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The 30" monitors from Apple have a resolution that cannot be fed by a single-link DVI connection. So they use dual-link DVI. Both single-link and dual-link are part of the DVI 1.0 standard, nothing Apple specific about them.

The difference between single-link and dual-link is how many of the pins in the connector is used for transmitting data, in a nut shell 12 pins for the former and 24 pins for the later.

Apple is using DVI-D (digital only) DVI connectors with a dual-link pin out for the 30" display. So one dual-link DVI-D connection is capable of driving one 30" display. The 6800 adapter used for these displays provides two dual-link DVI-D outputs, so one adapter can drive two 30" displays.

As a reference...

DVI connector type summary
DVI 1.0 specification (PDF)

UNC had done some work sometime back on using Haptic Models for helping paintings --

dAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes.

This project reminds me of that, extended to 3D with a few more features and capabilities thrown in.

Um Hello? +4 interesting? I was going for funny here

It's a turtle in a LYCRA BIKINI

*mutters* its funny dammnit

Could they have possibly picked a more random animal for that example?

For some reason this made me curious about turtles & magnetism- a little research turned up this guy's page about turtle migration at UNC.

It includes this gem:

To determine how turtles respond to magnetic fields that exist in different parts of the ocean or to magnetic field elements (such as inclination and intensity) that they encounter while migrating, each hatchling was placed into a nylon-Lycra harness as shown below. [empaphis mine]

Image is here

Could they have possibly picked a more random animal for that example?

For some reason this made me curious about turtles & magnetism- a little research turned up this guy's page about turtle migration at UNC.

It includes this gem:

To determine how turtles respond to magnetic fields that exist in different parts of the ocean or to magnetic field elements (such as inclination and intensity) that they encounter while migrating, each hatchling was placed into a nylon-Lycra harness as shown below. [empaphis mine]

Image is here

Could they have possibly picked a more random animal for that example?

For some reason this made me curious about turtles & magnetism- a little research turned up this guy's page about turtle migration at UNC.

It includes this gem:

To determine how turtles respond to magnetic fields that exist in different parts of the ocean or to magnetic field elements (such as inclination and intensity) that they encounter while migrating, each hatchling was placed into a nylon-Lycra harness as shown below. [empaphis mine]

Image is here

I can't go into details on the actual patent application until that process is complete, but the seemingly small twist that ClearBoard's conceptual model is 'two people on either side of a pane of glass' and ours is 'two people sitting side by side' made an amazing amount of difference as to how it was designed and therefore what it can do.

The FAQ also illustrates that the number of people interacting is the number of people shown - you also see yourself, something ClearBoard did not do. The FAQ explains why this is critical.

You're close... but it's actually better than that.

Check the FAQ here for a rundown of what's actually going on.

You see the other person *and yourself*. It's as if you're sitting side by side, working at the same keyboard. If either of you lifts your tracked fingertip into the camera view, the cursor is controlled by it. Either user can control the cursor, and edit the shared document(s).

And you're right, there is very little confusion as to what's going on - most people take to it immediately.

David Stotts' website. It looks like they are going to be presenting at Hypertext 2004 as well.

Ah, I found a link to a technical paper in PDF format posted on this blog page. (I think the paper is being Slashdotted at the moment--arrowed!)

here's an Endeavors article about the project at UNC

FaceTop

Dear god no. It was only written 60 years or so ago; public domain lasts for 95 years if the copyright is renewed regularly; Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate have been doing so ever since J.R.R. Tolkien's death.

I'm not a DEC-head, but a good bet for finding out would be the Classic Computers mailing list.

On the off chance that this is an honest question and not simply a troll

Maybe you're the troll.

Downloading and profits are both linked to the same factors.

Which, of course, is correct, but doesn't do anything to disprove the GP's notion that file-sharing causes only minor reductions (if at all) in profit. D'oh.

Reminds me of this.

No. Human color perception is based on the relative intesities of the frequency stimulation of the different cones in the retina. So, if you stimulate the retina with actual mango colored light, then you get a certain response from the cones, which your brain percieves as mango. Or, you can generate the same relative stimulation by using a mixture of red, green, and blue. If you looked at the spectrum, it would still be red, green, and blue, but your eye would have the same response as though it was mango, so your brain says "mango!".

The US has joined the metric system a long time ago.

They were doing this kind of stuff at UNC about 5 years ago when I was there. (US News recently ranked them first in Graphics) Still very cool though.

Even Dr. Evil gets to keep the "Dr." in his name, regardless of how many meteors he's tried to pull towards the earth with tractor beams.

Perhaps that's because he went to Evil Medical School. Perhaps he'd get his Doctorate pulled if he did something good.

If you've ever forgotten that your CapsLock key is on, then you have probably created phrases like "dEAR sIRS." The only time I encounter the DOS use-the-shift-key-and-get-lower-case-letters feature is when I want an upper-case letter and I've forgotten that the CapsLock is on. So I have to delete, retype, and then recover my train of thought. This is one of those rare cases in which the computer really should have known what I meant.

Alas, when Windows came out, the TSR no longer worked, and I've been cUSSING aBOUT IT eVER sINCE.

have a blocking filter that will defeat this technique. Surely camcorders will have it as well...

This all reminds me of the old saying that at its most advanced, mathmatics is indistinguishable from magic.

All those lovely Escher pictures similarly show the ways in which selective use of mathmatics & physics can create imaginary worlds that, while they could not necessaily occur in reality, "feel" realistic.

Another magical view of the future was the original Futurama Exhibit at the World's Fair .

I think what makes this war different is that it was started by politicians who purposefully avoided serving as soldiers when they had the opportunity. From Eisenhower to Bush Sr., every American president had some sort of military service (even Reagan's duties of making training films count) until Clinton came to office in '92, but Clinton didn't purposefully start a war in the Middle East, either.

Maybe we should go back to having a veteran in the White House so the nation is lead by someone who has been in battle and knows what our armed forces are going through. Even Colin Powell once admitted that war is hell and that he would consider himself a dove in a Newsweek article last year before toeing the line with the administration. Having that sort of perspective may have prevented this entire thing in Iraq from happening in the first place, although such conjecture is pointless since our administration currently lacks any useful perspective and we're already over there torturing Iraqis and wasting young American lives.

Funnily enough, both the commanding office and the officer in charge of that project went on the record to state that the problem was not with NT.

How about this?

Here's the relevant text from their outline:

Source of the Bug:
Who is to Blame?
Windows NT:
Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office
The crash was caused by the inability of the OS to properly handle division by zero.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio
Redman agrees with him, but he is more careful in casting blame
Why?
Who is to Blame?
The application program:
Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, the chief engineer on Yorktown at the time of the system shut-down
Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE Electronics
"The fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg" Fraser
"If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." McKelvey
They didn't use the right version of the software - the latest version would have prevented this problem ...

"Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT" Redman

While I have a hard time finding data on exactly what was done during the fix (I get the impression that the Navy was a bit closed-mouth about all of this), it seems that a reboot was part of the procedure.

Henry Fuchs

Hey, Fred Brooks Jr. is still live and well!

I wrote an omniscient debugger for Linux programs in 1995 (I wish I had thought of a cool name like 'omniscient', though).

The debugger works by capturing all the system calls in the inferior program. When you think about it, most of the instructions in the inferior program are deterministic -- given the same machine state on input, they produce the same machine state on output. These instructions can be replayed with no overhead.

The major interesting instructions are system calls. A system call will produce different changes in inferior state each time it is run. (Think of the results of gettimeofday(), or read()). So I wrote something like strace that hooked all the system calls and recorded all of their memory effects and return values.

So with a copy of the original program and a copy of the log file, one could replay the execution of the inferior program, on the same machine or on a *different* machine. Trace on the end-user's machine; mail the files to the developer; replay on the developer's machine!

The next step is to connect a debugger to the replay'ing program. I did this by running a debugger (gdb) in another sandbox where I filtered all of its system calls. When gdb calls ptrace(), I feed it appropriate values from the replay-inferior process. So gdb (or any other debugger) thinks it is interacting with the replay'ing process, without any changes needed to gdb.
Things I never implemented: ELF shared libraries; signals; shared memory; non-deterministic instructions such as the cpu-id instruction and hardware random number generator.

At this point the project is pretty defunct, but I may retun to it someday. It might have some value as 'prior art' in case anyone tries to patent this technique. The code is available at mec-0.3.tar.gz.

Good collision libraries are fun. I've written one, as part of Falling Bodies. I think I was the first, back in 1996-1997, to use axis-oriented bounding boxes with GJK, which is what SOLID, and everybody else, uses now.

Lin and Canny are the ones who really cracked this problem. Before Lin and Canny, algorithms for collisions in a space with N objects with M faces each were O(N^2) * O(M^2). They got that down to slightly worse than O(Nm), where Nm is the number of moving objects. Very clever.

I-Collide was the first generally available package for this. The original version was in LISP, which was translated to C, retaining much of the LISP style. They used axis-oriented bounding boxes with a linear programming package. This had some problems with numerical error, and the linear programming package was rather bulky. But it demonstrated, back in 1996, what was possible. Then everybody (well, the half dozen or so people into this stuff) went to work and built better systems.

Actually, collision detection is a pain to code, but well understood today. Collision response, the actual physics, is much harder.

The end result of all this is that games can now have really big worlds with working collision detection.

The artificial scarcity, which is very true, is how you pay for the cost or production. This is mere rationalization of grubbing free stuph pure and simple. Look at the big picture for a change instead of just telling yourself it's ok to rip. A movie company has to break even. Nobody is going to sink $100 million into the production of a movie if they're just going to sell one lousy $25 copy and everybody else gets free copies of that one purchase distributed by the friends network.

Yes this article does bolster file-sharers, but you're neglecting any data that doesn't support the conclusion that you've reached in advance. Worse, in fact, data that disaggrees with your conclusion is "rationalization of grubbing free stuph...". This is no way to filter truth from falsehood. If the argument holds, it's not only rationalisation, but a positive justification.

In terms of the argument that you put forth, you're neglecting the advertising benefits of propogated works, or else having your song played on radio would be really really bad. In truth, you're missing the big picture that economics is not just about maximising profit from each transaction, but also about maximising the number of those transactions.

For the record, I do think that it's okay to rip, but I also believe in spending as much money as ever buying complete works. In particular, I believe that some free downloads plus $25 spent four times over and greater exposure for art is better than $100 spent once, and only access to mass-marketted works.

You forgot one:

(15) I'm still waiting for the recording industry to prove that file sharing is harming their business.

As soon as they prove harm to their bottom line, I'll take a much more dismal view of song-swapping.

--K.

i know it, you know it, zorak know it, brak know it, tanzit know it ...

i know it, you know it, zorak know it, brak know it, tanzit know it ...

i know it, you know it, zorak know it, brak know it, tanzit know it ...

CDs sell plenty.
Damn right. Check out this report by Felix Oberholzer (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (University of North California): Report in PDF
"In total the estimates indicate that the sales decline over 2000-2002 was not primarily due to file sharing."

Peercy and Olano (Click on "PDF" in the upper right)

Presentation

ASHLI

GPGPU

More than Moore's Law

Moore's law : still for wimps

Using programmable graphics hardware (possibly through OpenGL) for final rendering is not that far off. (Definitely not in real-time, but as a more cost-effective way to do it, anyway.) Especially with the massive parallelism of rendering, and the fact that GPUs are far outpacing CPUs in terms of their speed and transistor counts.

OpenGL is much more similar to micropolygon rendering (REYES) than it is to raytracing in the first place. The shaders are where you spend all of your time, anyway.

Heck, do you think nVIDIA bought ExLuna (Larry Gritz, author of BMRT, and former Pixar employee) just for the fun of it?

Software for translating from RenderMan Shading Language to Cg?

And what about RenderMonkey supporting RenderMan?

Do you even remember PixelFlow from Pixar? Do you see the name Marc Olano on that paper? The same Marc Olano who talks about rendering on consumer-level graphics hardware? These things have far more in common than you seem to realize.

Sadly you're probably in the wrong.

I think that the courts have ruled incorrectly on metatagging, but there's not a lot we can do about stupid judges.

You don't need a full blown MTA, try ssmtp. It takes your messages, contacts your ISP's SMTP server, and sends it on its merry way.
Here's a guide on how to set it up (ostentiably for cygwin, but its similar for linux).

Like there wouldn't be a /usr/sbin/sendmail interface for home users...

Available in PDF format via Koleman Strumpf's site.

Check out the Super Mario Bros. remix of "Closer".

My dream is that a redesigned Internet Protocol will continue to be lean and mean, and not over-bloated with "if we only had this feature then we could do that".

(You can ignore the rest of this if I've explained things sufficiently. I like Imperial measurements, so I'm going to continue.)

Technically, a ton is 20 hundredweight. However, there are two kinds of hundredweight. The short (or American) hundredweight is 100 pounds, and the long (British) hundredweight is 112 pounds.

A British hundredweight was defined to be 112 pounds because it translated almost directly to foreign units of the time (the 1400s). 112 also divides easily into quarters (28 lb), stone (14 lb), and cloves (7 lb). If you're interested in the history of units of measurement, check out this page or any of a number of others you can find on Google.

Is it more than a googol? If not I am still not impressed.

Is anyone else amazed by the fact that industries as old as railroads are still doing shit as fucked up as this? This isn't the first railroad to get on slashdot for being jackasses.

Yeah, Gattaca is on TV right now and I'm watching

Here's some advice applicable to your question unlike the other 98% of unrelated opinions already posted:

OCW will get you started on the right foot, but I would recommend finding a suitable research field to apply those skills to.

Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been in a research lab at my alma mater's comp sci dept. And several of these grad students came from a non-computer science background such as physics, chemistry, genetics, etc. Once they found an immediate application for their programming skills, their skills progressed at an amazing rate. This does not mean that all science-based individuals are good programmers, but the purpose and foundation for learning (and learning properly) is already there.

So my advice? Use the internet to start researching some of the better computer science schools research groups and see if there is anything out there you like. Conjoining your medical background with a CS focus might lead to neuro/bio/medical -informatics, or maybe computational biology. You can also go into simulation, such as scientific visualization of specific area of medical research or even go into computer graphics. There are literally thousands of specific areas to look into.

Here's on example: Sticking with the foundation learned in OCW and applying proper programming techniques (such as learned in "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers) to fields such as computer graphics can be a great way to get immersed in the field - as long as you have an end application to apply your skills. So picking up a project like applying computer graphic visualization and simulation to a medical process or generating physical-based character animation can be extremely beneficial. You'll obviously have to learn computer graphics programming somewhere along the way, but that that'll just sharpen both your math skills and visual sense, along with having another great tool under your belt.

Go research some of the current projects going on at research labs at the top computer science schools. Here are some suggestions for you to check out:

And of course not all computer science research falls under the header of the computer science department. Research medical departments doing interdisciplinary research with both engineering and computer science.

Almost all research labs have papers of their work (even their most recent) avaialble in PDF format. Download some of the earlier papers to get a feel for the research focus and try to find something that interests you. Try to implement the same techniques and algorithms using your skills. This will bea great way for you to realize what you still need to learn and get a great foundation in a new area of research.

But always keep in mind that proper programming is of utmost importance. So while your trying to leanr a new area of research by applying your skills, also focus on the studying from the better programming books out there that teach you how to become a better programmer. Go on amazon for suggestions. Start with looking up my previous suggestion and go from there.

Good luck, and sorry about all of the hundreds of wasted postings coming from IT people bitching about their lack of applicable skills.

Martin

There's a big mistake here that needs correction: Chaucer's spelling and grammar are not "rough". He was, and is, considered one of the greatest writers ever to use the English language. The problem is that English has changed a bit in 600 years. And a writer couldn't look up "correct" spelling: dictionaries hadn't been invented yet.

In a strict sense, Chaucer's language is not Modern English but a different language called Middle English. They're as different as Classical Latin and Church Latin. (Huh?) OK, they're as different as Cantonese and Mandarin. (WTF are those?) Sigh. It's even more different thatn C++ and Java!

RELEASE
The Linux man page maintainer proudly announces. . .

man-pages-1.65.tar.gz - man pages for Linux

POSIX
This release is the first to contain the POSIX 1003.1-2003 man pages. The directories man0p, man1p, man3p contain descriptions of the headers, the utilities, and the functions documented in that standard.

Permission to distribute these POSIX man pages has just been obtained, and the pages in man0p, man1p, man3p were derived from the POSIX html pages by some silly conversion script. No doubt the result is still full of flaws, and all of this can be much improved. Corrections, scripts, etc. are welcome - aeb@<snip>.

In order to use this, put in {/usr/share/misc/}man.conf{ig} or so your favourite order of looking at these pages, for example,
MANSECT 1p:1:8:0p:3p:2:3:4:5:6:7:9:tcl:n:l:p:o
or set the MANSECT environment variable.

OTHER PAGES
The remaining pages are most of the section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 man pages for Linux, and in addition section 1 man pages for the fileutils-4.0 utilities, and section 5 and 8 man pages for the timezone utilities.

[The latter were taken from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzcode2001a.tar.gz.] [The section 3 man pages for the db routines have been taken from ftp://ftp.terra.net/pub/sleepycat/db.1.86.tar.gz.] [The rpc man pages were taken from the 4.4BSD-Lite CDROM.]

Differences from version 1.64:

POSIX pages were added

The man pages

chroot.2 clone.2 intro.2 mkdir.2 remap_file_pages.2

errno.3

sk98lin.4

elf.5 protocols.5 raw.7

are new or have been updated. Typographical or grammatical errors have been corrected in several other places.

Here is a breakdown of what this distribution contains:

Section 0p = POSIX headers
Section 1p = POSIX utilities
Section 3p = POSIX functions

Section 1 = user commands (intro, and pages not maintained by FSF)
Section 2 = system calls
Section 3 = libc calls
Section 4 = devices (e.g., hd, sd)
Section 5 = file formats and protocols (e.g., wtmp, /etc/passwd, nfs)
Section 6 = games (intro only)
Section 7 = conventions, macro packages, etc.
Section 8 = system administration (intro only)

Usually, there are no section 1, 6 and 8 man pages because these should be distributed with the binaries they are written for. Sometimes Section 9 is used for man pages describing parts of the kernel.

Note that only Section 2 is rather complete, but Section 3 contains several hundred man pages. If you want to write some man pages, please do so and mail them to aeb@<snip>.

The following people (listed in alphabetical order by first name) wrote, edited, or otherwise contributed to this project:

<snip>

Copyright information:

For the POSIX pages permission to distribute was given by IEEE and the Open Group, see POSIX-COPYRIGHT.

For the remaining pages, please note that these man pages are distributed under a variety of copyright licenses. Although these licenses permit free distribution of the nroff sources contained in this package, commercial distribution may impose other requirements (e.g., acknowledgement of copyright or inclusion of the raw nroff sources with the commercial distribution).
If you distribute these man pages commercially, it is your responsibility to figure out your obligations. (For many man pages, these obligations require you to distribute nroff sources with any pre-formatted man pages that you provide.) Each file that contains nroff source for a man page also contains the author(s) name, email address, and copyright notice.

Fred Brooks described Second-System effect in his 1974 classic book, The Mythical Man-Month. I don't think there's a need to rewrite this book yet.

pass without a hitch.

You're kidding, right?

Amendment I
(a) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

A bill "revoking" congress's power to add a refference to God to the pledge? Like that's gonna pass today? Conservatives would have a shit-fit.

(b) Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech

A bill forbidding congress to ban flag burning? No complaints from anyone there, LOL! And don't forget the internet "child-protection" laws that keep getting struck down as unconstitution? How many times in a row can those idiots pass the same freaking unconstituional law?

(c) Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom... of the press

Heck, now with the internet anyone and everyone can qualify as a member of the "press". Legislators generally have no love for the press, and expecially now they want to hold the press "responsible" "in our time of crisis" (terrorism). They would not take kindly to a bill "restricting" their ability to do anything.

(d) Congress shall make no law... abridging... the right of the people peaceably to assemble

Gay rights parades? KKK marches? Anti-war protesters? Globalisation protests?

The legislature loves go as far as the courts will allow them to in setting all sorts of rules, regulations, and permits on peaceful public assembly.

(e) Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom... to petition the government for a redress of grievances

Such people are lunatics, fanatics, and troublemakers stalking and harrasing public officials.

Amendment II
Yep, a problem like you said.

Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Ok, this one just seems archaic. I still don't think they'd appreciate restrictions being imposed on them "in our time of crisis" (terrorism).

Amendment IV
Forbidding law enforcement and intelligence agencies from doing their jobs execept with the prior permission of the courts? Good freaking luck! This one guts pretty much every relevant law since 9/11, wire tapping, search warrants, Carnivore, all sorts of stuff. It also guts the expedited subpoena powers granted to copyright holders' by the DMCA. It's none too helpfull for the "War on Drugs" searches and seiures either. Law enforcement loves their new powers to seize and sell "drug related" property and they never even need to bring a case, much less get a conviction. Law enforcement loves that one as a money-maker.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime... blah blah blah

Can you say "terrorists"? I knew you could!

nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself

Can you say "give me your encryptions keys"?

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial... yada yada yada

"Criminal's rights" is a dirty word and "speedy" is a joke.

Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved...

Hahahahahahahah! A jury trial over a twenty dollar issue! Weeee!

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Again, the dirty word "criminal rights". I'd say there are a few spots they've gone beyond the excessive line, but how about things like the public sex offender registries? They don't exactly cry over "pedophiles" being attacked, so long as the attack isn't on the wrong person.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Man, I really

... a hint to ViSta might fit in here.

QUOTE
Dynamic, High-Interaction, Multi-View Graphics: ViSta constructs very-high-interaction, dynamic graphics that show you multiple views of your data simultaneously. The graphics are designed to augment your visual intuition so that you can better understand your data.
UNQUOTE

Never had the time to evaluate for myself yet, but this is a recommendation by a friend / former colleague.

CC.

That feeling is actually in your inner ear, and it can be simulated by stimulating it with lowlevel electrical shocks. I remember a couple companies were working on bringing this kind of device to the mass market, but it never materialized, probably for legal reasons.

--