Someone who is not interested in supporting Open Source processors?
SPARC is an organization that licenses processor designs (Scalable Processor ARChitecture), provides docs, and even licenses a keyboard interface design (this part is low cost). I'm not sure what they charge, it may be just a fee for making sure your processor conforms to the sparcv9 spec or similar and you can put the SPARC stamp on your box. I have not heard of them being unreasonable before. It's an independent body. Sun and Fujitsu/Siemens happen to be a couple of the companies that use the processor design (modified for thier use). Probably similar to ARM in this case, but I will freely admit I do not know many details about the subject. I do know that one can download the designs and source code for the OpenSPARC T1 and T2 series processors from http://www.opensparc.net./
I hear that someone has a design that runs an OpenSPARC on a FPGA (granted, single core, but still cool).
So if you care about having an "Open" CPU design in your system, then you'll be missing out by avoiding SPARC.
Alas I do not have many facts available to back this up. www.sparc.org has been blocked by firefox or my antivirus somehow...perhaps someone is attacking it out of badwill or they got owned independently.
Regards
BTW: I've run gentoo on 'sun4u' SPARC processors, and hear that the kernel has lots of support for the 'Open' T1/T2 line and hypervisor, etc.
Perhaps on his end, yes; but the physical floppy drive used to load instructions/firmware on the legacy hardware device is still going to be present.
I personally have an early 80's Ensoniq Mirage 8-bit sampler that needs to load its OS (16kb) and initial sample set off of low-density 3.5" floppy disks with a specific format.
Most of the "benefits" of the extra swappable drive bay are nullified in newer laptops.
Here's his list: CD/DVD R/W, extra battery, floppy drive, extra hard drive, memory card reader, etc
Floppy drives are obsolete
Presumably someone who still has to run Windows 98 bare-metal for very specialized compilers tied to old systems would also have a use for a floppy drive. I seem to recall some very specialized systems that would only work with odd software on a special laptop with very specific peripherals, and often required use of a floppy drive for firmware, configuration dumps, or similar. That, or I could be misremembering.
No, but I think they did some work once for Spinal Tap.
off-topic: One of many reasons IRIX was cool -- run audiopanel with the -spinaltap option. All volume controls go to 11! There. I have given away my big secret.
btw if my sig doesn't make sense try it on HP-UX 10.20 or so.
The desktop switching and automatic different default wallpapers for CDE (the Common Desktop Environment) was one of my favourite features. There was basically nothing worth configuring, and it was so dead simple. The terminals like dtterm were wicked fast, the window manager was light and worked ok with 8bit colour....and it was on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX....an actual 'common desktop environment'. Most of the time, all I need are about four fast raster-font terminals anyhow.
But the automatic different backgrounds (albeit ugly) were great.
As far as I know, it has been quite stable for some time on Solaris and there's no need to use Apple products (started in the 6/06 release of Solaris 10 if I remember correctly).
>>NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content.
Watch it on cable (pay) or broadcast (free) television!
If you want to watch heroes, cannot on cable or broadcast TV or iTunes but still want to pay for it, then I would wait until they come out on DVD or VHS.
It's a simple solution. Actually, once you get 'behind' a season, it is far more pleasurable to watch them on dvd or tape at your leisure without commercials and such.
Solaris (and Sun) has probably been declared dead as much as Apple and BSD. In my line of work the commercial UNIX variants (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX) are very much alive (SAN/Database/medium-iron). Perhaps it's the native SAN driver/multipathing/utility stack on Solaris that's my favourite to work with that makes me like the OS. 'course, with ZFS and dtrace and zones in Solaris 10+ there are some nice new features, too.
1. How many target ports on the magnitude 3d? For that model, I'm not sure but they are probably 2gbit each. Try to balance load across the ports via multipathing software or manual balancing (server a uses port 1, server b uses port 2, etc).
2. What is your SAN switch topology? If hopping across ISLs make sure that you have an adequate amount of trunked bandwidth between the switches.
3. What speed are your SAN switches? Using 1gbit switches would bottleneck a lot faster than 2 or 4g ones.
4. If possible balance multipathing across independent fabrics. e.g. one port from each server to one fabric to one controller on array. this helps for HA.
5. Make sure the port speeds for all links are operational at the fastest common speed. (check that your 2g links are running at 2g, etc)
6. Check your zoning on the fabrics. I find it best in practice to mask by WWN and make sure that each hba port can only see the storage it should see, and nothing else. YES, even if you have masked your luns on the array. No sense having the OS go poking around trying to make device files and whatnot for devices it can't or shouldn't use.
7. Which qlogic cards? QLA21xx are ancient fc-al only. QLA22xx are 1gbit variants. QLA23xx are 2gb variants, the best being the qla234x series. QLA24xx should all be 4gbit.
8. Even a single 66mhz 64bit pci slot should be more than enough bandwidth for a single port 2gb card.
9. the magnitude 3d is if I remember correctly an entry level array. performance on it may be limited depending on how many physical spindles are installed. Also check the array health. if running degraded you will see a perf hit. higher end arrays should handle the failed disks better and not flinch but I've not tried this on a xiotech in practice. They actually may be quite good, I just don't know.
#1 - By default, you can never log in with root remotely via any means (only via an su). You'll note that/etc/default/login by default restricts root logins to the local console.
#2 - Any admin worth his/her salt will disable anything not required before making a system publicly accessable. This is not a consumer OS so people should be expected to have a clue.
#3 - Less salty admins will find that new installs of Solaris 10 will have a checkbox that restricts remote access to ssh only unless they specifically open the whole system up. t I'd imagine virtually all Solaris deployments are done via a custom JumpStart configuration anyways, and the primary admin of that would have all the patches and lockdowns scripted in to the finish scripts. I do this for a lab environment and it works well.
Couple of replies. Yes, I made a mistake when I said how to do the striped mirror; svm does handle it behind the scenes but on linux you do have to make the mirrors first then stripe. Thank you for pointing that out.
Second, Yes, I did pay $750 for 90gb of storage with 1gbit write bandwidth. It is highly redundant, and has effectively 10 spindles in the stripe; with what the original poster was implying (lots of random IO) this would be quite high-performance with the data striped across 10 drives with their own sets of heads, cache, position, etc. If the person was interested in just raw streaming bandwitdh with few concurrent IOs this is not even remotely the solution you'd look for. However, if you had a number of processes each doing lots of small IO at the same time, I'd place a bet that you'd get better REAL performance out of this array.
I can toss in a bit of advice as I've been working with fibre channel from the low to the high end for several years now. Currently I'm managing a lab with equipment from EMC, HDS, McData, Brocade, Qlogic, Emulex, 3par, HP, Sun, etc. from the top to bottom of the food chain. I'm personnaly running a small FCAL setup at home for my fileserver.
0. Get everything off of ebay. 1. Stick with 1GB speed equipment. It's older, but an order of magnitude less expensive. 2. Avoid optical connections if you can -- for a small configuration, copper is just fine and often a lot less expensive. Fibre is good for long distance hauls and >1gb speed. 3. Pick up a server board with 64bit pci slots, preferably at 66mhz. 4. Buy a couple of qlogic 2200/66's. These are solid cards, and are trivial to flash to sun's native leadville fcode if you desire to use a sparc system and the native fibre tools. They also work well on linux/x86 and linux/sparc64. These should run about $25 each. 5. Don't buy a raid enclosure. Get a fibre jbod. You can always reconstruct a software raid set if your host explodes if you write down the information. If you blow a raid controller, you're screwed. Besides, you won't want to pay for a good hardware raid solution, and I have yet to see a card-based raid; they're always integrated into the array. I recommend a Clariion DAE/R. Make sure you get one with the sleds. These have db-9 copper connections and empty should run about $200. Buy 2 or 4 of these, depending on how many hbas you have. They'll often come with some old barracuda 9's. Trash those; they're pretty worthless. 6. Fill the enclosures with seagate fc disks. If you're not after maximum size, the 9gb and 18gb cheetahs are cheap, usually like $10 a pop on ebay and are often offered in large lots. They are so inexpensive it's hard to pass them up. Try to get ST3xxxFC series, but do NOT buy ST3xxxFCV. The V indicates a larger cache, but also a different block format for some EMC controllers. They are a bitch to get normal disk firmware on. 7. Run a link from each enclosure to each hba. Say you have 2 enclosures with 10 disks each. Simple enough; and 1gb second up and down on each link. 8. Use linux software raid to make a bigass stripe across all the disks in one enclosure, repeat on the second enclosure, and make a raid10 out of the two. Tuning the stripe size will depend on the application; 32k is a good starting point.
With that setup, you should pretty much max out the bandwidth of a single 1gb link on each enclosure, and enjoy both performance and reduncancy with the software raid, and not have to worry about any raid controllers crapping out on you.
You should be able to get two enclosures, 20 disks, a couple of copper interconnects and some older hbas for about $750 to $1,000 depending on ebay and shipping costs.
This should net you some pretty damn reasonable disk performance for random access type io. This is NOT the right approach if you're lookign for large amounts of storage. You'll get the raid10 redundancy in my example, but if you want real redundancy (and i mean performance-wise, not just availability -- you can drive a fucking truck over a symmetrix, then saw it in half, and you probably won't notice a blip in the PERFORMANCE of the array--something fidelity and whatnot tends to like) you have to pay big money for it. The huge arrays are more about not ever quivvering in their performance no matter what fails.
using the jitter option when anti-aliasing can help (really depends on the scene) but for what you're looking for, it would be best done externally to POV, that is, via post-processing.
Ray tracing creations! That book was what got me into computer graphics, granted, there was a limit to the complexity of the scenes I could make on my 20mhz 386sx with 4mb of RAM.:) I must have read that book at least a thousand times....it bugs me to this day that I lost it a few years ago when I moved. The follow-on book, Ray Tracing Worlds, was nowhere near as good.
I fondly remember making simple FLC animations with DTA (dave's targa animator)....the only way you could possibly make something look decent was to make absolutely sure that everything was symmetrical in movment...such as a bunch of gears and whatnot....pump out 20 frames or so for something that rotated by 10 degrees and had appropriate rotational symmetry, loop it, and voila! A pretty sweet animation to impress your friends.:)
Just have something do "rotate y*clock*10" or something....simple easy.
I always admired POV-Ray because all the other renderers I had seen looked like total crap because they approximated everything with triangles. Screw that, when I want a sphere, I want a real sphere, not some blocky piece of polygonal crap like we still have in games.
One thing I was working on was a method of what I called "adaptive temporal anti-aliasing". Basically a utility to help produce motion blur in a not-quite-brute-force manner, even simulating different exposure times (for instance, for 24fps, you may not always want each frame to encompass 1/24th of a second of exposure). Maybe I'll start work on it again.:)
Okay, seems like the person who submitted this story did not know that traditional SSDs (Solid-State Disks) have been around for YEARS (unsure of the 'flash' variety). I have personal experience using one while at Quantum in '98, but a quick google will yield results dating back to about 1989 or so. I admit I don't quite 'get' FSSDs as the write cycles are limited.
SSDs with integrated traditional hard drives and a battery (used to write the memory module resident data to the dedicated hard disk in case of power failure) seem to negate any problems with power loss.
Why bother having such devices anyways (aka ramdrive argument)? Easy...when you've maxed out the amount of memory you can possibly install on a system, and you need MORE, you install SSDs on fast SCSI busses, and swap to the SSD. Not quite as good as having the extra RAM, but a damn sight better than writing to a physical disk in most cases.
As to 'why not just make another interface for a memory module' on the motherboard...well, i'm not an EE, but there's very small distances that you can go at reasonable speed, and a ton of trace paths.....you only have a certain number of memory slots on a board running at that ultra-fast DDR speed because that's all the engineers designing it could pull off! It's not like they're lazy and could simply add another couple inches to the board and put in 32 slots or so. I have seen boards with special accomodations for memory mezzanines and such to hold more modules, but I'd imagine that implementing multiple direct memory interfaces (running at appreciable speed and integrity) would be difficult and cost a great deal of money...I wish I understood all the issues involved.
I agree with you for the most part....however, what if you had 64 dimms (60ns) that are 8-way interleaved like many of the machines I use? Certainly imagining a trace through all of them would have incredible capacitance....but I think the interleaving avoids this by using 1 module per bank of 8 and sort of 'stripes' the data across the dimms.
I need to read up on this further from an engineering point of view.:)
I've got a Waltham model '83 myself, which has the 'railroad grade' movement before they started calling them as such. Also, I believe that this is an early stem-wind and stem-set model by Waltham. Double-sunk dial, thin roman numerals only, and the nice 'fancy' hands. It's got some nice damaskeening on the nickel plate inside, but the plating on one part is worn off a bit, possibly has been replaced. There are some cracks in the dial, but it gives it character. The crystal is likely original....the case is a dueber 20 year gold filled. I bought it for the mechanics, not the value of the materials.
Anyhow, I have no affiliation to this guy, but I bought it in Watertown, MA at www.watertownwatchandclock.com . It's a small shop that has mostly Walthams, but some others as well. I have had good luck with this guy, if anyone is looking for a Waltham and doesn't want to buy one off of ebay or something.
I got mine for a very reasonable sum and a warranty! Not bad for a 119 year old watch.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Rescue CDs are left off the list.
/----RHEL (IA64/x86_64/x86) --->
Desktop
RedHat (x86) --> Fedora (x86) ----> Gentoo (x86) --> Debian (x86) --> xubuntu (x86) -->
| |
\-> Knoppix (x86) \-> Gentoo (sun4u) -->
Servers
| |
| \-> CentOS (x86_64)
|
|----SLES (IA64/x86_64/x86) ---> OpenSuSE (x86_64)
|
|----Gentoo (x86/sun4u/sun4d; experimental!)
|
\----Debian (x86/x86_64)
A company must defend their trademark or they lose it.
guess who won't be buying any more sparc servers?
Someone who is not interested in supporting Open Source processors?
SPARC is an organization that licenses processor designs (Scalable Processor ARChitecture), provides docs, and even licenses a keyboard interface design (this part is low cost). I'm not sure what they charge, it may be just a fee for making sure your processor conforms to the sparcv9 spec or similar and you can put the SPARC stamp on your box. I have not heard of them being unreasonable before. It's an independent body. Sun and Fujitsu/Siemens happen to be a couple of the companies that use the processor design (modified for thier use). Probably similar to ARM in this case, but I will freely admit I do not know many details about the subject. I do know that one can download the designs and source code for the OpenSPARC T1 and T2 series processors from http://www.opensparc.net./
I hear that someone has a design that runs an OpenSPARC on a FPGA (granted, single core, but still cool).
So if you care about having an "Open" CPU design in your system, then you'll be missing out by avoiding SPARC.
Alas I do not have many facts available to back this up. www.sparc.org has been blocked by firefox or my antivirus somehow...perhaps someone is attacking it out of badwill or they got owned independently.
Regards
BTW: I've run gentoo on 'sun4u' SPARC processors, and hear that the kernel has lots of support for the 'Open' T1/T2 line and hypervisor, etc.
Perhaps on his end, yes; but the physical floppy drive used to load instructions/firmware on the legacy hardware device is still going to be present.
I personally have an early 80's Ensoniq Mirage 8-bit sampler that needs to load its OS (16kb) and initial sample set off of low-density 3.5" floppy disks with a specific format.
Most of the "benefits" of the extra swappable drive bay are nullified in newer laptops.
Here's his list: CD/DVD R/W, extra battery, floppy drive, extra hard drive, memory card reader, etc
Floppy drives are obsolete
Presumably someone who still has to run Windows 98 bare-metal for very specialized compilers tied to old systems would also have a use for a floppy drive. I seem to recall some very specialized systems that would only work with odd software on a special laptop with very specific peripherals, and often required use of a floppy drive for firmware, configuration dumps, or similar. That, or I could be misremembering.
Did these designers go on to work for NASA?
No, but I think they did some work once for Spinal Tap.
off-topic: One of many reasons IRIX was cool -- run audiopanel with the -spinaltap option. All volume controls go to 11! There. I have given away my big secret.
btw if my sig doesn't make sense try it on HP-UX 10.20 or so.
The desktop switching and automatic different default wallpapers for CDE (the Common Desktop Environment) was one of my favourite features. There was basically nothing worth configuring, and it was so dead simple. The terminals like dtterm were wicked fast, the window manager was light and worked ok with 8bit colour....and it was on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX....an actual 'common desktop environment'. Most of the time, all I need are about four fast raster-font terminals anyhow.
But the automatic different backgrounds (albeit ugly) were great.
I'm sure I will get modded to heck for this, but I think it is in the best interests of our country to try and keep the automakers afloat.
Not for jobs, or iconic brands, or saving face; those are good side effects if they work.
Think about what the big automakers produced during the late 1930s to mid 1940s.
Making cars is just something to keep the plants busy and keep a skilled manufacturing force around should we ever need to ramp up quickly again.
As far as I know, it has been quite stable for some time on Solaris and there's no need to use Apple products (started in the 6/06 release of Solaris 10 if I remember correctly).
Please correct if I am wrong.
>>NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content.
Watch it on cable (pay) or broadcast (free) television!
If you want to watch heroes, cannot on cable or broadcast TV or iTunes but still want to pay for it, then I would wait until they come out on DVD or VHS.
It's a simple solution. Actually, once you get 'behind' a season, it is far more pleasurable to watch them on dvd or tape at your leisure without commercials and such.
Solaris (and Sun) has probably been declared dead as much as Apple and BSD. In my line of work the commercial UNIX variants (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX) are very much alive (SAN/Database/medium-iron). Perhaps it's the native SAN driver/multipathing/utility stack on Solaris that's my favourite to work with that makes me like the OS. 'course, with ZFS and dtrace and zones in Solaris 10+ there are some nice new features, too.
All in all, everything has its place.
I guess we live in different 'communities'?
Here are a few things to consider.
1. How many target ports on the magnitude 3d? For that model, I'm not sure but they are probably 2gbit each. Try to balance load across the ports via multipathing software or manual balancing (server a uses port 1, server b uses port 2, etc).
2. What is your SAN switch topology? If hopping across ISLs make sure that you have an adequate amount of trunked bandwidth between the switches.
3. What speed are your SAN switches? Using 1gbit switches would bottleneck a lot faster than 2 or 4g ones.
4. If possible balance multipathing across independent fabrics. e.g. one port from each server to one fabric to one controller on array. this helps for HA.
5. Make sure the port speeds for all links are operational at the fastest common speed. (check that your 2g links are running at 2g, etc)
6. Check your zoning on the fabrics. I find it best in practice to mask by WWN and make sure that each hba port can only see the storage it should see, and nothing else. YES, even if you have masked your luns on the array. No sense having the OS go poking around trying to make device files and whatnot for devices it can't or shouldn't use.
7. Which qlogic cards? QLA21xx are ancient fc-al only. QLA22xx are 1gbit variants. QLA23xx are 2gb variants, the best being the qla234x series. QLA24xx should all be 4gbit.
8. Even a single 66mhz 64bit pci slot should be more than enough bandwidth for a single port 2gb card.
9. the magnitude 3d is if I remember correctly an entry level array. performance on it may be limited depending on how many physical spindles are installed. Also check the array health. if running degraded you will see a perf hit. higher end arrays should handle the failed disks better and not flinch but I've not tried this on a xiotech in practice. They actually may be quite good, I just don't know.
#1 - By default, you can never log in with root remotely via any means (only via an su). You'll note that /etc/default/login by default restricts root logins to the local console.
#2 - Any admin worth his/her salt will disable anything not required before making a system publicly accessable. This is not a consumer OS so people should be expected to have a clue.
#3 - Less salty admins will find that new installs of Solaris 10 will have a checkbox that restricts remote access to ssh only unless they specifically open the whole system up.
t
I'd imagine virtually all Solaris deployments are done via a custom JumpStart configuration anyways, and the primary admin of that would have all the patches and lockdowns scripted in to the finish scripts. I do this for a lab environment and it works well.
Couple of replies. Yes, I made a mistake when I said how to do the striped mirror; svm does handle it behind the scenes but on linux you do have to make the mirrors first then stripe. Thank you for pointing that out.
Second, Yes, I did pay $750 for 90gb of storage with 1gbit write bandwidth. It is highly redundant, and has effectively 10 spindles in the stripe; with what the original poster was implying (lots of random IO) this would be quite high-performance with the data striped across 10 drives with their own sets of heads, cache, position, etc. If the person was interested in just raw streaming bandwitdh with few concurrent IOs this is not even remotely the solution you'd look for. However, if you had a number of processes each doing lots of small IO at the same time, I'd place a bet that you'd get better REAL performance out of this array.
As with anything, it depends on how you use it.
I can toss in a bit of advice as I've been working with fibre channel from the low to the high end for several years now. Currently I'm managing a lab with equipment from EMC, HDS, McData, Brocade, Qlogic, Emulex, 3par, HP, Sun, etc. from the top to bottom of the food chain. I'm personnaly running a small FCAL setup at home for my fileserver.
0. Get everything off of ebay.
1. Stick with 1GB speed equipment. It's older, but an order of magnitude less expensive.
2. Avoid optical connections if you can -- for a small configuration, copper is just fine and often a lot less expensive. Fibre is good for long distance hauls and >1gb speed.
3. Pick up a server board with 64bit pci slots, preferably at 66mhz.
4. Buy a couple of qlogic 2200/66's. These are solid cards, and are trivial to flash to sun's native leadville fcode if you desire to use a sparc system and the native fibre tools. They also work well on linux/x86 and linux/sparc64. These should run about $25 each.
5. Don't buy a raid enclosure. Get a fibre jbod. You can always reconstruct a software raid set if your host explodes if you write down the information. If you blow a raid controller, you're screwed. Besides, you won't want to pay for a good hardware raid solution, and I have yet to see a card-based raid; they're always integrated into the array. I recommend a Clariion DAE/R. Make sure you get one with the sleds. These have db-9 copper connections and empty should run about $200. Buy 2 or 4 of these, depending on how many hbas you have. They'll often come with some old barracuda 9's. Trash those; they're pretty worthless.
6. Fill the enclosures with seagate fc disks. If you're not after maximum size, the 9gb and 18gb cheetahs are cheap, usually like $10 a pop on ebay and are often offered in large lots. They are so inexpensive it's hard to pass them up. Try to get ST3xxxFC series, but do NOT buy ST3xxxFCV. The V indicates a larger cache, but also a different block format for some EMC controllers. They are a bitch to get normal disk firmware on.
7. Run a link from each enclosure to each hba. Say you have 2 enclosures with 10 disks each. Simple enough; and 1gb second up and down on each link.
8. Use linux software raid to make a bigass stripe across all the disks in one enclosure, repeat on the second enclosure, and make a raid10 out of the two. Tuning the stripe size will depend on the application; 32k is a good starting point.
With that setup, you should pretty much max out the bandwidth of a single 1gb link on each enclosure, and enjoy both performance and reduncancy with the software raid, and not have to worry about any raid controllers crapping out on you.
You should be able to get two enclosures, 20 disks, a couple of copper interconnects and some older hbas for about $750 to $1,000 depending on ebay and shipping costs.
This should net you some pretty damn reasonable disk performance for random access type io. This is NOT the right approach if you're lookign for large amounts of storage. You'll get the raid10 redundancy in my example, but if you want real redundancy (and i mean performance-wise, not just availability -- you can drive a fucking truck over a symmetrix, then saw it in half, and you probably won't notice a blip in the PERFORMANCE of the array--something fidelity and whatnot tends to like) you have to pay big money for it. The huge arrays are more about not ever quivvering in their performance no matter what fails.
Hope this was of some use.
>>while the only OS that currently runs on Sparc is Solaris.
Tell that to my ultra-60 running gentoo and the ultra-1 running netbsd. They might disagree.
If a company could get by on "product perfomance speaking for itself", DEC would still be around and we'd all be running VMS on Alpha.
using the jitter option when anti-aliasing can help (really depends on the scene) but for what you're looking for, it would be best done externally to POV, that is, via post-processing.
Ray tracing creations! That book was what got me into computer graphics, granted, there was a limit to the complexity of the scenes I could make on my 20mhz 386sx with 4mb of RAM. :) I must have read that book at least a thousand times....it bugs me to this day that I lost it a few years ago when I moved. The follow-on book, Ray Tracing Worlds, was nowhere near as good.
:)
:)
I fondly remember making simple FLC animations with DTA (dave's targa animator)....the only way you could possibly make something look decent was to make absolutely sure that everything was symmetrical in movment...such as a bunch of gears and whatnot....pump out 20 frames or so for something that rotated by 10 degrees and had appropriate rotational symmetry, loop it, and voila! A pretty sweet animation to impress your friends.
povray +itest.pov +otest.tga +ft +dgt +w320 +h240 +kfi0 +kff23 +ki0 +kf1.0 +kc +a0.05 +r4 +j0.0
Just have something do "rotate y*clock*10" or something....simple easy.
I always admired POV-Ray because all the other renderers I had seen looked like total crap because they approximated everything with triangles. Screw that, when I want a sphere, I want a real sphere, not some blocky piece of polygonal crap like we still have in games.
One thing I was working on was a method of what I called "adaptive temporal anti-aliasing". Basically a utility to help produce motion blur in a not-quite-brute-force manner, even simulating different exposure times (for instance, for 24fps, you may not always want each frame to encompass 1/24th of a second of exposure). Maybe I'll start work on it again.
Okay, seems like the person who submitted this story did not know that traditional SSDs (Solid-State Disks) have been around for YEARS (unsure of the 'flash' variety). I have personal experience using one while at Quantum in '98, but a quick google will yield results dating back to about 1989 or so. I admit I don't quite 'get' FSSDs as the write cycles are limited.
SSDs with integrated traditional hard drives and a battery (used to write the memory module resident data to the dedicated hard disk in case of power failure) seem to negate any problems with power loss.
Why bother having such devices anyways (aka ramdrive argument)? Easy...when you've maxed out the amount of memory you can possibly install on a system, and you need MORE, you install SSDs on fast SCSI busses, and swap to the SSD. Not quite as good as having the extra RAM, but a damn sight better than writing to a physical disk in most cases.
As to 'why not just make another interface for a memory module' on the motherboard...well, i'm not an EE, but there's very small distances that you can go at reasonable speed, and a ton of trace paths.....you only have a certain number of memory slots on a board running at that ultra-fast DDR speed because that's all the engineers designing it could pull off! It's not like they're lazy and could simply add another couple inches to the board and put in 32 slots or so. I have seen boards with special accomodations for memory mezzanines and such to hold more modules, but I'd imagine that implementing multiple direct memory interfaces (running at appreciable speed and integrity) would be difficult and cost a great deal of money...I wish I understood all the issues involved.
I agree with you for the most part....however, what if you had 64 dimms (60ns) that are 8-way interleaved like many of the machines I use? Certainly imagining a trace through all of them would have incredible capacitance....but I think the interleaving avoids this by using 1 module per bank of 8 and sort of 'stripes' the data across the dimms.
:)
I need to read up on this further from an engineering point of view.
I wonder if he'll invest it in FCOJ?
Nice.
:)
I've got a Waltham model '83 myself, which has the 'railroad grade' movement before they started calling them as such. Also, I believe that this is an early stem-wind and stem-set model by Waltham. Double-sunk dial, thin roman numerals only, and the nice 'fancy' hands. It's got some nice damaskeening on the nickel plate inside, but the plating on one part is worn off a bit, possibly has been replaced. There are some cracks in the dial, but it gives it character. The crystal is likely original....the case is a dueber 20 year gold filled. I bought it for the mechanics, not the value of the materials.
Anyhow, I have no affiliation to this guy, but I bought it in Watertown, MA at www.watertownwatchandclock.com . It's a small shop that has mostly Walthams, but some others as well. I have had good luck with this guy, if anyone is looking for a Waltham and doesn't want to buy one off of ebay or something.
I got mine for a very reasonable sum and a warranty! Not bad for a 119 year old watch.
>>And Sun have probably done a lot more I can't remember right now.
:)
NFS is still my favourite thing to come out of Sun.