I agree with this viewpoint much more than I do the posting it's in response to. You have to look at what the end user needs to accomplish and see if there is a cohesive way, under Linux, to provide it reliably and effectively. If the users' only requirement is a term emulator, an e-mail client, and a spreadsheet app, can't that be handled under Linux six ways to Sunday?? Personally, I'm more inclined than ever before to try to go diskless on the desktop so that my IT plant has fewer moving parts and less replication cost.
Let's see: provided I know FreeSWAN, I can grab a machine and start setting it up immediately. If I want to get something commercial and very expensive, I have to fill out how many forms, get approval from how many people, wait for it to get ordered how long? Exactly where are you starting your clock when you say "configured from GUI in a few hours?"
That's what happened to me. DirecTV service over Bellsouth lines. DirecTV DSL service vanished one day and never returned. DirecTV's tech support made mostly of assclowns kept wanting to know about my lights every time I called. I finally just told them, look, I have no DSL service - no carrier, no nothing - any more and I'm tired of talking to people about my lights! So there was a lot of inertia just getting DirecTV to escalate the problem. Then, there would be no solution and no follow-up. A month and a half later, I had AT&T Broadband up and runninng. I'm plenty POed at them for different reasons but the point is, noether DirecTV nor Bellsouth get any of my Internet connection money.
Here's what needs to happen. I install Linux and then StarOffice. If I pull up my file manager and click on an.sdw file, StarOffice should either launch and open the document or open the document if it's already launched. Mandrake/KDE does not do this.
Do a Google search on "Extreme Programming." It's a lightweight methodology that actually presumes requirements will change as you go and allows for it.
It's probably the most sensible thing I've seen in this line of work.
Maybe you didn't catch the in-joke - "transparent aluminum" was an invention and plot device of STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME, the most comedically-pleasing flick in the series.
Nature seeks equilibrium and so does business. The person who makes $4000/yr in India for doing a $35,000-in-US job yet gets the same globally-distributed and -marketed products pushed in his face as we do but does not have the same living conditions or freedoms is going to start to wonder why there's such an inequality. This is how revolutions begon - EQUALIZING revolutions.
I'll tell you what didn't help - remember the IBM PS/2 300GL, that nice little desktop box with built in vid and NIC? Total piece o' sheitz under Win95, Win98, and WinNT, but under Linux it was fantastic!!
I like Roger Ebert a lot, but he often missed the boat completely on SF films, which I don't understand because he's quite a sharp guy. In his reviews, he fundamentally misunderstood ST: GENERATIONS and TERMINATOR 2.
I have to agree wholeheartedly, though, with the even/odd theory. Separate audiences shown 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 and 2, 4, 6, and 8 would come away with vastly different impressions. To date, 2 and 8 have been far and away the best movies, with 4 not far behind simply on entertainment value alone.
1 suffered terribly from the distraction of the Decker and Ilia characters - Decker looked dislikable from any angle and as for Ilia - well, acting experience is preferable in an actress...
3 had a fundamentally solid story hampered by some slapdash editing and some execrably bad performances, specifically from the actress who replaced Kirstie Alley as Saavik (Robin somebody?). She should not shoulder the blame completely, as she was given some really horrible lines (such as the explication regarding "protomatter" worthy of a Scooby-Doo episode).
Good ideas are present in 5, and the segment of the story from the point where the Enterprise flies to that planet to rescue purported hostages to the point where Scotty blows Kirk, McCoy, and Spock out of the brig is really good - smart, funny, and exciting. The rest - oh, well.
6 is more of a plain cloak-and-dagger story using the ST characters and setting to do the telling, and as such, I consider the film a success.
7: Uck. I did not like how anything in this film was handled although I was awed by the saucer section re-entry and crash-landing
In 8 (First Contact), the chilling idea of the Borg is given the kind of treatment that only feature-film money can buy. One difficulty in using the NG cast is in finding enough for everyone to do and they succeed here by giving the characters different but interconnected spheres of action. The same thing was done in 4 (Voyage Home) but in a more blunt fashion and less seamlessly. One thing that impressed me was that for the first time, I could sort of follow the movement of the space battles easier - I think whoever directed those sequences (was it actually Frakes?) used the wide-screen format and the elongated shapes of the ships to better convey motion, direction, and scale.
One of my favorite bits in 8 is Troi's "intelligence debriefing" to Riker, complicated by the fact that Zefrem Cochrane has gotten her totally shitfaced. I think her line is "He made me drink three glasses of something called...tequila...before he would even tell me his name!"
The easiest and least error-prone thing to do was to go by last four digits of phone number. I think the command I used was something like
cat file1.txt file2.txt | grep -4323
This tended to spit out every record that had the same phone number. If you only got one line out, you were done and could go on to the next one. If you got two or more, you almost always either had the same person more than once (either within the same file or between the two files) OR you had more than one person in the same dwelling, perhaps even with different last names. Maybe once or twice did different people have the same last four digits in their phone numbers, simply by chance.
Like I said, a dose of Perl 'fu could have done a lot more than what I was capable of - the point was that what I had and what I knew (at essentially zero monetary cost) was sufficient to speed up Red Cross volunteer operations.
No, I couldn't have, "Reality Master." The duplicates could only really be detected by eye, as the two lists of volunteers were data collected by ear and typed, and as such had terrible discrepanies. The fields weren't at all chosen with an eye toward data quality or usability - "name" was a single field that might have been last name first or first name first depending on who typed in the record.
Do you really think I wouldn't have sorted the list if doing so would have helped?? Come ON!
I wholeheartedly second this fellow's opinion. Why deal in the WinWorld at all? Supposing all you had was Linux, would you really be hurting for anything at all in your endeavors, really?
In the weeks after Sep. 11, I did some volunteer work for the Red Cross in Atlanta. What the people there didn't know and didn't understand was that the little Case Logic CD carrier I held in my hand held enough Free Software to power a small country. I am often still just blown away by the degree of capability that an average Linux distribution represents. Anyway, back to my Red Cross story, they wanted me to go through these two Excel spreadsheets of volunteers to weed out duplicates and it looked like a dauntingly tedious process, so I converted the spreadsheets to comma-delimited text files and booted the Dell I was given to work with to a Linuxcare CD, mounted the disk, and used cat and grep to go through the list at several times the speed I was expected to go at. If I were a "Perl Monk" I am sure that I could have blown through it in even less time.
For the scientific work you're doing in Africa, I've seen posts regarding TeX. Good. That's vastly preferable to MS Office or Sun StarOffice but it takes a new approach to doc writing and a learning curve.
I recommend Octave, a work-alike to PRO-MATLAB. Also, most Linux distributions give you all kinds of programming languages to work in: FORTRAN, C, C++, Perl, Python. There's a Pascal-to-C source converter (p2c). There's gnuplot for making graphs (Octave uses it for its graphing functions).
To get you past your low-bandwidth issue, you need a sympathetic hand with a FedEx account, a CD burner, and a fat pipe to the Internet.
Best of luck to you and please, just forget Windows exists.
[rolling eyes] You missed the POINT! Photomultiplier tubes are a class of VACUUM TUBES, and the ones that they use are HUGE. That's WORSE than a light bulb, which at least holds some gas - inert gas at less than 1 atm, I believe.
This fellow's explanation makes as much sense as any - implosion of one tube causing failure of nearby tubes. It isn't so much that water is denser than air as the fact that water is a liquid and liquids aren't compressible (appreciably). Knowing that the tubes they use in these detectors are on the order of 18"-24" across, I wouldn't have wanted to be in the water anywhere near one of those things when it goes crunch.
I was a Telocity DSL customer in Atlanta in Summer 2000. I was very happy with it, getting 1300Kbps SUSTAINED for distro downloads. Almost always up. Hughes DirectTV bought Telocity and the slide began. DNS servers going out. Mail servers going out. Changing mail server names without telling anyone. Changing DNS addresses without telling anyone. An FTP server for personal Web content that you couldn't get into and eventually, once you could, you couldn't cd to anywhere.
Finally at the end of September the DSL carrier disappeared. I called tech support nearly every day for two weeks, each time having to start over with "what are your lights doing?" questions. Tier 2 people, when you could finally get to them after an hour or so of waiting, were equally unable to actually do anything. No relationship with Bellsouth (last-mile carrier) seemed to exist. Over a month later, still nothing. Oh, I eventually called back a bit over a week ago to see if they even cared anymore, and I talked to a tier 1 supervisor who sounded all concerned and chagrined...then nothing but a message on the answering machine from someone I'd never talked to before...useless. I since signed up for AT&T Broadband. Their customer service seems only a bit better so far, but it's nice when you can at least connect and use the web chat client for tech spt. The tech who came out was able to work with me pretty well (I use a Coyote Linux masqing firewall and a mixture of Win and Lin machines in behind, hanging off two Fast Ethernet switches) but because I had already bought a modem (3com) and called tech spt to get it registered, I was already working but I needed some assistance with the creaky house cabling and e-mai lsetup (which is screwed up because they were tranisitioning to new servers). I only get 20-50kB/s (bytes, not bits) when I ftp ISOs from the Georgia Tech mirrors, but I really don't know where the bottleneck is - I know the firewall (16MB 486/DX33, Local Bus machine with two ISA NICs) can go faster. I've had some outages but now that I've been rewired I've been OK the last couple of days. A big FY to Bellsouth, who refused my attempts to follow up with them about the ticket from DirectTV - I guess they don't go out of their way to help competing ISPs who lease their copper. I did not go with Bellsouth DSL primarily because I don't want them to profit from screwing DirectTV over and me by extension.
We have thousands of 20- to 30-year-old bottle-blondes driving (well, sort of driving) bigass SUVs like Suburbans and Navigators here on the north side of Atlanta. I say, load these honeys onto some cargo planes over at Dobbins ARB and let 'em loose in downtown Kabul!! HAH! That'll show the Taliban what terror really is!!
Joneshenry makes a good point. These "superhero" angles only work for me when they have to play their superiority against ordinary things like humor, love, lust, or common decency. As a writer, it seems like time and time again you would be trotting that out, or its doppelganger, the "Achilles' Heel:" Spock can't love, Seven can't carry on a normal conversation (with arguably the best ass on series television, does she really NEED to?), Data can't laugh. My question is, though, are these superheroes really effective dramatic characters by virtue of their special powers? I contend no. The episodes that stick out in my mind as being good television for any genre are those where it is ordinary things like courage, loyalty, sense of right/wrong that drives the characters, even the superheroes. It reminds me of a book I read about TV SF going all the way back to Outer Limits that said that writers were instructed by the producers that every episode needed a "bear" (Vaudeville term for the guy in a bear suit that would be sent onstage when a skit was going badly) - that one thing that was supposed to strike awe, fear, and wonder into the viewer. That mentality drives much of the history of TV SF (does anyone recall the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century where an otherwise fairly serviceable dramatic episode had a "bear" of poor Mark Lenard removing his head??) Some of the best TV SF episodes I remember had little or no "bear" because the writers knew how to write DRAMA for characters.
Saying Linux isn't tested nor built for clusters this big is a little like saying that sand isn't meant to go in car windows.
Linux has ten years and millions of manhours' worth of development and refinement that has gone into it. You wanna do WHAT from scratch?? PASS!
A cluster is still a machine-by-machine entity, which is the level that the OS is working at; it's the "hooks" you create that facilitate cluster behavior. If you want to write an actual "cluster OS," i.e., one that does not have a context on a single machine, then by all means, go for it, but don't blame these guys for building something by integrating mostly pre-existing parts in order to get the behavior they seek.
Forgive me for the harsh subject line; it's been a long week!
In order to get a job, you can reasonably expect to send out hundreds of resumes and make hundreds of phone calls. In one job-hunt period, I quite posibly contacted 750 potential employers and probably never heard back from at least half - not as much as a flusharooski.
Where are you getting this??? I have a Dell 2U server with their own hardware RAID controller - that does RAID 5 just fine - and the whole system cost less then $5000.
Llewellyn, by a long shot! For one thing, i dunno quite what it is, but I get the impression that RL is a person first, an actor second, and the guy who played Kryten third. His overall demeanor suits the show better and his rapport with what's-her-name (keep her!) is better. RL is apparently a genuinely funny man and it shows when he's talking but not to the camera. I just hope that someone, anyone, will get rid of the Zappa kid on Robotica. The guys on Battlebots are even far superior to him.
A couple years ago, the college team cars stopped in Atlanta and my (at the time) 4-year-old daughter got to see them up close. If you're anywhere near the route, please TAKE THE KIDS TO SEE THIS! It may forever change their impression of what can be done with solar power but more importantly, they can see intelligence and determination in action!
I have a question for any and all race participants: During the course of the race, do any of the drivers actually have to BE RACE DRIVERS, i.e., do you ever "toss" the cars, try to go flat-out thru turns, do adhesion-limit braking, etc.?
Film, as we're used to seeing it in theaters, is "temporally quantized" at (IIRC) 24 frames per second. This is a characteristic that's designed into the camera/film combination and reproduced in the projector.
In real life, objects exhibit continuous motion. Consider the case of a tiny LED being filmed as it moves from one side of the frame to the other across a black background. During part of the 1/24th-sec cycle, the camera's shutter is closed while the motorized claw is moving the film. Once the film stops moving, the shutter opens for some amount of time, it closes, and then the cycle repeats. If you look at one frame of the finished film, you see not a dot but a line with ends that ramp from full-dark to full-light, because the shutter cannot open and close instantaneously. If you look at the next frame, you will see a similar soft-ended line located off to the side of where the line is in the previous frame. The motion that took place while the film was being advanced and the shutter was closed did not get recorded
This process affects arbitrary objects in arbitrary motion as well. We are accustomed to seeing the result in theaters and it does not strike us as odd that moving things on the screen get smeared out and have part of their motion missing (in fact, the screeen is dark during that time). For one thing, our ocular system (brain/perception included) has its own "smear" effect and an inability to register separate events as separate at high rates. In CGI movies, if you don't have a blur, the effect is noticeably unnatural. You have probably seen the effect in music videos (use of strobe lights synchronized to the camera shutter) and in sports coverage (many CCD TV cameras have a very short "open shutter" mode that is sometimes made available even on consumer camcorders).
My guess is that in CGI rendering, blur algorithms are only applied when they matter; there is probably a minimum threshold apparent (i.e., cross-frame) velocity below which it is not applied at all, and the same probably goes for action in the frame that is not the focus of attention. For instance, if a dollying "camera" is tracking a walking character, his legs probably get blurred but the trees behind him probably do not. To me, this is a bit of a "cheat" because motion blur is universally present in "real-space" film as a mere function of apparent velocity.
As long as we have temporally-quantized media, blur or simulation thereof is nearly unavoidable in recording and is expected in playback.
As for your grain issue, as long as they're running film in theaters, you're going to have it. For "real space" film, however, you get more of it because there are multiple film steps. I don't know for sure, but I expect that when you or I go into a theater, we're seeing a positive print that's maybe three to four generations away from what was actually in the camera. For an all-CGI movie like A BUG'S LIFE, this might get cut down to two or three from what actually came from Pixar. I don't imagine that the economics support "printing" the theater print directly (anyone?).
While I don't think a "no-blur" approach is attractive, I think "no-grain" is; that is one thing that CGI can actually do to improve the experience. If you go see an IMAX film, you can get a feel for what can be accomplished with cameras, film, and projectors (I liken it to looking at a Kodachrome 25 slide, super-close-up, with both eyes!).
Microsoft is pretty much free to do what it wants, especially if it comes to hijacking people's attention in order to get more and more people to like all things Microsoft or Microsoft-benefiting. Look, if ABC can implant a huge spooky-looking Oldsmobile billboard in the infield of Turn 4 of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ("positioned," curiously enough, to be a serious safety hazard) during their coverage of the Indy 500, think what Microsoft can do if they smarten the browser they've all but forced you to use to the point where they can tailor your whole "Web experience." MS has MILLIONS of people buying and using their products uncritically and without as much as a thought to alternatives. Never in the hostory of the world has any one entity, governmental or corporate, had such an inroad into the actions and decisions of such a large group of people.
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I agree with this viewpoint much more than I do the posting it's in response to. You have to look at what the end user needs to accomplish and see if there is a cohesive way, under Linux, to provide it reliably and effectively. If the users' only requirement is a term emulator, an e-mail client, and a spreadsheet app, can't that be handled under Linux six ways to Sunday?? Personally, I'm more inclined than ever before to try to go diskless on the desktop so that my IT plant has fewer moving parts and less replication cost.
Let's see: provided I know FreeSWAN, I can grab a machine and start setting it up immediately. If I want to get something commercial and very expensive, I have to fill out how many forms, get approval from how many people, wait for it to get ordered how long? Exactly where are you starting your clock when you say "configured from GUI in a few hours?"
That's what happened to me. DirecTV service over Bellsouth lines. DirecTV DSL service vanished one day and never returned. DirecTV's tech support made mostly of assclowns kept wanting to know about my lights every time I called. I finally just told them, look, I have no DSL service - no carrier, no nothing - any more and I'm tired of talking to people about my lights! So there was a lot of inertia just getting DirecTV to escalate the problem. Then, there would be no solution and no follow-up. A month and a half later, I had AT&T Broadband up and runninng. I'm plenty POed at them for different reasons but the point is, noether DirecTV nor Bellsouth get any of my Internet connection money.
Here's what needs to happen. I install Linux and then StarOffice. If I pull up my file manager and click on an .sdw file, StarOffice should either launch and open the document or open the document if it's already launched. Mandrake/KDE does not do this.
Do a Google search on "Extreme Programming." It's a lightweight methodology that actually presumes requirements will change as you go and allows for it.
It's probably the most sensible thing I've seen in this line of work.
Haven't you heard? "Nothing gets though a General Products hull."
Maybe you didn't catch the in-joke - "transparent aluminum" was an invention and plot device of STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME, the most comedically-pleasing flick in the series.
Nature seeks equilibrium and so does business. The person who makes $4000/yr in India for doing a $35,000-in-US job yet gets the same globally-distributed and -marketed products pushed in his face as we do but does not have the same living conditions or freedoms is going to start to wonder why there's such an inequality. This is how revolutions begon - EQUALIZING revolutions.
I'll tell you what didn't help - remember the IBM PS/2 300GL, that nice little desktop box with built in vid and NIC? Total piece o' sheitz under Win95, Win98, and WinNT, but under Linux it was fantastic!!
Does this mean that Roger Daltrey is going to be swinging CAT5 over his head???
I like Roger Ebert a lot, but he often missed the boat completely on SF films, which I don't understand because he's quite a sharp guy. In his reviews, he fundamentally misunderstood ST: GENERATIONS and TERMINATOR 2.
I have to agree wholeheartedly, though, with the even/odd theory. Separate audiences shown 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 and 2, 4, 6, and 8 would come away with vastly different impressions. To date, 2 and 8 have been far and away the best movies, with 4 not far behind simply on entertainment value alone.
1 suffered terribly from the distraction of the Decker and Ilia characters - Decker looked dislikable from any angle and as for Ilia - well, acting experience is preferable in an actress...
3 had a fundamentally solid story hampered by some slapdash editing and some execrably bad performances, specifically from the actress who replaced Kirstie Alley as Saavik (Robin somebody?). She should not shoulder the blame completely, as she was given some really horrible lines (such as the explication regarding "protomatter" worthy of a Scooby-Doo episode).
Good ideas are present in 5, and the segment of the story from the point where the Enterprise flies to that planet to rescue purported hostages to the point where Scotty blows Kirk, McCoy, and Spock out of the brig is really good - smart, funny, and exciting. The rest - oh, well.
6 is more of a plain cloak-and-dagger story using the ST characters and setting to do the telling, and as such, I consider the film a success.
7: Uck. I did not like how anything in this film was handled although I was awed by the saucer section re-entry and crash-landing
In 8 (First Contact), the chilling idea of the Borg is given the kind of treatment that only feature-film money can buy. One difficulty in using the NG cast is in finding enough for everyone to do and they succeed here by giving the characters different but interconnected spheres of action. The same thing was done in 4 (Voyage Home) but in a more blunt fashion and less seamlessly. One thing that impressed me was that for the first time, I could sort of follow the movement of the space battles easier - I think whoever directed those sequences (was it actually Frakes?) used the wide-screen format and the elongated shapes of the ships to better convey motion, direction, and scale.
One of my favorite bits in 8 is Troi's "intelligence debriefing" to Riker, complicated by the fact that Zefrem Cochrane has gotten her totally shitfaced. I think her line is "He made me drink three glasses of something called...tequila...before he would even tell me his name!"
The easiest and least error-prone thing to do was to go by last four digits of phone number. I think the command I used was something like
cat file1.txt file2.txt | grep -4323
This tended to spit out every record that had the same phone number. If you only got one line out, you were done and could go on to the next one. If you got two or more, you almost always either had the same person more than once (either within the same file or between the two files) OR you had more than one person in the same dwelling, perhaps even with different last names. Maybe once or twice did different people have the same last four digits in their phone numbers, simply by chance.
Like I said, a dose of Perl 'fu could have done a lot more than what I was capable of - the point was that what I had and what I knew (at essentially zero monetary cost) was sufficient to speed up Red Cross volunteer operations.
No, I couldn't have, "Reality Master." The duplicates could only really be detected by eye, as the two lists of volunteers were data collected by ear and typed, and as such had terrible discrepanies. The fields weren't at all chosen with an eye toward data quality or usability - "name" was a single field that might have been last name first or first name first depending on who typed in the record.
Do you really think I wouldn't have sorted the list if doing so would have helped?? Come ON!
I wholeheartedly second this fellow's opinion. Why deal in the WinWorld at all? Supposing all you had was Linux, would you really be hurting for anything at all in your endeavors, really?
In the weeks after Sep. 11, I did some volunteer work for the Red Cross in Atlanta. What the people there didn't know and didn't understand was that the little Case Logic CD carrier I held in my hand held enough Free Software to power a small country. I am often still just blown away by the degree of capability that an average Linux distribution represents. Anyway, back to my Red Cross story, they wanted me to go through these two Excel spreadsheets of volunteers to weed out duplicates and it looked like a dauntingly tedious process, so I converted the spreadsheets to comma-delimited text files and booted the Dell I was given to work with to a Linuxcare CD, mounted the disk, and used cat and grep to go through the list at several times the speed I was expected to go at. If I were a "Perl Monk" I am sure that I could have blown through it in even less time.
For the scientific work you're doing in Africa, I've seen posts regarding TeX. Good. That's vastly preferable to MS Office or Sun StarOffice but it takes a new approach to doc writing and a learning curve.
I recommend Octave, a work-alike to PRO-MATLAB. Also, most Linux distributions give you all kinds of programming languages to work in: FORTRAN, C, C++, Perl, Python. There's a Pascal-to-C source converter (p2c). There's gnuplot for making graphs (Octave uses it for its graphing functions).
To get you past your low-bandwidth issue, you need a sympathetic hand with a FedEx account, a CD burner, and a fat pipe to the Internet.
Best of luck to you and please, just forget Windows exists.
[rolling eyes] You missed the POINT! Photomultiplier tubes are a class of VACUUM TUBES, and the ones that they use are HUGE. That's WORSE than a light bulb, which at least holds some gas - inert gas at less than 1 atm, I believe.
This fellow's explanation makes as much sense as any - implosion of one tube causing failure of nearby tubes. It isn't so much that water is denser than air as the fact that water is a liquid and liquids aren't compressible (appreciably). Knowing that the tubes they use in these detectors are on the order of 18"-24" across, I wouldn't have wanted to be in the water anywhere near one of those things when it goes crunch.
I was a Telocity DSL customer in Atlanta in Summer 2000. I was very happy with it, getting 1300Kbps SUSTAINED for distro downloads. Almost always up. Hughes DirectTV bought Telocity and the slide began. DNS servers going out. Mail servers going out. Changing mail server names without telling anyone. Changing DNS addresses without telling anyone. An FTP server for personal Web content that you couldn't get into and eventually, once you could, you couldn't cd to anywhere.
Finally at the end of September the DSL carrier disappeared. I called tech support nearly every day for two weeks, each time having to start over with "what are your lights doing?" questions. Tier 2 people, when you could finally get to them after an hour or so of waiting, were equally unable to actually do anything. No relationship with Bellsouth (last-mile carrier) seemed to exist. Over a month later, still nothing. Oh, I eventually called back a bit over a week ago to see if they even cared anymore, and I talked to a tier 1 supervisor who sounded all concerned and chagrined...then nothing but a message on the answering machine from someone I'd never talked to before...useless. I since signed up for AT&T Broadband. Their customer service seems only a bit better so far, but it's nice when you can at least connect and use the web chat client for tech spt. The tech who came out was able to work with me pretty well (I use a Coyote Linux masqing firewall and a mixture of Win and Lin machines in behind, hanging off two Fast Ethernet switches) but because I had already bought a modem (3com) and called tech spt to get it registered, I was already working but I needed some assistance with the creaky house cabling and e-mai lsetup (which is screwed up because they were tranisitioning to new servers). I only get 20-50kB/s (bytes, not bits) when I ftp ISOs from the Georgia Tech mirrors, but I really don't know where the bottleneck is - I know the firewall (16MB 486/DX33, Local Bus machine with two ISA NICs) can go faster. I've had some outages but now that I've been rewired I've been OK the last couple of days. A big FY to Bellsouth, who refused my attempts to follow up with them about the ticket from DirectTV - I guess they don't go out of their way to help competing ISPs who lease their copper. I did not go with Bellsouth DSL primarily because I don't want them to profit from screwing DirectTV over and me by extension.
We have thousands of 20- to 30-year-old bottle-blondes driving (well, sort of driving) bigass SUVs like Suburbans and Navigators here on the north side of Atlanta. I say, load these honeys onto some cargo planes over at Dobbins ARB and let 'em loose in downtown Kabul!! HAH! That'll show the Taliban what terror really is!!
Joneshenry makes a good point. These "superhero" angles only work for me when they have to play their superiority against ordinary things like humor, love, lust, or common decency. As a writer, it seems like time and time again you would be trotting that out, or its doppelganger, the "Achilles' Heel:" Spock can't love, Seven can't carry on a normal conversation (with arguably the best ass on series television, does she really NEED to?), Data can't laugh. My question is, though, are these superheroes really effective dramatic characters by virtue of their special powers? I contend no. The episodes that stick out in my mind as being good television for any genre are those where it is ordinary things like courage, loyalty, sense of right/wrong that drives the characters, even the superheroes. It reminds me of a book I read about TV SF going all the way back to Outer Limits that said that writers were instructed by the producers that every episode needed a "bear" (Vaudeville term for the guy in a bear suit that would be sent onstage when a skit was going badly) - that one thing that was supposed to strike awe, fear, and wonder into the viewer. That mentality drives much of the history of TV SF (does anyone recall the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century where an otherwise fairly serviceable dramatic episode had a "bear" of poor Mark Lenard removing his head??) Some of the best TV SF episodes I remember had little or no "bear" because the writers knew how to write DRAMA for characters.
Saying Linux isn't tested nor built for clusters this big is a little like saying that sand isn't meant to go in car windows.
Linux has ten years and millions of manhours' worth of development and refinement that has gone into it. You wanna do WHAT from scratch?? PASS!
A cluster is still a machine-by-machine entity, which is the level that the OS is working at; it's the "hooks" you create that facilitate cluster behavior. If you want to write an actual "cluster OS," i.e., one that does not have a context on a single machine, then by all means, go for it, but don't blame these guys for building something by integrating mostly pre-existing parts in order to get the behavior they seek.
Forgive me for the harsh subject line; it's been a long week!
In order to get a job, you can reasonably expect to send out hundreds of resumes and make hundreds of phone calls. In one job-hunt period, I quite posibly contacted 750 potential employers and probably never heard back from at least half - not as much as a flusharooski.
Where are you getting this??? I have a Dell 2U server with their own hardware RAID controller - that does RAID 5 just fine - and the whole system cost less then $5000.
Llewellyn, by a long shot! For one thing, i dunno quite what it is, but I get the impression that RL is a person first, an actor second, and the guy who played Kryten third. His overall demeanor suits the show better and his rapport with what's-her-name (keep her!) is better. RL is apparently a genuinely funny man and it shows when he's talking but not to the camera. I just hope that someone, anyone, will get rid of the Zappa kid on Robotica. The guys on Battlebots are even far superior to him.
A couple years ago, the college team cars stopped in Atlanta and my (at the time) 4-year-old daughter got to see them up close. If you're anywhere near the route, please TAKE THE KIDS TO SEE THIS! It may forever change their impression of what can be done with solar power but more importantly, they can see intelligence and determination in action!
I have a question for any and all race participants: During the course of the race, do any of the drivers actually have to BE RACE DRIVERS, i.e., do you ever "toss" the cars, try to go flat-out thru turns, do adhesion-limit braking, etc.?
You raise a good point. I'll try to answer it.
Film, as we're used to seeing it in theaters, is "temporally quantized" at (IIRC) 24 frames per second. This is a characteristic that's designed into the camera/film combination and reproduced in the projector.
In real life, objects exhibit continuous motion. Consider the case of a tiny LED being filmed as it moves from one side of the frame to the other across a black background. During part of the 1/24th-sec cycle, the camera's shutter is closed while the motorized claw is moving the film. Once the film stops moving, the shutter opens for some amount of time, it closes, and then the cycle repeats. If you look at one frame of the finished film, you see not a dot but a line with ends that ramp from full-dark to full-light, because the shutter cannot open and close instantaneously. If you look at the next frame, you will see a similar soft-ended line located off to the side of where the line is in the previous frame. The motion that took place while the film was being advanced and the shutter was closed did not get recorded
This process affects arbitrary objects in arbitrary motion as well. We are accustomed to seeing the result in theaters and it does not strike us as odd that moving things on the screen get smeared out and have part of their motion missing (in fact, the screeen is dark during that time). For one thing, our ocular system (brain/perception included) has its own "smear" effect and an inability to register separate events as separate at high rates. In CGI movies, if you don't have a blur, the effect is noticeably unnatural. You have probably seen the effect in music videos (use of strobe lights synchronized to the camera shutter) and in sports coverage (many CCD TV cameras have a very short "open shutter" mode that is sometimes made available even on consumer camcorders).
My guess is that in CGI rendering, blur algorithms are only applied when they matter; there is probably a minimum threshold apparent (i.e., cross-frame) velocity below which it is not applied at all, and the same probably goes for action in the frame that is not the focus of attention. For instance, if a dollying "camera" is tracking a walking character, his legs probably get blurred but the trees behind him probably do not. To me, this is a bit of a "cheat" because motion blur is universally present in "real-space" film as a mere function of apparent velocity.
As long as we have temporally-quantized media, blur or simulation thereof is nearly unavoidable in recording and is expected in playback.
As for your grain issue, as long as they're running film in theaters, you're going to have it. For "real space" film, however, you get more of it because there are multiple film steps. I don't know for sure, but I expect that when you or I go into a theater, we're seeing a positive print that's maybe three to four generations away from what was actually in the camera. For an all-CGI movie like A BUG'S LIFE, this might get cut down to two or three from what actually came from Pixar. I don't imagine that the economics support "printing" the theater print directly (anyone?).
While I don't think a "no-blur" approach is attractive, I think "no-grain" is; that is one thing that CGI can actually do to improve the experience. If you go see an IMAX film, you can get a feel for what can be accomplished with cameras, film, and projectors (I liken it to looking at a Kodachrome 25 slide, super-close-up, with both eyes!).
Microsoft is pretty much free to do what it wants, especially if it comes to hijacking people's attention in order to get more and more people to like all things Microsoft or Microsoft-benefiting. Look, if ABC can implant a huge spooky-looking Oldsmobile billboard in the infield of Turn 4 of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ("positioned," curiously enough, to be a serious safety hazard) during their coverage of the Indy 500, think what Microsoft can do if they smarten the browser they've all but forced you to use to the point where they can tailor your whole "Web experience." MS has MILLIONS of people buying and using their products uncritically and without as much as a thought to alternatives. Never in the hostory of the world has any one entity, governmental or corporate, had such an inroad into the actions and decisions of such a large group of people.