for anyone with an interest in writing 'hard' science fiction with aliens in it.

"Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aarrggh'. He'd just say it!" - King Arthur Pendragon

Sleep Theives, by Stanley Coren.

http://www.animalnews.com/coren/e_thieves.htm
http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/students/VOX/Books/cor en.htm
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInqu iry.asp?isbn=0684831848

Ten hours a night, please.

Strider is a Ranger. Rangers roam the north fighting bad stuff. (insert 4000 words of lineages, history, the rise and fall of kingdoms, self imposed exile, etc.) Most villagers are ignorant of this and frown on them as vagabonds. He just popped up in the book also. Later we learn that he had been working with Gandalf pretty closely. The reader, and the hobbits, find out he is Isildur's heir through much reading - dropped hints, foreshadowing, a cryptic poem, etc. The fact of an heir had to be kept secret from the enemy. Jackson couldn't really do that.

Legolas represents the Elves, he is there on behalf of Elrond. All races are represented in the fellowship, as the fate of all races rest on it's outcome. Also he very much wanted to see Lothlorien/ Galadriel.. although that was left out of the movie.

For Galadriel's temptation, I refer you back to the rhyme of the rings, and remind you that the story isn't over yet.

Yes (for the movie)you mostly answered that one for yourself, but in the book he also decides that it's a suicide mission, and there is no need to drag his friends along for the suicide. He has a long complex debate with himself. At this point the orcs (and wolves) attack and essentially make his choice for him. He runs from orcs (and wolves) with the ring on his finger and gets in the boat. Sam sees an "empty" boat and swims out to him. They are long gone before the battle is over. So in the book he ran from the orc battle, never talking to Aragorn. In the movie, he had to talk to Aragorn, or do a cheesy soliloquy, somehow he had to let the audience hear his thoughts. I prefer small liberties being taken with the plot over voiced narration or lame "inner monologues".

All in all it was the best 170 pages per hour I could have hoped for.

Interestingly enough, the BT patent credits a 1965! patent awarded to UIUC Professor Don Bitzer for his PLATO work that sure seems like suitable prior art on its own for hyperlinks.

Don Bitzer is the true unsung hero of computer science - his work touched virtually everything people love today about computers and the Internet!

Check out the patent - bitmapped graphics, audio and photographic quality images back in 1965!

Other (pre-1975!) PLATO innovations included instant messaging, near zero latency multiplayer network gaming, distance learning, groupware, newsgroups, online newspapers, animated email, network delivery of music, client/server computing, touch screen interfaces, flat-panel displays (the basis for the ones you're just now seeing at Circuit City!), and multimedia that were delivered across a worldwide educational network with satellite and cable communications.

In his ACM article on the early days of Smalltalk, Alan Kay states that he had no idea how to implement his Dynabook concept before seeing a demo of Bitzer's patented plasma display.

Search some of the early WWW documents, and you'll be surprised to see PLATO's influence. Here's e-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson and Ethernet papa Robert Metcalfe attending a 1971 conference that included a demo of Bitzer's PLATO system before their breakthrough work. And there's communication from none less than Tim Berners-Lee encouraging early Internet pioneers to try to meet Professor Daniel Sleator's challenge to try to provide the Web with easy-to-use PLATO features from two decades earlier.

Prominent users of Bitzer's PLATO system at the University of Illinois included Groove's Ray Ozzie (who credits PLATO with giving him the idea for Lotus Notes) and Brand Fortner, a founder of Spyglass, which produced the original Internet Explorer for Microsoft.

At the risk of overestimating PLATO's profound influence, it certainly is an odd coincidence that "ground zero" of PLATO just happened to be across the street from Netscape founder Mark Andreesen's NSCA gig (where Fortner also worked at one time).

For more info on PLATO, check out David Woolley's excellent PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community.

After reading it, you'll see that Bitzer's PLATO of the early '70s had far more in common with today's popular Internet that Berners-Lee's Web of the early '90s.

Don Bitzer's been the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet for far too long - it's time to give the guy the proper respect he deserves!

The University of Calgary recently started a S.E. degree program as well, (which I currently attend, and am glad to be attending.)

And I thought I heard somewhere that in Canada, a professional engineering body was threatening that there would be legal action over Microsoft's use of the title MCSE - Microsoft Certified Software Engineer, since it is or will be a protected name, or something. Also, my source said that MS replied by saying they'd change to comply with the local law, But I haven't heard much about this elsewhere. It seems like it would be a pretty big change for MS to change MCSE to something else. Does anyone know if this is correct and what impact it would have on MCSE in Canada or US?

You! Yes, you, the concerned parent. Play with your fucking kids, get them a book or whatever and stop them from surfing the fucking net ON THEIR OWN and then stop the fucking whining you stupid fuck.

If you're too fucking lazy to watch over your children and teach them about shit yourself, it's your fault if they end up at rotten.com.

The Internet is not your fucking babysitter! There are web pages for children. Read them together. And shut the fuck up!!

While I was finishing off my Undergrad Computer science degree, I was working as well doing ASP and ColdFusion work. Then I took a course here - ( Computer Science 550 )
Which blew my mind. I ended up doing well enough to be offered a job with the Comp. Sci Department - and have been here for a year now.

Working here is incredible - So many OS's, so much freedom to experiment and learn - and the beauty is that if you screw up, for the most part, the company will not lose money. To boot, It's a great laid-back atmosphere.
We hire a lot of summer students to help with all the major work over the summer ( new OS roll-outs for instance ) - take a look at all the departments at your school.

Enjoy!

From the course syllabus...

Objectives

The Department's objectives in offering this course is to provide an introductory to the history of computation - including early computing devices and their uses, and the people who developed them.

Ideally, students who successfully complete this course will improve their understanding of how the field of computing developed and matured. They will be expected to be aware of the principal people, places, and events that shaped their profession. Such students will appreciate the broad sweep of this branch of history and be able to relate it to the social and scientific changes that were taking place during the same time frames. They will also be able to describe the concepts and show some understanding of the developments and be able to differentiate and make comparisons between them.

Additional information about a fall 1998 section of this course - namely, a collection of additional readings used to supplement the course text - is also available.

(Please note - I have "highlighted" those parts of the text which I thought gave insight toward the scope of this particular class)

I am not saying this class isn't a good class, however, judging from the syllabus alone, it seems to do just what I said could only be realisticly done; namely "skim".

It is an introductory course, not designed to give an in-depth view of the history. It seeks to only point out "principal people, places, and events", which, while these individuals are important, probably leave out a lot of minor players who made contributions to the history of computing that weren't recognized until much later, if ever (people like Jaquard, with a card controlled loom, directly influenced Babbage, and further, Herman Hollerith, who later help found IBM, which went on to make the standard 80 column punch card, which led to 80 column video displays. I am certain I am leaving out steps here, but the point is this is one known example - there are many lesser known ones, and students of the course will never know about them).

I feel that this course seeks to point students in a particular direction. Perhaps some will go further with the knowledge gained from it, but most will simply take what was said in the course as "that is all there is", and not find out more about this particular area of study.

The syllabus admits to the history of computers having a "broad sweep", something that stands out in the course of all history. I dare to think, without having taken the course, that it probably starts with Pascal's investigations and inventions (or perhaps Napier's bones for calculations), and stops at the ENIAC era, with anything after that machine being relagated to "modern" times. But the fact is a lot of investigation into logic and calculation was made long before Napier or Pascal (indeed, look at the Antikythera Mechanism for such an example), and a lot of history has been made since the ENIAC.

Alas, I fear a lot of students will never really know about it, or care.

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

In fact it can and has been done. There is a course at the university that I got my degree from that does exactly this. The homepage for the course is CPSC 509 The person who teaches this course is retiring (which has has been saying for about 3 years now). He in fact has spent his entire life doing this research. He has many originaly copies of notes and manuscripts from research projects. Any course on history of computing should be modelled on this one.

I believe he also spent a year as the Guest Curator of the History of Computing wing of the Smithsonian (and wrote the last program ever plugged into ENIAC, which now rests there).

It's still running at the U. of Calgary as CompSci 509.

Prof. Williams has a History of Computing Web Site. ...and just clip the last directory level off that to get his own web page.

Best of Luck.

povray has a linux version that allows multi-machine rendering...

'Supercomputer on a CD' software is supposed to make it so easy to put a Beowulf cluster together

I've wanted to build a cluster for a long time. I was given that chance at school & work. School(U of C) allowed me to do it as a term project that is still ongoing. Work allowed me to use a pile of spare machines that were waiting for new users.

So, early one Saturday morning, I sit down with the O'Reilley book "Building Linux Clusters" and the CD that came with it. I followed the instructions in the book, and was frustrated beyond belief. The CD contained all the Beowulf software that was required. The downside was that the software had all been thrown over top of Red Hat 6.2. Being the second time I had ever installed Red Hat, I wasn't sure what the magic sequence was to get everything to work.

I first had problems with unsupported video cards... I tried 3 different cards. Each time, I needed to re-install Red Hat. Why wouldn't it let me install all the drivers for all the cards?

DHCP? Why? You only need to set the IPs once. Don't force me to do this... oh wait, I don't know Red Hat's weird config script structure... sigh.

The book mentioned nothing about re-compiling the kernel. But, in order to add support for the network cards, this is what I needed to do. Oh wait, where are the kernel sources?

This is when I got sick of this "wonderful" Beowulf CD.

I went to Slackware 7.1.

Installed it on the master no problem. Enabled frame buffer support for the video card so that it would work on ANY video card. Enabled native support for the network cards I was using.

Next step, I went to THE beowulf site, did a search for PVM and PVMPOV. I downloaded all the source code I needed.

Now, without the help of the book, I was at a bit of a loss. Luckily, there was this site that explained EVERY STEP in about a page and a half. The how-to was written by Christopher Johnson and I must say, he did an excellent job. I found only one thing that was lacking, you may also need to set PVM_DPATH=/home/pvm3/lib/pvmd in your profile.

Now the purpose behind all of this was to get PVMPOV running, well, with a little searching, I was able to find everything I needed here.

Conclusions:
Use a Linux distro you are used to.
Get a book if you want to know the theory.
Always remember that some PVM Books are free.

I hope this will help someone out there.
Beware TPB

Thalia

Thalia

Does anyone remember the 'Thing King'?

It's a way of describing virtual memory...

Here's an interesting essay on the subject.
--
01 13 19
TVDJC TDSLR AZNGT NWQSH KPN

Take a look at:

Luddism Index

For some examples of radical critiques of technology. A couple I'd recommend:

• Lessons from the Luddites by Kirkpatrick Sale
• The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life by Nancy Owlglass

The Pleiades, like many of the stars and constellations, trace their history back to Ancient Greek Culture-not, as you imply to any particular culture that survives today. If you look at http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~gibson/pleiades/pleiad es_myth.html for example, you will see that the legends surrounding the seven sisters indeed originated in Ancient Greek Society. It was this tradition that I was referring to, in particular that the possibility exists that Subaru changed historical legend to fit a corporate logo.

First off, this isn't Slashdot's fault (although sometimes the posts are woefully unresearched). The London Times screwed up by saying "United Nations" a couple of times when there's nothing anywhere to indicate that the UN has anything to do with it.

The International Astronomical Union has been around since 1919, well predating the UN, and is headquartered in Brussels. While it's a member of the International Council of Scientific Unions, as far as I can tell, they have nothing to do with the United Nations. Well, OK, they're working with the ITU (which does) and the UN working group on peaceful uses of outer space, but neither of those institutional connections impacts the separate SKA working group. There are many international organizations that operate wholly independently of the UN.

While the SKA project is still a ways from reaching the point of a firm technical plan and seeking funding, there's no evidence they're going to ask the UN for money. In fact, a lot of the funding is likely to come from participating universities (who may in turn, of course, seek grants from their national governments to support their involvement). No UN bureaucracy at all.

The moral? Don't believe everything you read in the papers. Looks to me like the editor saw "International [Astronomical] Union" and assumed it was a UN agency. Not the case.
----

I am going to include the obligatory link to the science goals of the square kilometer array. If you read the outline, you will see that SETI is only one of many. In fact, this is the first I had heard of using the SKA to do SETI. Most people talk about 21 cm studies out to high redshift, not LGMs....

http://www.ucalgary.ca/ucs/polic y/comp_policy.html

7.4.2 Collegiality and sharing demands that each user treat all other users as they wish to be treated. The following list indicates activities that improve the computing environment for everyone:

Deleting unneeded files and electronic mail to make disk space available for other users

Avoiding use of university computing and network facilities for tasks unrelated to academic or administrative activities particularly when the facilities are heavily used

Avoiding use of university dial-in communication facilities for tasks unrelated to academic or administrative activities particularly when the dial-in lines are heavily used

Avoiding use of computing and network facilities to peruse the Internet or chat with user groups when the facilities are being heavily used for academic and administrative activities

Refraining from using disk space for the storage of large sound or graphic files (e.g., pornography) that are not directly related to university activity

Refraining from consuming computing or network resources to play games (e.g., MOO's, MUD's, etc.) except when required for course assignments or research projects

--

I can't remember where I found this but it is an interesting read.

What are your thoughts about the whole DeCSS fiasco? Do you believe it's a way for the MPAA control who has access to DVD data, rather than just a copyright control mechanism? Will you write a feature about it? :)

My OpenDVD artwork

let rec f x = (f x)

Perhaps you are confusing with Charity in which all programs terminate?

The failover is part of PVMPOV, and has nothing to do with the configuration of the systems. It was coded this way because it used to run on a room full of unreliable machines that ran at wildly different speeds that other people were using, and even if the machine didn't die, it was possible that a system was busy with other things at the time, so I didn't want to wait for renderings to finish when other CPUs were idle... Check out the PVMPOV Home Page for more info. Yes, 32s was impressive at one time (it used to be at the top of the list).