The gimp is not intended to scale at all on CPU (memory is a differnt story). It's a photoshop clone. So maybe if you had a 64 CPU box you could have 64 gimp instances each working on 64 different data sets.
Video performance in the machine is almost a non-issue from the task you've described. Heavy duty image manipulation is very CPU dependent (speed and cache size), but since you aren't rendering this stuff in real-time 3d, it's just a bunch of numbers on disk. So PDL, numpy, c/c++/fortran with LAPACK/BLAS, matlab, et al. would be better. Put your money in CPU and IO bandwidth (like somebody said, if your data sets are >2gb each you need a 64bit platform like alpha/MIPS/sparc).
Man, without shitty highschool experiences, where would the crop of angsty goth and industrial musicians be?!? In twenty years we'd have nothing
but happy shiny crappy whiny oops-I-fucked-up-again music from the mutant prozac-gobbling offspring of Britany Spears and NSuck.
Like Trent Reznor said, "I could go to therapy but it might ruin my musical career.":^)
Eh, by your logic it seems that since the other people I talk about (book X) with should also buy it becuase they've derived some benefit from the book without having purchased it. This does not seem logical.
If the intellectual property contained in the physical media is valuable enough to the purchaser, they will tend to hang on to the ``container.'' (I still have have all the _wheel of time_ books by R. Jordan even though I've read them all ~6 times, for example.) If it isn't, they have no incentive to hang onto the container and are entitled, I feel, to attempt some economic recompensation for the resources they expended initially in the hopes of getting valuable IP. (Let's face it, how many people buy a book thinking "man, this looks like a real piece of ass, maybe it'll suck so bad I can laugh when I trick some hapless used book seller into taking it..."?)
I have an idea! Why not make the authors buy back books from people who got them new and want to sell them used? Say for %40 of the original cover price and then the authors coould sell them for %50 making a %10 profit margin... If nothing else this might cut down of the massive flow of treacle that is the computer press these days (Mastering Visual Suckage in 21 Femtoseconds and XML-based OO Kernel-less Operating Systems Unleashed).
Remember a few (4?5?) years back when Garth Brooks was raising a big stink about how used CDs were hurting musicians? It seems like every field of creativity has had these issues WRT reselling of used content at some point now. (I bet somebody pissed and moaned about used records decades ago.)
Just goes to show there really isn't anything new under the sun...
As far as the authors/musicians/whoever go my sympathy is limited. If their content was good enough to keep it wouldn't get resold.
I'll leave the hardware decisions up to you (becuase the performance and cost constraints your application(s) face(s) are best decided by you). But if you go with a linux solution, DON'T USE RH 7. Don't get me wrong, I used RH 5.2 ->6.2 very happily (before that I was a Slack fan). RH 7.0 is FULL of bugs, from little annoying ones to great big monsters.
So either ``downgrade'' to RH 6.2 or use some other distro (I switched to debian potato for a change of pace).
Speaking of the GIMP, is it the best solution for batch image processing? I suspect that something like PDL (perl data language, a module that provides perl with blazing fast data manipulation, matrix math, image proc, et al) or numerical python would have lower overhead.
If you'd like my 2 cent's on the hardware, if money isn't an object go with the SGI harware. If money is slightly important go with an alpha solution. If money is important enough to equal performance, go with MP Athlon systems in a few months once the 760MP chipset comes out (excellent FP perf and cheaper than Intel).
There is a way to mimic this pretty strongly in Vim. Naturally I'm 750 miles from my linux box right now for the holidays or else I'd be more definitive in my answer.:-)
Essentially, run ctags on your source files. then when you hit CTRL-X (I think) in insert mode, it autocompletes with the first match in a user-defined ordering and set of places to look (tag files for var/func/macro defs, words in/usr/dict/words, etc), then CTRL-N/P move back and forth through the result set. This isn't quite like intellisense, but it's still pretty handy when you have a ton of methods laying about. The vim online help and man page have much more info on this. Of course once you've completed the name of a tag, you may want to jump to it to see the definition. No prob, just hit CTRL-], then CTRL-O iirc to jump back to where you were. Admittedly not really intuitive, but better than LALT-META-CTRL-BKSP-x FooBar to do something in emacs...;-) What with the fairly simple (10-15) key sequence collection needed to become productive and the bright 8-bitish coloring of the code, my friends and I joke that C programming is becoming more and more like playing an old Nintendo game...
Ahh, come on, goatse.cx isn't so ba-ba-ba-ba-bad.;-)
It can get under your skin but then on a certain level it can be funny too (I've seen some really good puns involving it, like stories about fat download pipes, shitty interfaces, etc.).
D'oh.:-) I should have but I forgot (the link). One interesting/.-esque tidbit about her is that she doesn't use a regular, stand-alone machine, instead having one of the last X-Terminals (19", color) in the dept. becuase she didn't like the noise level of an ordinary machine. (<-- from the pwr supply fan, hard disk(s), cpu fan, etc. etc.) I worked in the math dept. as an assistant systems dude for ~9 months in '99, and one of the things I remember us talking about was trying to find a more powerful system for her that was zero or near zero noise.
Mmm. Science is very much about people skills, unless you happen to be the absolute number one person in your field. Corporations and government entities don't sit around thinking "hmmm, what asshead prima donna scientist can we give money to this week", and the scientist that can do great work with no coworkers is rare indeed. As a computational chemist, I think I have some insight into this world;-).
No man is an island, in any field. Besides, having your work be your life is pretty lonely. I used to think I didn't need people very much either, but I became a whole lot happier when I realized how stupid I was being. Having friends to knock of on friday to get beer and cheese fries with is just as valuable to the soul as being a penta-PhD.
I see your web address has math in it, implying that you are a math-head. So here's an example for you: Dr. Karen Uhlenbeck. She's the math professor I just took a mathematical modeling class from. She is very intelligent (which is an understatement of truly titanic proportions), and has a list of awards from scientific bodies that's almost a full page long in condensed form. I've heard the other math people refer to her as being one of the best geometers of the past millenia, one of the founders of the modern understanding of analytical geometry, one of the people whose theories underly modern quantum physics, etc. She is by any definition a brilliant mind. You know what? She's really, really funny too. She's very charismatic and personable, and when you're around her it's like you're just chillin' with a homey (to use a term from my home neighborhood); you get the feeling that she really genuinely cares about the people studying under and with her. It's only after you walk away from class do you realize how much you learned in the process of smiling and laughing. She obviously loves what she does and has a very happy, rewarding life. My point being that she's very much a people person and yet is also, as another professor put it in hushed tones, probably one of the top 5 or 10 living mathematical minds.
The original poster wasn't talking about buying a p4. He mentioned a p90. I know a place here in town where, depending on inventory, I could probably get a server-grade p90 (dual hot swap PS, SCSI , 32Mb ram (heh), typical corp. file server from 5 years ago) for USD$300 or so. A basic p90 machine I could probably find for $100. PCs _are_ very cheap, if you buy a few years back on the tech curve.
Where did you pull the 1970's-pc-cpu-arch rant from? yes, the i4004 and i8008 chips were from the mid 70s, but here's a news-flash dude: the i586 bears as much resemblance to them as my left asscheck bears to the Queen Mum (<-- same pasty white color but thats about it). "a mish mash from different manufacturers" -- so? as long as it works, so what? If anything, this is a good thing becuase parts are easier to find. I'm sure the Atari's cpu and an pentium can both do the required amount of data processing, so there is no difference on a user-spec level between them.
I don't think there is anything technically wrong with old proprietary hardware, but that's not the point. The point is: can it push the bits so the docs can use it (it can), and is it easily maintainable (Atari loses big here). How many repair shops are there for early 80s Ataris compared to x86 shops?
Regardless of how you may feel about machine Foo versus machine Bar, it doesn't matter to the end users. They just want something that works reliably. This can be hard for techies to get becuase we care so much about the technical aspects, but most secretaries could give two shits if Word was coded in C or C++ or Befunge as long as it works (in as much as Word works).
I can't count the number of times (in HTML or in any other language) I've accidentally left off the closing part of something (a tag, a comment, whatever) and inadvertantly nullified half of the file. Syntax highlighting is remarkably effecitve at preventing this and making you more productive overall (e.g. questions of "is that the right way to spell that reserved word" are moot when it's a different color when it's right).
On windows, my favorite programmer's editor ($20, 30 day trial shareware) is EditPlus. Small, fast, incredibly featureful and easy to extend. On Unix, Vim is the way to go (small, fast, simple interface you could learn in 10 minutes, syn coloring, etc.). If you're connecting into a remote unix machine to edit your code, check to make sure (ask the admins if need be) that your terminal emulator on the client machine is et right to support color (e.g. xterm-color for the $TERM variable).
If you're using windows and want a good free SSH and SCP (like a secure, network aware version of cp(unix)/copy(dos)), check out PuTTY SSH. Putty supports setting the TERM variable on login like I mentioned above. You can also use SSH to "tunnel" other applications over the encrypted stream (like FTP, checking mail, rsync, CVS, X11, etc etc.), but that's beyond the scope of this post (see the docs or do a web search).
As many other posters have said wisely, switching tools midstream is a sure route to pain. Trust me, once you've made core tech decisions, stick with them! At least until you get version 1.0 out the door...
I too don't like using gdb on the command line, but combined with DDD, the Data Display Debugger (works natively on pretty much any Unix, linux strain, I've seen ports to win32, etc) debugging is a much nicer experience. I don't write multitrheaded stuff being a pretty neophyte C++ programmer (eh, we all have to start somewhere:-) ), but I did notice in the online manual that it does have at least rudimentary support for threads.
Plus it's free and doesn't require any changes to your environoment or toolchain. (Basically just install it, it defaults to using gdb as the "inferior" debugger (as opposed to dbx or any of the perl/python/java/whatever debuggers), and you type "ddd progname" instead of "gdb progname". It even has a command window to interact with gdb directly if you so wish...) Last but not least it has a cute logo.;-)
My russian is reeeeeeeeeeeeeal rusty so I'm not sure if this is the same text as the linked article but it still has cool photos and is an interesting read: Post-Accident Report
Oh, btw, the russian stuff seems to be in KOI-8 if you want to look at that.
I see a large number of posts saying that this will lead to stagnation in the video card market, increased prices, blah blah blah, the usual bad things that come with monopoly. I don't think these fears are grounded in a solid grasp of reality.
The video card market is much broader than the high-end-home-user-gamer-speed-freak niche. Although I do not have exact figures to back this up, I'd wager that the total amount of cards sold as integrated solutions (part of a Dell or the like) to both the business and non-gamer household market exceeds the gamer market by a large integer multiple. NVidia IMHO makes the best current 3d hardware, but they have nothing in the business/SOHO/laptop/OEM market that I'm aware of, whereas Matrox and ATI have vast sums of revenue from those markets. With that kind of revenue stream, they could probably each buy NVidia several times over.
In short, don't assume that becuase NVidia has become the de facto monopolist in the gamer market (with a very, very small foothold in the workstation market[1]) they are somehow the totality of the video card market. They will continue to face competition from Matrox and ATI for the forseeable future.
[1] quadro and somebody was telling me the new sgi vpro line of graphics chipsets was based on NVIdia tech
Becuase you can't have hypertext without a linking mechanism. Since BT's patent claims revolve around a hypertextual linking mechanism, a prior example of a hypertext system (description or device, patents involve ideas and not having physically made something yet) would a priori contain a linking system that would be prior art WRT the BT patent. IIRC BT's patent was from 1974, this article was published 29 years prior to that. Hope that's clear, or something.:-)
IIRC, Vanavar (sp?) Bush talked about having a global, hypertextual web of information in the late 1940s (48?49?), which is discussed somewhere in Brook's Mythical Man Month I think (or maybe it was Levy's Hackers, I've been reading both in the past few days and they are starting to blend together). Even if he didn't patent anything, his writings are a part of public record. When is BT claiming their patent is from again?;-)
OK, I actually found some substantive evidence:
An academic paper segement talking about hypertext, which contains a reference to:
As We May Think by Vanavar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, 1945. Credited in the academic piece as being the first mention in print of hypertextual documents (and you sort of have to have a hyperlink to have a hypertext).
It was "Ma" Ferguson IIRC, towards the beginning of the 20th (like before 1920). She was texas's first woman gov, again IIRC. Sorry, even though I live in Texas, Texas History doesn't interest me that much.:-)
Sadly enough I can see this being possible, given sufficiently powerful edge-detection routines (clothing region detection, sub-clothing body feature determination for nipple and breast shapes etc.). *shakes head* If you want celebrity fake nudes though, why not just look for them on all the bajillions of sites devoted to that? Of course, what with NutScrape being the pig that it is, you'll expend the same amount of cpu cycles either way[1]. Or just become a millionaire and offer the object of your desire a few hundred thousand dollars for a weekend o' carnal fun. "The only difference between an actor and a whore is that the actor sells their mind too." ~ some person whose name I'm forgetting
[1] which naturally is going to lead some troll to propose building a beowulf cluster of 386s to use hot_grits.fu to render a naked N. Portman. Groan. Why do I think of these things?
Perhaps, but even if not, a majority of their advertising budget comes from MS or companies strongly aligned with them. This of course is the Fine Journalistic Tradition of Integrity that many in the media use, which has one commandment: Thall Shalt Not Piss Off Thine Advertisers, But Their Competitors Are Fair Game.
Hmm, yeah, and what would the composition of the force be? I'd say that, judging from ESR's Geeks with Guns events, enough of us dot-communist free software crazies to fill a couple of surplus APCs could raise a ruckus or two.:-) Round that out with some Finnish and Swedish people lead by Linus and we're talking some real fun...
Ballmer: "Uhh, sir, there are several white armored vehicles coming in through the front gate, flying flags with penguins and demons on them." Gates: "What?!" Dotcommunista: "We come to bring freedom to the oppressed masses!" Gates: "What?!" Dotcommunista: "OK, we've come to free the oppressed temps and laugh at your source code. Good, bad, we're the guys with the tank."
Vim is an _awesome_ vi derivative. Syntax highlighting and a million other cool features blended into a very smooth programming and editing environment. It's pretty small too (~1.8Mb stripped) given all the things it can do. The syntax is pretty easy, in practice (with recent vim versions) all I need is ESC to get to command mode, and i to go into insert (i.e. edit) mode. in command mode:w writes out the file,:q quits, and:wq writes and quits. That's, what, 5 commands? I bet notepad has more menu options than that...:-)
The first thing I do on a new system is install vim and symlink vi to it. The second is usually transitioning to qmail.
Slashdot Mirror
The gimp is not intended to scale at all on CPU (memory is a differnt story). It's a photoshop clone. So maybe if you had a 64 CPU box you could have 64 gimp instances each working on 64 different data sets.
Video performance in the machine is almost a non-issue from the task you've described. Heavy duty image manipulation is very CPU dependent (speed and cache size), but since you aren't rendering this stuff in real-time 3d, it's just a bunch of numbers on disk. So PDL, numpy, c/c++/fortran with LAPACK/BLAS, matlab, et al. would be better. Put your money in CPU and IO bandwidth (like somebody said, if your data sets are >2gb each you need a 64bit platform like alpha/MIPS/sparc).
--
Man, without shitty highschool experiences, where would the crop of angsty goth and industrial musicians be?!? In twenty years we'd have nothing but happy shiny crappy whiny oops-I-fucked-up-again music from the mutant prozac-gobbling offspring of Britany Spears and NSuck.
Like Trent Reznor said, "I could go to therapy but it might ruin my musical career." :^)
--
Eh, by your logic it seems that since the other people I talk about (book X) with should also buy it becuase they've derived some benefit from the book without having purchased it. This does not seem logical.
If the intellectual property contained in the physical media is valuable enough to the purchaser, they will tend to hang on to the ``container.'' (I still have have all the _wheel of time_ books by R. Jordan even though I've read them all ~6 times, for example.) If it isn't, they have no incentive to hang onto the container and are entitled, I feel, to attempt some economic recompensation for the resources they expended initially in the hopes of getting valuable IP. (Let's face it, how many people buy a book thinking "man, this looks like a real piece of ass, maybe it'll suck so bad I can laugh when I trick some hapless used book seller into taking it..."?)
I have an idea! Why not make the authors buy back books from people who got them new and want to sell them used? Say for %40 of the original cover price and then the authors coould sell them for %50 making a %10 profit margin... If nothing else this might cut down of the massive flow of treacle that is the computer press these days (Mastering Visual Suckage in 21 Femtoseconds and XML-based OO Kernel-less Operating Systems Unleashed).
--
Remember a few (4?5?) years back when Garth Brooks was raising a big stink about how used CDs were hurting musicians? It seems like every field of creativity has had these issues WRT reselling of used content at some point now. (I bet somebody pissed and moaned about used records decades ago.)
Just goes to show there really isn't anything new under the sun...
As far as the authors/musicians/whoever go my sympathy is limited. If their content was good enough to keep it wouldn't get resold.
--
I'll leave the hardware decisions up to you (becuase the performance and cost constraints your application(s) face(s) are best decided by you). But if you go with a linux solution, DON'T USE RH 7. Don't get me wrong, I used RH 5.2 ->6.2 very happily (before that I was a Slack fan). RH 7.0 is FULL of bugs, from little annoying ones to great big monsters.
So either ``downgrade'' to RH 6.2 or use some other distro (I switched to debian potato for a change of pace).
Speaking of the GIMP, is it the best solution for batch image processing? I suspect that something like PDL (perl data language, a module that provides perl with blazing fast data manipulation, matrix math, image proc, et al) or numerical python would have lower overhead.
If you'd like my 2 cent's on the hardware, if money isn't an object go with the SGI harware. If money is slightly important go with an alpha solution. If money is important enough to equal performance, go with MP Athlon systems in a few months once the 760MP chipset comes out (excellent FP perf and cheaper than Intel).
--
There is a way to mimic this pretty strongly in Vim. Naturally I'm 750 miles from my linux box right now for the holidays or else I'd be more definitive in my answer. :-)
Essentially, run ctags on your source files. then when you hit CTRL-X (I think) in insert mode, it autocompletes with the first match in a user-defined ordering and set of places to look (tag files for var/func/macro defs, words in /usr/dict/words, etc), then CTRL-N/P move back and forth through the result set. This isn't quite like intellisense, but it's still pretty handy when you have a ton of methods laying about. The vim online help and man page have much more info on this. Of course once you've completed the name of a tag, you may want to jump to it to see the definition. No prob, just hit CTRL-], then CTRL-O iirc to jump back to where you were. Admittedly not really intuitive, but better than LALT-META-CTRL-BKSP-x FooBar to do something in emacs... ;-) What with the fairly simple (10-15) key sequence collection needed to become productive and the bright 8-bitish coloring of the code, my friends and I joke that C programming is becoming more and more like playing an old Nintendo game...
--
Oh god, the thought of a panicky Alvin the Helium-Induced Chipmunk just slays me...
--
--
Ahh, come on, goatse.cx isn't so ba-ba-ba-ba-bad. ;-)
It can get under your skin but then on a certain level it can be funny too (I've seen some really good puns involving it, like stories about fat download pipes, shitty interfaces, etc.).
--
D'oh. :-) I should have but I forgot (the link). One interesting /.-esque tidbit about her is that she doesn't use a regular, stand-alone machine, instead having one of the last X-Terminals (19", color) in the dept. becuase she didn't like the noise level of an ordinary machine. (<-- from the pwr supply fan, hard disk(s), cpu fan, etc. etc.) I worked in the math dept. as an assistant systems dude for ~9 months in '99, and one of the things I remember us talking about was trying to find a more powerful system for her that was zero or near zero noise.
--
No, and she's in her late fifties, early 60s I think. ;-) So if you're <= 40 or so, she probably is.
--
Mmm. Science is very much about people skills, unless you happen to be the absolute number one person in your field. Corporations and government entities don't sit around thinking "hmmm, what asshead prima donna scientist can we give money to this week", and the scientist that can do great work with no coworkers is rare indeed. As a computational chemist, I think I have some insight into this world ;-).
No man is an island, in any field. Besides, having your work be your life is pretty lonely. I used to think I didn't need people very much either, but I became a whole lot happier when I realized how stupid I was being. Having friends to knock of on friday to get beer and cheese fries with is just as valuable to the soul as being a penta-PhD.
I see your web address has math in it, implying that you are a math-head. So here's an example for you: Dr. Karen Uhlenbeck. She's the math professor I just took a mathematical modeling class from. She is very intelligent (which is an understatement of truly titanic proportions), and has a list of awards from scientific bodies that's almost a full page long in condensed form. I've heard the other math people refer to her as being one of the best geometers of the past millenia, one of the founders of the modern understanding of analytical geometry, one of the people whose theories underly modern quantum physics, etc. She is by any definition a brilliant mind. You know what? She's really, really funny too. She's very charismatic and personable, and when you're around her it's like you're just chillin' with a homey (to use a term from my home neighborhood); you get the feeling that she really genuinely cares about the people studying under and with her. It's only after you walk away from class do you realize how much you learned in the process of smiling and laughing. She obviously loves what she does and has a very happy, rewarding life. My point being that she's very much a people person and yet is also, as another professor put it in hushed tones, probably one of the top 5 or 10 living mathematical minds.
--
The original poster wasn't talking about buying a p4. He mentioned a p90. I know a place here in town where, depending on inventory, I could probably get a server-grade p90 (dual hot swap PS, SCSI , 32Mb ram (heh), typical corp. file server from 5 years ago) for USD$300 or so. A basic p90 machine I could probably find for $100. PCs _are_ very cheap, if you buy a few years back on the tech curve.
Where did you pull the 1970's-pc-cpu-arch rant from? yes, the i4004 and i8008 chips were from the mid 70s, but here's a news-flash dude: the i586 bears as much resemblance to them as my left asscheck bears to the Queen Mum (<-- same pasty white color but thats about it). "a mish mash from different manufacturers" -- so? as long as it works, so what? If anything, this is a good thing becuase parts are easier to find. I'm sure the Atari's cpu and an pentium can both do the required amount of data processing, so there is no difference on a user-spec level between them.
I don't think there is anything technically wrong with old proprietary hardware, but that's not the point. The point is: can it push the bits so the docs can use it (it can), and is it easily maintainable (Atari loses big here). How many repair shops are there for early 80s Ataris compared to x86 shops?
Regardless of how you may feel about machine Foo versus machine Bar, it doesn't matter to the end users. They just want something that works reliably. This can be hard for techies to get becuase we care so much about the technical aspects, but most secretaries could give two shits if Word was coded in C or C++ or Befunge as long as it works (in as much as Word works).
--
Sorry, I'm not a python programmer. I know that the switch --pydb will invoke the python debugger instead of gdb, but that's about it.
--
I can't count the number of times (in HTML or in any other language) I've accidentally left off the closing part of something (a tag, a comment, whatever) and inadvertantly nullified half of the file. Syntax highlighting is remarkably effecitve at preventing this and making you more productive overall (e.g. questions of "is that the right way to spell that reserved word" are moot when it's a different color when it's right).
On windows, my favorite programmer's editor ($20, 30 day trial shareware) is EditPlus. Small, fast, incredibly featureful and easy to extend. On Unix, Vim is the way to go (small, fast, simple interface you could learn in 10 minutes, syn coloring, etc.). If you're connecting into a remote unix machine to edit your code, check to make sure (ask the admins if need be) that your terminal emulator on the client machine is et right to support color (e.g. xterm-color for the $TERM variable).
If you're using windows and want a good free SSH and SCP (like a secure, network aware version of cp(unix)/copy(dos)), check out PuTTY SSH. Putty supports setting the TERM variable on login like I mentioned above. You can also use SSH to "tunnel" other applications over the encrypted stream (like FTP, checking mail, rsync, CVS, X11, etc etc.), but that's beyond the scope of this post (see the docs or do a web search).
--
As many other posters have said wisely, switching tools midstream is a sure route to pain. Trust me, once you've made core tech decisions, stick with them! At least until you get version 1.0 out the door...
I too don't like using gdb on the command line, but combined with DDD, the Data Display Debugger (works natively on pretty much any Unix, linux strain, I've seen ports to win32, etc) debugging is a much nicer experience. I don't write multitrheaded stuff being a pretty neophyte C++ programmer (eh, we all have to start somewhere :-) ), but I did notice in the online manual that it does have at least rudimentary support for threads.
Plus it's free and doesn't require any changes to your environoment or toolchain. (Basically just install it, it defaults to using gdb as the "inferior" debugger (as opposed to dbx or any of the perl/python/java/whatever debuggers), and you type "ddd progname" instead of "gdb progname". It even has a command window to interact with gdb directly if you so wish...) Last but not least it has a cute logo. ;-)
--
My russian is reeeeeeeeeeeeeal rusty so I'm not sure if this is the same text as the linked article but it still has cool photos and is an interesting read: Post-Accident Report
Oh, btw, the russian stuff seems to be in KOI-8 if you want to look at that.
--
I see a large number of posts saying that this will lead to stagnation in the video card market, increased prices, blah blah blah, the usual bad things that come with monopoly. I don't think these fears are grounded in a solid grasp of reality.
The video card market is much broader than the high-end-home-user-gamer-speed-freak niche. Although I do not have exact figures to back this up, I'd wager that the total amount of cards sold as integrated solutions (part of a Dell or the like) to both the business and non-gamer household market exceeds the gamer market by a large integer multiple. NVidia IMHO makes the best current 3d hardware, but they have nothing in the business/SOHO/laptop/OEM market that I'm aware of, whereas Matrox and ATI have vast sums of revenue from those markets. With that kind of revenue stream, they could probably each buy NVidia several times over.
In short, don't assume that becuase NVidia has become the de facto monopolist in the gamer market (with a very, very small foothold in the workstation market[1]) they are somehow the totality of the video card market. They will continue to face competition from Matrox and ATI for the forseeable future.
[1] quadro and somebody was telling me the new sgi vpro line of graphics chipsets was based on NVIdia tech
--
Becuase you can't have hypertext without a linking mechanism. Since BT's patent claims revolve around a hypertextual linking mechanism, a prior example of a hypertext system (description or device, patents involve ideas and not having physically made something yet) would a priori contain a linking system that would be prior art WRT the BT patent. IIRC BT's patent was from 1974, this article was published 29 years prior to that. Hope that's clear, or something. :-)
--
IIRC, Vanavar (sp?) Bush talked about having a global, hypertextual web of information in the late 1940s (48?49?), which is discussed somewhere in Brook's Mythical Man Month I think (or maybe it was Levy's Hackers, I've been reading both in the past few days and they are starting to blend together). Even if he didn't patent anything, his writings are a part of public record. When is BT claiming their patent is from again? ;-)
OK, I actually found some substantive evidence:
--
It was "Ma" Ferguson IIRC, towards the beginning of the 20th (like before 1920). She was texas's first woman gov, again IIRC. Sorry, even though I live in Texas, Texas History doesn't interest me that much. :-)
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Sadly enough I can see this being possible, given sufficiently powerful edge-detection routines (clothing region detection, sub-clothing body feature determination for nipple and breast shapes etc.). *shakes head* If you want celebrity fake nudes though, why not just look for them on all the bajillions of sites devoted to that? Of course, what with NutScrape being the pig that it is, you'll expend the same amount of cpu cycles either way[1]. Or just become a millionaire and offer the object of your desire a few hundred thousand dollars for a weekend o' carnal fun. "The only difference between an actor and a whore is that the actor sells their mind too." ~ some person whose name I'm forgetting
[1] which naturally is going to lead some troll to propose building a beowulf cluster of 386s to use hot_grits.fu to render a naked N. Portman. Groan. Why do I think of these things?
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Perhaps, but even if not, a majority of their advertising budget comes from MS or companies strongly aligned with them. This of course is the Fine Journalistic Tradition of Integrity that many in the media use, which has one commandment: Thall Shalt Not Piss Off Thine Advertisers, But Their Competitors Are Fair Game.
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Hmm, yeah, and what would the composition of the force be? I'd say that, judging from ESR's Geeks with Guns events, enough of us dot-communist free software crazies to fill a couple of surplus APCs could raise a ruckus or two. :-) Round that out with some Finnish and Swedish people lead by Linus and we're talking some real fun...
Ballmer: "Uhh, sir, there are several white armored vehicles coming in through the front gate, flying flags with penguins and demons on them."
Gates: "What?!"
Dotcommunista: "We come to bring freedom to the oppressed masses!"
Gates: "What?!"
Dotcommunista: "OK, we've come to free the oppressed temps and laugh at your source code. Good, bad, we're the guys with the tank."
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Vim is an _awesome_ vi derivative. Syntax highlighting and a million other cool features blended into a very smooth programming and editing environment. It's pretty small too (~1.8Mb stripped) given all the things it can do. The syntax is pretty easy, in practice (with recent vim versions) all I need is ESC to get to command mode, and i to go into insert (i.e. edit) mode. in command mode :w writes out the file, :q quits, and :wq writes and quits. That's, what, 5 commands? I bet notepad has more menu options than that... :-)
The first thing I do on a new system is install vim and symlink vi to it. The second is usually transitioning to qmail.
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