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http://www.trace.wisc.edu/world/web/index.html#dis _web_use

Actually, it will be a chlenge to do something with all these transistors. The problem is that as the number of transistors grows, the number of pins to the outside world can only grow by sqrt(#of transistors). So you can do more inside but you you have not enough I/O. That is the current problem in computer architecture. An issue of IEEE computer was dedicated to that. You need special access to see the articles at IEEE but you could do a google search with the title and the paper might pop up.

Project Phoenix??? You would think they could choose a more reasuring name for hydrogen powered aircraft, given people's perceptions!

Of course, by now it's also a bit of a cliché...

seriously? I go to UW-madison, and at least in the earlier course's (upto 400 level), they're practically documentation natzi's...

Don't get me wrong, I agree... I've delt with entirely too much code that's become my responsibility that has crap for documentation, but the documentation we're required to do on our submitted code is a little bit anal...

The university where I did my CS degree maintains that CS majors, like other students in the college of Letters & Sciences, take a majority of classes outside the major - 80 credits of the 120 needed for a baccalaureate degree must be outside the declared major. As a result, CS grads need to have a decent background in literature, history, hard sciences, and social sciences. This does a lot for critical thinking skills. The opposing view is that CS students should be "prepared for industry", which essentially boils down to teaching some vendor's tools exclusively - Oracle DBA classes, MS programming tools, Cisco certifications.

I'm firmly of the opinion that CS students should be kept in the traditional academic program. Good analytical skills are worth more in the long run than knowing how to use vendor tools right out of the box. Bear in mind that the average adult goes through seven career changes in a lifetime - a general education will still be useful to me when the paradigms of today come crashing down.

The university where I did my CS degree maintains that CS majors, like other students in the college of Letters & Sciences, take a majority of classes outside the major - 80 credits of the 120 needed for a baccalaureate degree must be outside the declared major. As a result, CS grads need to have a decent background in literature, history, hard sciences, and social sciences. This does a lot for critical thinking skills. The opposing view is that CS students should be "prepared for industry", which essentially boils down to teaching some vendor's tools exclusively - Oracle DBA classes, MS programming tools, Cisco certifications.

I'm firmly of the opinion that CS students should be kept in the traditional academic program. Good analytical skills are worth more in the long run than knowing how to use vendor tools right out of the box. Bear in mind that the average adult goes through seven career changes in a lifetime - a general education will still be useful to me when the paradigms of today come crashing down.

If you keep blocking the ads, then the advertisers will give up and you will get to pay for the content. It's that simple.

Advertisement will fail in the long term if people do not buy the products advertised. I see lots of people claiming to be willing to put up with ads, but that's a moot point. No one is buying.

Now I just need to know how to stop the lame animated GIFs -- can anyone please tell me if there's a way to halt them in Konqueror the way I can by hitting ESC in Mozilla/Opera/IE?

As to funding of sites not-selling-stuff? I don't know. Surely many of them will perish in the coming months. But you know what? It's not my responsibility to keep them in business by watching mind-numbing ads. And as I said, it wouldn't matter if I did since I never buy things through ads anyway, and that, ultimately, is where the money comes from. Sites are pulling out all the stops trying to come up with new ideas for funding. Some of them will succeed. Let's just hope they don't patent their business model...but that's another rant.

--Bob

FilterProxy

--Bob

Yeah, so it's a repeat, but it's still a great technique.

Having played with it, and with writing custom renders, I can say that the SDK is really great. It's found here.

For more great NPR eye candy and programming stuff have a look at this good intro to toon rendering, this NPR site or indeed this or this demo of cell shading.

For anyone else who, like me, likes GFX programming for fum but is tired of working on an OGL engine that just ends up like everyone else's, this is a pretty cool feature to try and implement.

One portion which shocked me was:

Our final piece of analysis concerns operating system crashes. Occasionally, during our UNIX study, tests resulted in OS crashes. During this Windows NT study, the operating system remained solid and did not crash as a result of testing. We should note, however, that an early version of the fuzz tool for Windows NT did result in occasional OS crashes. The tool contained a bug that generated mouse events only in the top left corner of the screen. For some reason, these events would occasionally crash Windows NT 4.0, although not in a repeatable fashion.

Here is something which didn't surprise me at all:

Our 1995 study found that applications based on open source had better reliability than those of the commercial vendors. Following that study, we noted a subsequent overall improvement in software reliability (by our measure). But, as long as vendors and, more importantly, purchasers value features over reliability, our hope for more reliable applications remains muted.

Mine, too.

If you really want to understand tuning and how it is connected with spectra of sounds you should read Bill Sethares excellent book "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale". Take a look at this article to get a preview about what the book is all about. He is not using the concept of a harmonic template at all, but relies solely on sensory dissonance (by Plompt and Levelt). The results are still quite usable in composing music.

IMHO, this book is about the only way the usual geek can understand the basics of harmony, consonance, and composition.

If you really want to understand tuning and how it is connected with spectra of sounds you should read Bill Sethares excellent book "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale". Take a look at this article to get a preview about what the book is all about. He is not using the concept of a harmonic template at all, but relies solely on sensory dissonance (by Plompt and Levelt). The results are still quite usable in composing music.

IMHO, this book is about the only way the usual geek can understand the basics of harmony, consonance, and composition.

here is a picture from space of the attack on the WTC. http://origin.ssec.wisc.edu/~gumley/NY_ch02_scale. jpg or here

Ghostscript can read PDFs. You'll need a viewer to view the output. Follow the relevant links!

my desktop.

Along the left side of my screen are launchers for my most often-used programs. Thanks to badgering of programmers on my part they respond to edge-clicks, making them easy targets.

The top of my screen has hacked versions of the deskguide and tasklist which also respond to edge-clicks. Thus, I can switch desktops and windows quite quickly with the mouse

I have a transparent terminal for when I need it. The large panel on the bottom is auto-hide. The applets there are too big to fit on a 24 pixel panel. Brak is there for dancing to music.

I don't believe the Keyboard is God, I think my setup is quite efficient, pleasant to look at, and very functional.

Really big sheets of metal? No, we can't make that now.

According to this site we throw away 350000 tons of aluminum foil every year. That's a lot of foil. Check out what the area of one roll is compared to how much it weighs. Now tell me that we cannot weld smaller, easier produced pieces together. Tell me that we cannot have thousands of robots doing this welding at inexpensive prices in a hundred years (they can already do this now, but they are not super cheap, they aren't mass produced).

So we can make really big sheets of metal now with existing technology. It's just rather expensive, that's all.

Try to get permission to use them, even on Venus.

I intentionally ignored this aspect. My fundamental assumption was that humankind would have to actually *WANT* to do this and focus on it somewhat to be able to accomplish this. This is merely a political problem. Also, china wants to use nuclear devices to help build a dam to generate hydroelectic power. If they can do it, we can do it on another planet.

We can poke around genetically, but we have very little control. You're proposing totally reworking an organism on a scale that's totally beyond what we can reasonably envision today.

True, our current biotech is *NOT* very good, however it's the fastest growing field of science and technology, and developments in nanofabrication, femtosecond pulse lasers, atomic force microscopes, and nanotubules has been giving us a much finer control in the realms of biomolecules and DNA. Biotech will most likely be the science where all the action is in the next century, as bioinformatics is slowly coming into the light, and our manipulation technology is growing by leaps and bounds (they are working on ways of reading the entire genetic code of a cell from a single copy of the DNA). What I proposed to do with the microorganisms may actually mostly be a "simple" matter of combining traits from different microrganisms, with the modifications necessary to make the genes compatable. This is very different from designing the organism from scratch, and I can forsee this within the next 100 years (we can already cross-transplant genes between species, look at the mouse that grew a human ear).

Where are you finding this "nuclear drive"? In as much as treaties ban nukes in space, I have to say that this surprises me.

I'm not sure where you have been, but NASA had developed this stuff in the 60s and early 70s. I believe they had some working prototypes even, however they were not allowed to fly these for political reasons (*sigh*). Also, NASA has been renewing its work in nuclear propulsion. A friend of mine received two PhDs from MIT, and one of his graduate thesises was on Nuclear Propulsion Using Magnetohydrodynamic Vorteces for Containment and Propulsion. So there's plenty of work going on with nulcear drives, in fact had we not stopped in the 70s, we could be using them for all sorts of things right now.

Also one other idea being pursued is the idea of an antimatter-fusion hybrid drive, using antiprotons to spark fusion reactions. This is being developed currently at Penn State University, and was the subject of my younger brother's science project a few years ago. NASA moved the site about it, so I couldn't find it for you.

We also have chemical rockets. Neither will be enough to move an asteroid from 3 AU to 0.7 AU with anything like a reasonable cost.

Chemical rockets are not worth mentioning here, as they lack the necessary specific impulse. Ion engines could do this, but they would take a very very long time. The actual moving process could take 30 years, in which case things like solar sails and nuclear propulsion become rather viable. Also, if we use a near-earth asteroid, it would only be 1 AU to .7 AU, a much smaller distance, and we may even be able to bring it close enough to earth to give it a "reverse gravitational slingshot" in which kinetic energy is transferred to EARTH rather than to the asteroid, thus saving us most of the work with our rockets. It's okay if moving the asteroid has a very high cost ($1 Trillon) in that if you can get 1 billion people to eventually live on Venus, that's only $1000 per person. Not too bad...

Grounded loosely in today's science, yes. But so is Star Trek.

Are you KIDDING?!?!?! Star Trek blatantly violates both relativity and quantum theory (warp drive and transporters, respectively) not to mention constantly gets their technobabble wrong (no, you cannot use ejected antimatter to create an electrolytic reaction to cause a space monster that ate your ship to throw up, like that one episode of voyager). Anything remotely scientific in Star Trek is nothing more than a plot device (I used to be and still am a big fan of TNG, but the more physics I take, the more I see is wrong with it, especially any time they do time travel). *ONCE* in a while they get something right.

What I am saying is *NOT* loosely based on science, it's actually possible today (granted current technology would require an amount of time and energy that would make it nonfeasible, and yes the biotech part isn't yet possible). Going to the moon was once science fiction, and there was nothing in the laws of physics to say it couldn't be done, but the physics said that the amount of energy required to do it was enormous. So it took a while until we learned to do it. It's the same way with this. It's just a matter of time/energy put into it. Eventually construction techniques, energy sources, robotics and biotechnology should be able to tackle all of these problems, as solutions can already be envisioned and planned today.

I'm not talking about doing this in 50 years. I'm talking about starting it in 100, and it possibly taking several hundred to finish. Few can argue that it's impossible, though. Politically infeasible? Maybe. Expensive? Perhaps, depends on whether or not we have self-replicating robotics and inexpensive intra-system travel. Those last two, may for now be science fiction, true. For now.

In the OS/2 case, developers were looking at the IBM-MS collaboration, and planning a switch of platforms to OS/2. MS instead sold them on that inferior product which is Win3.1. We could have a good OS with properly pre-emptive multitasking. But we didn't.

As for the assertion that Windows NT is not based on OS/2 but VMS, that is just wrong. Windows NT was definitely spun off from OS/2, the development of which was based on VMS. Those VMS engineers were from IBM!

The Internet is supposed to be...

• TO EMPOWER K-12 LEARNERS
  
• the promise of our future
  
• to save the American medical system
  
• a global, multipurpose, multimedia communications network
  
• to strengthen Hispanic families and communities
  
• to open the door for competition
  
• for English as a Second Language
  
• for freedom from sysadmin
  
• to transfer the power of the high-speed network effectively to society at large
  
• to compete successfully with Fortune 500 companies
  
• To center learning around the student instead of the classroom
  
• to regain the tails of the normal distribution
  
• to test the founding vision of the framers of the Constitution
  
• to propel the economy forward
  
• a truly democratic means of communication.
  
• to increase mail usage and expand paper consumption
  

The University of Wisconsin provides us with a good example of how the Bayh-Dole Act is implemented. Early work by Dr. Thomson on non-human primates, such as Rhesus monkeys, was federally funded and therefore, the patent obtained on stem cells arising from this work is governed by this Act. In accordance with the law, the invention was disclosed to the NIH, a patent application was filed by the University, through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and WARF licensed the technology to a small company (Geron). Because federal funds were used for this non-human primate work, the government has a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use the patented cells by or on behalf of the government. This would allow the government laboratories and contractors the right to use the patented cells for further research. In addition, in handling this invention the University must ensure that the goals of the Bayh-Dole Act -- utilization, commercialization, and public availability -- are implemented.

Maybe one day we'll see the Aha-ed version of Zelda, following the lead of NPRQuake

If you want to actually play around with NPR, try NPRQuake, which is Quake as a cartoon. Really funky to play. Windows only, sadly, but gives you a very odd flavor. This was covered on Slashdot a few months ago.

UW Stem Cell Press Kit http://www.news.wisc.edu/packages/stemcells/ UW Waisman Center Stem Cell Research Program http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/scrp/ UW WARF Stem Cell licensing page http://www.wisc.edu/warf.boi/p00103us.html

UW Stem Cell Press Kit http://www.news.wisc.edu/packages/stemcells/ UW Waisman Center Stem Cell Research Program http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/scrp/ UW WARF Stem Cell licensing page http://www.wisc.edu/warf.boi/p00103us.html

UW Stem Cell Press Kit http://www.news.wisc.edu/packages/stemcells/ UW Waisman Center Stem Cell Research Program http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/scrp/ UW WARF Stem Cell licensing page http://www.wisc.edu/warf.boi/p00103us.html

I thought there were some weather satellites

The site http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/ has some nice pictures, including full-hemisphere views from GOES-8 and GOES-10.

Of course these are in a fixed position with respect to the earth's surface, while GoreSat would have been fixed with respect to the sun's position.

Also of interest is the SOHO spacecraft currently orbiting L1 and observing the sun.

I thought there were some weather satellites

The site http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/ has some nice pictures, including full-hemisphere views from GOES-8 and GOES-10.

Of course these are in a fixed position with respect to the earth's surface, while GoreSat would have been fixed with respect to the sun's position.

Also of interest is the SOHO spacecraft currently orbiting L1 and observing the sun.

I thought there were some weather satellites

The site http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/ has some nice pictures, including full-hemisphere views from GOES-8 and GOES-10.

Of course these are in a fixed position with respect to the earth's surface, while GoreSat would have been fixed with respect to the sun's position.

Also of interest is the SOHO spacecraft currently orbiting L1 and observing the sun.

Try GSView + GhostScript. GhostScript is an open source PostScript interpreter. GSView is a (shareware) GUI for GhostScript. Both are available on Windows and Linux.

Hey if you are at Madison, WI, take a look at UW-Madison's surplus shop. I got a 17" Sun monitor for $17 USD, also they got zillion of Macs, each selling $10 to $20 USD, good for running NetBSD.

Here is SWAP Shop Inventory website.

dreamword
Proud owner of a 17" monochrome NeXT monitor that I have no idea what to do with, but couldn't pass up

Heck, this is too easy: The .Net, starring Sandra Bullocks

Avoid Adobe. Use GhostScript. Or have the criminals convert it to HTML for you here.

Use a recent version of ghostscript (eg 7.0), as the pdf generation is a lot better. However the newer versions of GS (always) aren't covered by the GPL, but by the Aladdin licence.

See ghostscript webpage.

Sounds like you need to use verb tenses from the part of the book that was left blank to save printing costs :)

The Kodak team felt double-crossed. They had worked with Microsoft and the camera industry for a year

Same old story, how many times have we heard it? In the early 90s, I was still able to feel sympathy whenever a story came out about a Windows developer getting backstabbed by Microsoft. Then after a dozen or so instances over a few years, where idiots still didn't learn from the mistakes of those who preceeded them, I stopped feeling sorry for them, and started laughing at them. Whenever someone makes a deal with the devil, it always ends the same way: with a pitchfork rammed up their ass. It gets to be a classic punchline, the same every time. Instead of the joke getting old, it becomes anticipated and expected. When the Church Lady says, "Who could it be? Oh, I don't know. Could it be..." it's built up and you know what's coming next, but it's still funny.

But just as sympathy had given way to sadistic pleasure at the lemmings' misfortune, there finally came a point where my pleasure was replaced by anger at the victims themselves. "We were legitimizing NT as a Web server platform," Tim O'Reilly said. The victims weren't just screwing themselves, they were making the world a worse place in the process, by increasing Microsoft's power.

And that's why now, I can only say: Fuck you, Kodak. Your loss is Microsoft's gain. Your loss isn't nearly as important as the fact that you, like O'Reilly, have helped to "legitimize" them, which helps to insure that you will not be the last lemming. You've helped to pave the way for future victims, with one more bullet item on the feature list in Microsoft brochures.

And if there isn't any life on Jupiter's moons, we can go out and start a party of our own... Recently, bacterial ecosystems have been discovered in Earth's clouds. This opens the possibility of using balloons on Venus to inject heat and acid loving bacteria into Venus' cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. Let's start colonizing space today!

UW-Madison is actually working on something similar. Sure, it's no black hole laptop, but it is quantum computing. Remember... It's not paranoia if they're really after you.

I'm currently teaching a similar course as part of something called Senior Summer School. I try to teach general concepts in the classroom and work on learning specific techniques in the lab. Some seniors have difficulty especially with the mice due to arthritic hands so I spend a lot of time teaching keyboard shortcuts to help them avoid having to double click when necessary. Patience is key especially in the lab and the suggestion to use Freecell and Solataire is a great way to demystify computers for those seniors who are scared of them. It's worth reassuring them also that the only way to break the computer is to physically hit it - many of them get nervous when programs crash. And since they'll be almost certainly using Windows, it's a good idea to teach them how to reboot the machine when necessary. Feel free to use my lecture notes .

Recently, bacterial ecosystems have been discovered in Earth's clouds. This opens the possibility of using balloons on Venus to inject heat and acid loving bacteria into Venus' cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. Let's start colonizing space today!

So your hair follicle will be frozen solid and blasted into oblivion by cosmic rays over the millenia. Big deal. What everybody really wants is to get to space alive. I've had an idea for quite some time that could be expanded to cover this option ... and adding YOUR VERY OWN DNA (YVOD, registered trademark) might just provide the funding required....Basically, there are some bacteria that love heat and acid, and Venus just happens to have that environment in cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. So let's get space colonization underway and send these little guys on the ride of their life. Before they go, we could add plasmids spliced with YVOD (tm) and instead of inert frozen DNA, it would actually be active in the bacteria, contributing to its evolution and creation of the Venesian ecosphere by expression of your non-bacterial proteins. This isn't a nutty idea, already there is bacterial ecosystems being discovered in Earth's clouds. Any remaining dot-com millionaires out there who want to provide seed (pun) funding, I actually AM a rocket scientist and would love to get a project based on this idea (minus the plasmids, even) off the ground....or even just start a discussion about it.

• "We've got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts."
• "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction."
• "The fact is that the American people are sick and tired of this whole foreign aid concept anyhow"

FilterProxy can remove web bugs by stripping them straight out of the html. Oh, and it removes ads too.

</plug>

--Bob

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

The SNAP-27 power supply weighed about 20 kilograms, was 46 cm long and 40.6 cm in diameter. It consisted of a central fuel capsule surrounded by concentric rings of thermocouples. Outside of the thermocouples was a set of fins to provide for heat rejection from the cold side of the thermocouple.

Each of the SNAP devices produced approximately 75 W of electrical power at 30 VDC. The energy source for each device was a rod of plutonium-238 weighing approximately 2.5 kilograms and providing a thermal power of approximately 1250 W.

Plutonium-238 is a non-fissile isotope of plutonium that decays by alpha particle emission with essentially zero associated gamma emissions. This characteristic was very important for the ALSEP powering application, both because the instruments would have been negatively affected by interference from a gamma emitter and because the devices required close handling by lunar astronauts.

Even though the only radiation from Pu-238 is alpha particles which require little shielding, it is necessary to use thick gloves when handling a 2.5 kilogram rod of Pu-238. The surface temperature will reach about 500 degrees C because of the energy being released by radioactive decay. After ten years of continuous power output, a Pu-238 based RTG will still produce 92% of its initial power.

One measure of performance that is often used for chemical storage batteries is the amp-hour. A modern battery might have a capacity of 1.5 amp-hrs/kg. The SNAP-27 power supplies demonstrated the ability to provide more than 4380 amp-hrs/kg during the four years that their performance was monitored. Similar RTGs have produced 24,000 amp-hrs/kg during a 20 year operating life and are still going strong.

Enjoy...

http://mirror.sit.wisc.edu/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/
ftp://mirror.sit.wisc.edu/mirrors/linux/kernel/v2. 4/

Enjoy...

http://mirror.sit.wisc.edu/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/
ftp://mirror.sit.wisc.edu/mirrors/linux/kernel/v2. 4/

From http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/NPRQuake/

... First, a "get started quick" thing. Download this into your quake directory, unzip it, and run nprquake.exe. When the game comes up, bring down the console and type: "r_load sketch" without the quotes. Also try "r_load bprint" and "r_load brush". To go back to the default, do "r_load dr_default". ...

Alex Mohr

Actually, you can. :)

Check out the stuff I did following NPRQuake here. This stuff allows you to stylize OpenGL programs non-invasively. At the conference, I did a live demo of a (much improved) sketchy renderer on the Q3A Demo.

Alex Mohr

The video on this site is really something. 27mb QuickTime. The pencil sketch renderings of quake 3 are amazing. I may have to install Windows again just to see this in action. Ack!

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/Stylized/i mg/style-i3d-web.mov

TomatoMan

NPRQuake was done a year ago by Chris Herrman, Andy Gardner, Steve Dutcher, Erik Bakke, and me.

We aren't working on it any more -- we've all pretty much moved on. Although it did lead to some research presented at I3D this year. You can see some of that here.

Sorry for it being Windows only, but since we only had like two weeks to do the project, it was pretty much just hack hack hack. And since my Linux box doesn't have a 3D accelerator...

It wouldn't be too hard to port -- mostly just exchanging the DLL code for shared library stuff. Although the code is rather unsightly.

There are a lot of things that could be vastly improved. Silhouette edges, for instance--even a naive method would be fast enough. Also, transforming geometry to screen space and drawing there would help various things.

I think it would be great if someone wanted to pick it up and apply it to some real mod with a rendering style focused on that mod. For example, do a comic-book style for some comic-based mod, or a traditional toon-style for some "cartoony" mod.

Alex Mohr