>the next closest thing to a RTS they've made was the Caesar series, which is a lot like Sim City for crack-babies (don't get me wrong; I liked it, but it's weird).
What, you don't like hearing "More Plebs are Needed!" every 5 seconds?:)
> I think the "classic rock" format farted its brain out when they started having those "500 best of all time" weekends, where everyone could send in their votes for best song. They apparently used the results of those votes to prune their play lists to the sure winners. When the format first started they played a lot of interesting B-sides, album tracks, and other stuff that never made the top 40, but after a few years it got to where you could set your watch by which Pink Floyd or Bob Seeger tune they were playing.
I've noticed the same thing happening around here in eastern Massachusetts. We have a pretty good following here of the classic rock format. Boston's WZLX is the only decent station, they tried putting one up in Worcester (WWFX), but apparently there wasn't enough people to justify two stations, so WWFX changed over to a generic rock format. Strange part is, the playlists between the two were very much alike, by artist but not by particular song. For instance, one station would play Gimme Three Steps, then if you switch to the other station, a minute later Freebird comes on. Really bizarre. WZLX still plays slightly more rare tunes on occasion, but most of it is the tried-and-true 'hits'. The problem is that you quickly reach a plateau that you never get off of, in terms of hearing the works of a particular artist. I'm a big Steely Dan fan, and occasionally they'll play 'Reeling in the Years' or 'Hey Nineteen', but you will probably never hear 'Charlie Freak' or 'Parker's Band' on the radio.
Now, this might not apply to everyone, but it's an idea. What I've been doing lately is trolling used record stores in the area. Often, once you get friendly with the owner, they might let you dig through stacks of albums in the basement or back room, or wherever they pile stuff they haven't gone through yet. Most of the things they know will sell easily get picked out, but quite often there are some true gems in the middle of a stack. It's like a treasure hunt, and can be pretty fun, especially when you find something interesting. What you want to do is write down a list of some artists and bring it with you (it's terribly difficult to remember what you're looking for once you've looked at a few hundred albums.) Pick a few albums out that you think you might like (maybe it will have a track on it that you know), pay the $3 or so for the record, bring it home, and throw it on the turntable.
It's much cheaper than buying a new CD if you're on a budget, it can be somewhat adventurous in a weird sort of way, and I don't know about other people, but if I take out phyical vinyl album and put it on the player, I'm far more inclined to listen to the WHOLE thing, or at least one side. I do this to a lesser extent for CDs, and I almost always jump around randomly with mp3s. Listening to the whole album will possibly open you up to some new songs that were not considered hit material and didn't make it to the airwaves, or aren't as prominent (or even available) on the file sharing networks.
I won't even start up the argument over whether vinyl sounds better than any other format, suffice to say that if your album is in good shape, and you have a halfway tolerable turntable and cartridge, it will definitely sound good enough to enjoy. If anyone's interested, I'm using a run-of-the-mill Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable (dj variety, very solid, direct drive), with a Grado 'red' series cartridge/needle. I'm not trying to be an elitist here, but I just want to let you know that your grandmother's zenith console turntable probably won't be quite up to par with the quality expected by people bred on CD players. Find yourself a decent used direct drive turntable (such as an old marantz, perhaps) so you don't have to worry about belts, and buy a new cartridge if it's in question. Shouldn't run you too much money.
Another thing is if people know you like to listen to albums, you might find that a lot of people will just GIVE you stacks of records, and possibly record players. Millions of people keep these things around but don't listen to them anymore for some reason, but they don't have the heart to throw them out. If they think you'll get some enjoyment out of the music they grew up on, and would treat the records with respect (i.e. no scratching you djs!), you just might get a bunch of great music AT NO COST, and COMPLETELY LEGALLY!
Hey, there's always the added bonus of possibly making some of your mp3 tracks slightly more legal....if you do own a copy of the track on some form of media, it's probably not as bad as just having the mp3 and no 'real' copy to back it up in case the FBI comes and busts down your door.
Since Mozilla was designed from the ground up to be fully cross-platform, I don't see how it can be called a "clunky port". IE for Mac OS X could be called a "clunky port", maybe (of IE for Mac OS 9, which was an elegant port of IE for Windows).
You want clunky ports? Try IE5 on Solaris some day.:-)
(Yes, it does exist, though it is discontinued. Here is a link to the binary. Good luck.)
(I may be mistaken, but I believe that Industrial Light & Magic is a Solaris shop... ever see Jurassic Park?).
Yes...I also noticed the somewhat-prominent placement of some SGI Indigos in the server room scene.:-) I think ILM switched to number-crunching on Sun a little after JP, but still did the interactive work on SGI. I believe at this time they have a lot of linux boxen....could be wrong though, I'm not as big in the graphics scene as I used to be.:P I just hope I'm not confusing ILM with pixar!
I don't get why sun is releasing solaris 9 to the intel platform. I thought they were supposed to be a hardware company?
By releasing solaris for free on the sparc platform they increase the value of their hardware business. By releasing solaris for the intel platform they are decreasing the value of their core sparc platform, because they are giving users the choice of going with cheaper hardware companies. All of sun's engineering talent and effort is going to waste.
Actually, I think it is a very smart move of them to keep the intel port alive....think about it: maintaining the portability of one's software (especially an OS) to other platforms has its benefits.
Everyone thought it was brilliant when Apple announced it was porting parts of its OS to x86. They just don't want to be locked into one processor only....maybe Sun's thinking the same thing, or just covering its ass? Maybe we'll see an ia-64 port some day?
At any rate, it is easier to maintain the portability of code rather than try to hack it in in a desparate effort later on.
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
I'm standing. Using the serial port from my pc is a good way to acesss the consoles of a couple of my unix machines at home (irix/solaris). It's also much cheaper than trying to have a separate head or kvm device for the boxes. Granted, this is probably a small niche at home......but not at work. How do you think you remotely access the consoles of various unix boxen? Serial lines, which of course are running to a terminal concentrator. But anyways, I think that just about every device should have a serial port. It's standard, 9600 8N1 is a good guess when dealing with hardware you don't know the specs of off-hand, and it is indespensible for configuring items such as raid arrays/headless servers/switches (ethernet and san), etc that for some reason won't come up on the network properly.
Basically it's good to have because it almost always works, when the rest of the system may be in a messed-up state.
It's probably still around because it does its job. The technology might not be the best/newest, but the theory is sound: a well-documented, common, low bandwidth way to access some piece of hardware, implemented in a manner on the device such that it will 'work' when the rest of the system may not.
I just got done trying out this release of GNOME on a SunBlade 150 (550 MHz UltraSPARC II, 512 MB RAM, PGX-64 graphics). It works and it's kinda snazzy, but it's mighty slow. I don't know if it's the fault of my low end hardware or maybe the software itself, but this beast really makes my machine chug.
Your sunblade 150 is a fairly low-end machine, not that you would think it would take much horsepower to make a snappy feeling gui. Basically put, I've used many classes of Sun workstations/servers (from SparcStation IPX to SunFire V880), and the gui 'feels' horribly slow on all of them. The system underneath can do things very quickly and reliably, but nothing 'feels' fast. For example, my workstation at work is a Sun Blade 1000 (essentially a SunFire 280R in a desktop case), dual 750 usparc3's, fc-al disks, and the same old video card as you. Still feels slow. I have a p2-233 at home with a matrox millenium, 128mb of 70ns ram, and a couple crusty narrow-scsi barracudas, and running CDE on it feels a couple orders of magnitude faster than the sun workstation. Granted, any real work being done goes much quicker on the SunBlade.
I think the problem lies in several areas. First, the pgx-64 has been around for a few years and was probably several generations behind in video acceleration when it came out. Second, I don't think there's too much video acceleration going on with the sun video cards (excluding those that do opengl). I think this is the primary problem. Third, the feel issue. Maybe Xsun is just set up to not update ultra-fast, or maybe it's set by default to make background applications get most of the cycles? Wish I knew how to configure it to try and update the screen at about 10x the current rate...based on the cpu usage of Xsun, it's GOT to be sitting around twiddling it's thumbs between screen updates.
Something is just skewed with X's response time. Granted, gnome will use more cycles to display the fancy graphics, but what I'm talking about is very noticiable even with CDE. CDE feels fast on HP workstations, such as the B2000, which is fairly old. Feels fine on alphas too. I have mixed emotions of ibm/aix. X HAULS on SGI from r4400 based workstations and up (early 90's). Sun.....just feels slow for the gui, everything else runs just dandy!
p.s. In case you're interested, the sunblade you have most likely uses the same pc133 ECC SDRAM DIMMS (cas 3) as a sunblade 100, a seagate barracuda IDE disk, and has a slightly higher-clocked CrippleSparc(tm) processor, which has significantly less cache than the 'real' server-model UltraSparc IIs. My favorite part is running a 'prtdiag' and have it say '1-way memory interleaving'!:-)
If you're running Apache/MySQL/PHP, you shouldn't need to see the console very often. Connect remotely using SSH.
I'll say it again, X has no place on a production machine. It's acceptable, but form for a development machine.
Amen brother! I have to convince people at work about this very fact all the time. Imagine a lab where every machine had a CRT and a keyboard/mouse, or even kvms! Yuck. Unimaginable in a production enviroment (which I don't have, I just run a lab.) I get much higher density with rack mounted solaris boxen (mostly 220Rs and 280Rs, with some E4x00's thrown in the mix), where you can ssh in or if you need console access use a tip server or serial concentrator. Nothing like watching your server post from across the country! Heck, if you really want, the power sequencers in the rack have a serial line, which I'm pretty sure you can instruct to disconnect power from a particular power cord. (I admit, I haven't yet had the opportunity or necessity to try this feat.)
Concentrating serial console lines for this sort of thing is really efficient, compared to having to have some kind of video (!) output to watch a PC type box post. I swear, having a serial console line is probably the one thing I like most about the unix servers that support it (e.g. all sun sparc machines, and most from other unix vendors). 9600 baud is more than enough to see the few lines of text that you want to see when something is coming up.:)
When you watch a movie at 24 fps, or television at 30 fps, motion blur makes sure you don't miss anything between frames. If the action is moving fast enough, it will appear as a blur in a single frame, so you're not missing anything "between" frames.
Not to be too picky here, but your statement is not necessarily correct. Exposure time of the film is not locked to 1/24th second for 24fps 'movie' film, or 1/30th of a second for TV. It is possible to lock your exposure at, say, 1/24th...but you'd have to change your arpeture (and thus depth of field) so that your exposure is still spot-on. I'm guessing that in pro-level equipment, there's also some sort of filter that can vary quickly in the lens assembly so that if you NEEDED 1/24th second exposures AND f/1.8 arpeture with an outdoor scene with varying lighting, it would be possible to do this.
But anyways, you can display film at 24fps which was only exposed per frame at 1/1000th second.....I've seen this disturbing trend in some recent movies and especially music videos. Kindof freaks me out sometimes. =) Still, controlling motion blur to produce a specific effect is just as valid as any other technique to give a piece a specific 'feel'.
Sorry if I went off on a tangent....just had to state that a 24fps movie isn't necessarily (or even often?) exposed at 1/24th second per frame.
Here's my big idea, please feel free to shoot the hell out of it.:)
Let's assume you have a piece of physical media with your information on it. Say one side holds the data in an optical format, and the other side can be used to put text on in the form of ink or engraving, which is human-readable. A CD-ROM would be an example of this. Now, in English*, describe on the human-readable side how the bits on the data side are laid out, in sufficient detail so that, if necessary, a device could be built from scratch to read the media. Also convey the format of the first x number of bits, say, in an 8-bit ascii format to keep things simple. Don't forget to describe the format so people can decypher what the initial bits mean!
Ok, so now say we can read bits off of the other side of the media. Since we know the format of the initial bits, and the characters that they correspond to are in English*, we can use that initial data to describe the filesystem layout of the rest of the disc. Now, if the whole disc is going to be in the same format (ascii), no additional metadata description would be needed.
A good thing to put in this plain text area would be, say, something indicating that starting at bit x we have some images that are x bits long, a description of the image format, and any other information that would be necessary to describe the proper way to display the image.
*Now, of course, English may not be the proper choice. Maybe some other language would be appropriate, I'm not a linguist. Maybe every disc should be forced to have a standard 'rosetta stone' placed on it somehow?
The basic idea is that there should be enough human (or alien) readable information on the disc itself such that a device could be constructed to read the rest, increasing in complexity as we switch from ink text->ascii->filesystem->files.
If you do a search on the net for _any_ manufacturer or _any_ line of products you are likely to find a number of unhappy customers. Every hard disk manufacturer has sent out a bad batch on occasion -- I've had various people recommend to me at different times "Never buy Maxtor" or "never buy Seagate" or "never buy Western Digital" and so on.. because that particular person had a bad experience with a drive.
I've worked in a small lab of various vendor's systems and storage arrays, at any given time, there's probably somewhere around 1000 disks or so running there. They have arrays from Compaq, Hitachi, etc, and many PCs/Unix servers as well. My overall experience is this: Everyone's drives fail occasionally. It's a fact of life, you can't expect that something spinning at high rpm and has heads floating at miniscule distances from platters will last indefinitely.
As far as FC-AL or SCSI disks go, reliability-wise, they're all pretty much the same. I have seen an IBM, Fuji, Hitachi, Seagate, Quantum, etc pop once in awhile, but nothing major. IDE disks are a little different, the IBM 'deathstar' drives caused problems, and the older (sub 8 gig) Western Digitals seem to have a high mortality rate after a few years of use. Same goes for the defunct Seagate 'Hawk' line. Granted, this is beyond the warranty period, but many of the other seagates/ibms/etc are still going strong after several years. I normally swear by Seagate, but I just had to send back an 80gb drive from my home machine for replacement...not sure what the exact failure was, though. I have hit the random-ascii-garbage-during-boot from a 10gig Fuji, but that was an isolated incident.
Advice: Assume that your critical drive WILL fail, and plan accordingly. Now I mirror everything, AND back it up. Keeping redundant online storage is different than maintaining backups of earlier versions of data! Even in a home PC, it is really worth it to get two drives and mirror them, with software or otherwise.
You don't have to go hog-wild though....I'm a storage redundancy zealot, and I tend to go overboard. (Clustered fileservers, two fibre HBAs in each [on different buses], multipath through redundant switches to RAID arrays, power from different circuits to each array, etc. Fun stuff to play with, if you have the equipment around.:-)
I'm a big fan of POV-Ray, I've been using it since about a year after DKB-Trace. I started on a 386sx 40mhz, with 4mb of ram, so pretty much anything now seems 'fast' comparatively. It is pretty painfully slow if you're not used to it, though. Then again, it is free, has a lot of features (now), and nothing beats using the equation for a sphere when rendering a sphere....screw 18 billion triangles! It's really disgusting when you see an otherwise good render and notice that every curve is made up of discrete angles....ugh. As with many renderers, it's very easy to put the 'quality' options up way too high and spend an abnormally long time on a render. I admit, though, that I've spend 4+ days on renders with lots of AA and glass CSG objects...for a 1024x576 image. (Granted, on a 400mhz p2)
POV-Ray is good for a number of things, though I would recommend using a modeller if you plan on rendering anything 'organic'. (Defining bezier patches by hand, while possible, is not reccommended.) Animation support has come a little further lately, though mainly you're going to be rendering a number of stills with some computations in the scripts varying based on a clock value which gets passed in.
Oh, and here's one big advantage -- the source code is freely available! Hack to your hearts delight, just follow the rules if you plan to distribute. Binaries are available for a number of platforms, and the generic UNIX source should be fairly easy to compile. Note: If you're using IRIX, check out SGI's freeware site for a binary. I've had fairly good luck compiling it on Solaris, but I don't have the dev libraries for Irix so I use the precompiled version.
If anyone does end up using POV, please at least give a thought to donating a couple of bucks to them, I'm sure they could use it.
There are some things in OS X that need improvement - notably window-sizing - but then again, the Win2000 box still does outline-drawing for resizing so it's not fair.
Display Properties->Effects->Show Window Contents While Dragging->Apply
Still damn fast, I'll bet.
Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS. It makes a gigantic difference, and takes a major load off the CPU. But it is version 1. It will get better.
So OSX is now where Irix was 10 years ago? Ok, so I made that number up, but buy an old SGI box from Indigo r4k and up (about 10 years old), and even with the latest Irix build, the window system (X with 4dwm) flies. I have never seen X on any platform be as snappy as far as responsiveness goes. (I admit my linux boxen are console only so I don't know about how fast that's gotten in the last few years.) Heck, video drivers for windows have had acceleration for drawing window-manager stuff in them for a long time too.
Sorry about the flame, had to vent a little. Don't get me wrong, I love a UI with eyecandy, but I also want to be able to turn all that crap off, or get a hyper-fast text-only window at times too.:-)
Ok, Honestly, what on earth do people put behind their LCD monitors? You're not going to have the plane of the screen any further away from you, so you've got about a foot or so of dead space behind your LCD. (Maybe more for huge CRTs put in retirement, but mine just hangs a few inches off the back of the desk.) I'd almost think of putting a mid-tower case behind there, but then I'd be reaching around the side every time I needed to eject a CD or turn the machine off, and on the other side I'd be able to see all the cabling coming off the back of the case.
You know, I like LCDs, but other than the refresh rate problem and blurring, I do a bit of tinkering with graphics, and I play a few games, so I like to change my resolution once in a while and not have to worry about having the graphics look like garbage 'cause I'm not at my native resolution.
I just picked up a copy of DSotM on vinyl at a used records store in Lowell, MA. It was $15, but the album appeared totally mint, and it still has the posters and stickers inside (unstuck, unpush-pinned). Even the cover is in excellent shape, but I've got some sort of nick half-way through 'any colour you like'. Pisses me off...I can't see anything there, but my player apparently does.:)
Of course, I've got several masters on CD, Mobile Fidelity being the best, but those are almost all scratched beyond repair because they were played so much in my car player. Looks like I'll be buying a 4th.
I really wish that once I 'purchased' a specific recording, I could get replacement media at a nominal fee.
I went off to college back in '96 to pursue a degree in Computer Science. I graduated in the top 10 in my High School, but my college career was very different. As soon as I moved in my forced-triple dorm room with two roomates I despised immediately, life was pretty damn bad for the 2.5 years that I stuck with it. Unless you are good-looking or very social or a jock or a frat-boy bastard, there ain't shit to do at college. The majority of my time there was spent trying to complete random assignments, sleeping, and working minimum wage jobs. My grades were poor, my GPA being around 2.05 for classes that I passed. (At WPI, anything under a C is never recorded). I failed so many classes freshman year that I had to take 4 during the summer to retain financial aid...which I barely pulled off. Halfway through the second nightmare year, I wanted out really bad....I wanted to pursue a degree in computer art at SCAD, drove to georgia to interview, got accepted, and couldn't go because of lack of money. I then returned to WPI, took an 8 month co-op position, and hoped when I went back that I would have more motivation again. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I went back, tried to take the required classes that I failed before, and promptly failed them again. (Calculus 4 and analysis of algorithms, if anyone cares.) Now I was out on the street, some $42,000+ in debt, with no degree and huge loan payments. All I can say is thank god that the company I did a co-op for was pleased with my prior performance and gave me a decent job at a pay rate slightly higher than my original co-op.
Now, a couple years later, the company I work for was bought up by a larger company, I survived a round of layoffs, and I'm taking night classes at Clark University to finish off my CS degree. I was able to transfer most of my credits from WPI...and now have about 6 years worth of night courses to fill up random degree requirements not relating to my major. It will be a lot of work, but I would really like someday to have a degree in CS. Partially for my own vindication, so I can actually believe in my abilities again, but also because if I ever got laid off, there is no way in hell I could get a job without a degree.
If I remember correctly, to enable 64 bit operation on an UltraSPARC 1 cpu (such as that in an Ultra 1 workstation), you need to upgrade to OpenBoot 3.11.1 at a minimum, and then uncomment the line in/platform/sun4u/boot.conf that says this: ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU=true.
I don't know exactly what the bug is with the old UltraSPARC 1's, except that given specific hand-written assembly code, it is possible to lock up the machine.
I have been running mine on the 64 bit kernel for some time now, and haven't noticed any problems, so it's probably safe in most circumstances.
Fanboys and cinemaphiles love the kind of extras in DVD's. While the general public might not care about missing scenes or directors commentary, there is definetley a niche market that does, and I think in the case of FOTR, much of/. readership is part of that niche.
I totally agree...the extra features on DVD's are good in general, and even better on Director's Cuts. Prior to DVD's, the only way to get ahold of extra features such as deleted scenes, widescreen editions, and extra audio tracks was to purchase the LaserDisc versions. I have a fairly large assortment of special/collectors edition LD's, and I have to say that although I get ~80 lines less resolution, I believe that the LDs are better in some cases. Take the Criterion edition of The Princess Bride on LD...the mastering work looks better than what's on the DVD...probably because more attention was paid to the LD master, because they were pretty strictly marketed to Audio/Videophiles. Another great advantage to LD's is that there are never (in my experience) any god-forsaken commercials on the disc that I pay good money for. Putting in the disc and pressing Play, to be presented with (other than the legal statement) only perhaps a THX intro and the movie itself is more professional and tasteful than having some horribly ugly menu interface and a smattering of advertisements/trailers for other movies.
That, and I can watch Star Wars - Special Edition in Dolby AC-3 (aka 5.1, aka dolby digital), and Indiana Jones movies.:-)
Only down-side is the cost and (recently) the availability of movies on LD. Any new releases I now get on DVD, but the LDs are still holding up well. DVDs will always have a better price point, I admit....the Criterion version of the Princess Bride on LD cost me $100 originally!
CD quality? Big deal, I can throw an mp3 player in my car for cheap these days.
Am I the only person who still uses CDs for "CD Quality" music?:-)
Realistically though, 74 minutes of music is probably more than enough for most trips. If not, take two CDs! I just make a couple mix cds and keep them in the back seat.
Actually, the Extreme graphics set came with (1) Geometry pre-processor, (2) Raster Engines, and (3) OpenGL processors. I'm currently using an Indigo^2 Extreme (R4400 200mhz, 256mb RAM) as my webserver, and it has absolutely no problem maxing out my pitiful 384kbaud upstream).:)
As a side note, Indigo^2 owners had to wait until the later purple-box High/MaxImpact grapcics sets to get hardware texturing support and texture RAM.
A truly cool machine is the Crimson Reality Engine. By far, the most sexy deskside box EVER.
Another question I've had bouncing around in the back of my head is why no one uses MPEG decoder circuitry for MP3 playback? All the players I've tried, windows or linux, take 10-30% of the CPU for noraml playback operation. This is unacceptable when working in big apps like 3DStudio Max, make-ing a big app or running big scripts.
I'm curious, what hardware are you rendering on, where the cpu usage for decoding an mp3 stream takes up 10-30% of your cpu? Running winamp with the mini-vis set to 70fps, and checking task manager in NT4Wks reports that winamp uses 0-1% of my cpu. This can actually be taken to read 1-2%, since I am running a dual-processor pentium 2 at 233mhz, with 256mb of 60ns ram, an ISA sb64, and an old pci TNT using old detonator drivers, since the new detonators break avi playback for me.
As an alternative test, I fired up MXaudio on my SGI Indigo, which has a 100mhz r4000 cpu and ELAN graphics, and to decode a 256kilobit mp3 stream, it takes 35% of the cpu. (Not bad considering the age of the machine)
Although I am a sick bastard and raytrace images on the Indigo and my 486sx laptop, I hope you have a slightly more powerful machine for 3DStudio. Perhaps the huge amount of cpu usage for your mp3 player is due to poorly written sound card drivers? I would seriously look into this.
I hope they will continue to include the OpenWindows desktop as well, does anybody know if they are planning to drop OpenWindows in favor of Gnome, or will Openwindows, Gnome, and CDE all be available?
Even though I like OpenWindows, I almost always have my default sessions set to use CDE, since that way I can easily have my window manager the same on all the UNIX platforms I use (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, OSF/1), with the exception of IRIX.:)
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What, you don't like hearing "More Plebs are Needed!" every 5 seconds?
I've noticed the same thing happening around here in eastern Massachusetts. We have a pretty good following here of the classic rock format. Boston's WZLX is the only decent station, they tried putting one up in Worcester (WWFX), but apparently there wasn't enough people to justify two stations, so WWFX changed over to a generic rock format. Strange part is, the playlists between the two were very much alike, by artist but not by particular song. For instance, one station would play Gimme Three Steps, then if you switch to the other station, a minute later Freebird comes on. Really bizarre. WZLX still plays slightly more rare tunes on occasion, but most of it is the tried-and-true 'hits'. The problem is that you quickly reach a plateau that you never get off of, in terms of hearing the works of a particular artist. I'm a big Steely Dan fan, and occasionally they'll play 'Reeling in the Years' or 'Hey Nineteen', but you will probably never hear 'Charlie Freak' or 'Parker's Band' on the radio.
Now, this might not apply to everyone, but it's an idea. What I've been doing lately is trolling used record stores in the area. Often, once you get friendly with the owner, they might let you dig through stacks of albums in the basement or back room, or wherever they pile stuff they haven't gone through yet. Most of the things they know will sell easily get picked out, but quite often there are some true gems in the middle of a stack. It's like a treasure hunt, and can be pretty fun, especially when you find something interesting. What you want to do is write down a list of some artists and bring it with you (it's terribly difficult to remember what you're looking for once you've looked at a few hundred albums.) Pick a few albums out that you think you might like (maybe it will have a track on it that you know), pay the $3 or so for the record, bring it home, and throw it on the turntable.
It's much cheaper than buying a new CD if you're on a budget, it can be somewhat adventurous in a weird sort of way, and I don't know about other people, but if I take out phyical vinyl album and put it on the player, I'm far more inclined to listen to the WHOLE thing, or at least one side. I do this to a lesser extent for CDs, and I almost always jump around randomly with mp3s. Listening to the whole album will possibly open you up to some new songs that were not considered hit material and didn't make it to the airwaves, or aren't as prominent (or even available) on the file sharing networks.
I won't even start up the argument over whether vinyl sounds better than any other format, suffice to say that if your album is in good shape, and you have a halfway tolerable turntable and cartridge, it will definitely sound good enough to enjoy. If anyone's interested, I'm using a run-of-the-mill Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable (dj variety, very solid, direct drive), with a Grado 'red' series cartridge/needle. I'm not trying to be an elitist here, but I just want to let you know that your grandmother's zenith console turntable probably won't be quite up to par with the quality expected by people bred on CD players. Find yourself a decent used direct drive turntable (such as an old marantz, perhaps) so you don't have to worry about belts, and buy a new cartridge if it's in question. Shouldn't run you too much money.
Another thing is if people know you like to listen to albums, you might find that a lot of people will just GIVE you stacks of records, and possibly record players. Millions of people keep these things around but don't listen to them anymore for some reason, but they don't have the heart to throw them out. If they think you'll get some enjoyment out of the music they grew up on, and would treat the records with respect (i.e. no scratching you djs!), you just might get a bunch of great music AT NO COST, and COMPLETELY LEGALLY!
Hey, there's always the added bonus of possibly making some of your mp3 tracks slightly more legal....if you do own a copy of the track on some form of media, it's probably not as bad as just having the mp3 and no 'real' copy to back it up in case the FBI comes and busts down your door.
Yes...I also noticed the somewhat-prominent placement of some SGI Indigos in the server room scene.
Actually, I think it is a very smart move of them to keep the intel port alive....think about it: maintaining the portability of one's software (especially an OS) to other platforms has its benefits.
Everyone thought it was brilliant when Apple announced it was porting parts of its OS to x86. They just don't want to be locked into one processor only....maybe Sun's thinking the same thing, or just covering its ass? Maybe we'll see an ia-64 port some day?
At any rate, it is easier to maintain the portability of code rather than try to hack it in in a desparate effort later on.
I'm standing. Using the serial port from my pc is a good way to acesss the consoles of a couple of my unix machines at home (irix/solaris). It's also much cheaper than trying to have a separate head or kvm device for the boxes. Granted, this is probably a small niche at home...
Basically it's good to have because it almost always works, when the rest of the system may be in a messed-up state.
It's probably still around because it does its job. The technology might not be the best/newest, but the theory is sound: a well-documented, common, low bandwidth way to access some piece of hardware, implemented in a manner on the device such that it will 'work' when the rest of the system may not.
Your sunblade 150 is a fairly low-end machine, not that you would think it would take much horsepower to make a snappy feeling gui. Basically put, I've used many classes of Sun workstations/servers (from SparcStation IPX to SunFire V880), and the gui 'feels' horribly slow on all of them. The system underneath can do things very quickly and reliably, but nothing 'feels' fast. For example, my workstation at work is a Sun Blade 1000 (essentially a SunFire 280R in a desktop case), dual 750 usparc3's, fc-al disks, and the same old video card as you. Still feels slow. I have a p2-233 at home with a matrox millenium, 128mb of 70ns ram, and a couple crusty narrow-scsi barracudas, and running CDE on it feels a couple orders of magnitude faster than the sun workstation. Granted, any real work being done goes much quicker on the SunBlade.
I think the problem lies in several areas. First, the pgx-64 has been around for a few years and was probably several generations behind in video acceleration when it came out. Second, I don't think there's too much video acceleration going on with the sun video cards (excluding those that do opengl). I think this is the primary problem. Third, the feel issue. Maybe Xsun is just set up to not update ultra-fast, or maybe it's set by default to make background applications get most of the cycles? Wish I knew how to configure it to try and update the screen at about 10x the current rate...based on the cpu usage of Xsun, it's GOT to be sitting around twiddling it's thumbs between screen updates.
Something is just skewed with X's response time. Granted, gnome will use more cycles to display the fancy graphics, but what I'm talking about is very noticiable even with CDE. CDE feels fast on HP workstations, such as the B2000, which is fairly old. Feels fine on alphas too. I have mixed emotions of ibm/aix. X HAULS on SGI from r4400 based workstations and up (early 90's). Sun.....just feels slow for the gui, everything else runs just dandy!
p.s. In case you're interested, the sunblade you have most likely uses the same pc133 ECC SDRAM DIMMS (cas 3) as a sunblade 100, a seagate barracuda IDE disk, and has a slightly higher-clocked CrippleSparc(tm) processor, which has significantly less cache than the 'real' server-model UltraSparc IIs. My favorite part is running a 'prtdiag' and have it say '1-way memory interleaving'!
Amen brother! I have to convince people at work about this very fact all the time. Imagine a lab where every machine had a CRT and a keyboard/mouse, or even kvms! Yuck. Unimaginable in a production enviroment (which I don't have, I just run a lab.) I get much higher density with rack mounted solaris boxen (mostly 220Rs and 280Rs, with some E4x00's thrown in the mix), where you can ssh in or if you need console access use a tip server or serial concentrator. Nothing like watching your server post from across the country! Heck, if you really want, the power sequencers in the rack have a serial line, which I'm pretty sure you can instruct to disconnect power from a particular power cord. (I admit, I haven't yet had the opportunity or necessity to try this feat.)
Concentrating serial console lines for this sort of thing is really efficient, compared to having to have some kind of video (!) output to watch a PC type box post. I swear, having a serial console line is probably the one thing I like most about the unix servers that support it (e.g. all sun sparc machines, and most from other unix vendors). 9600 baud is more than enough to see the few lines of text that you want to see when something is coming up.
Not to be too picky here, but your statement is not necessarily correct. Exposure time of the film is not locked to 1/24th second for 24fps 'movie' film, or 1/30th of a second for TV. It is possible to lock your exposure at, say, 1/24th...but you'd have to change your arpeture (and thus depth of field) so that your exposure is still spot-on. I'm guessing that in pro-level equipment, there's also some sort of filter that can vary quickly in the lens assembly so that if you NEEDED 1/24th second exposures AND f/1.8 arpeture with an outdoor scene with varying lighting, it would be possible to do this.
But anyways, you can display film at 24fps which was only exposed per frame at 1/1000th second.....I've seen this disturbing trend in some recent movies and especially music videos. Kindof freaks me out sometimes. =) Still, controlling motion blur to produce a specific effect is just as valid as any other technique to give a piece a specific 'feel'.
Sorry if I went off on a tangent....just had to state that a 24fps movie isn't necessarily (or even often?) exposed at 1/24th second per frame.
Here's my big idea, please feel free to shoot the hell out of it. :)
Let's assume you have a piece of physical media with your information on it. Say one side holds the data in an optical format, and the other side can be used to put text on in the form of ink or engraving, which is human-readable. A CD-ROM would be an example of this. Now, in English*, describe on the human-readable side how the bits on the data side are laid out, in sufficient detail so that, if necessary, a device could be built from scratch to read the media. Also convey the format of the first x number of bits, say, in an 8-bit ascii format to keep things simple. Don't forget to describe the format so people can decypher what the initial bits mean!
Ok, so now say we can read bits off of the other side of the media. Since we know the format of the initial bits, and the characters that they correspond to are in English*, we can use that initial data to describe the filesystem layout of the rest of the disc. Now, if the whole disc is going to be in the same format (ascii), no additional metadata description would be needed.
A good thing to put in this plain text area would be, say, something indicating that starting at bit x we have some images that are x bits long, a description of the image format, and any other information that would be necessary to describe the proper way to display the image.
*Now, of course, English may not be the proper choice. Maybe some other language would be appropriate, I'm not a linguist. Maybe every disc should be forced to have a standard 'rosetta stone' placed on it somehow?
The basic idea is that there should be enough human (or alien) readable information on the disc itself such that a device could be constructed to read the rest, increasing in complexity as we switch from ink text->ascii->filesystem->files.
Does this sound reasonable?
I've worked in a small lab of various vendor's systems and storage arrays, at any given time, there's probably somewhere around 1000 disks or so running there. They have arrays from Compaq, Hitachi, etc, and many PCs/Unix servers as well. My overall experience is this: Everyone's drives fail occasionally. It's a fact of life, you can't expect that something spinning at high rpm and has heads floating at miniscule distances from platters will last indefinitely.
As far as FC-AL or SCSI disks go, reliability-wise, they're all pretty much the same. I have seen an IBM, Fuji, Hitachi, Seagate, Quantum, etc pop once in awhile, but nothing major. IDE disks are a little different, the IBM 'deathstar' drives caused problems, and the older (sub 8 gig) Western Digitals seem to have a high mortality rate after a few years of use. Same goes for the defunct Seagate 'Hawk' line. Granted, this is beyond the warranty period, but many of the other seagates/ibms/etc are still going strong after several years. I normally swear by Seagate, but I just had to send back an 80gb drive from my home machine for replacement...not sure what the exact failure was, though. I have hit the random-ascii-garbage-during-boot from a 10gig Fuji, but that was an isolated incident.
Advice: Assume that your critical drive WILL fail, and plan accordingly. Now I mirror everything, AND back it up. Keeping redundant online storage is different than maintaining backups of earlier versions of data! Even in a home PC, it is really worth it to get two drives and mirror them, with software or otherwise.
You don't have to go hog-wild though....I'm a storage redundancy zealot, and I tend to go overboard. (Clustered fileservers, two fibre HBAs in each [on different buses], multipath through redundant switches to RAID arrays, power from different circuits to each array, etc. Fun stuff to play with, if you have the equipment around. :-)
I'm a big fan of POV-Ray, I've been using it since about a year after DKB-Trace. I started on a 386sx 40mhz, with 4mb of ram, so pretty much anything now seems 'fast' comparatively. It is pretty painfully slow if you're not used to it, though. Then again, it is free, has a lot of features (now), and nothing beats using the equation for a sphere when rendering a sphere....screw 18 billion triangles! It's really disgusting when you see an otherwise good render and notice that every curve is made up of discrete angles....ugh. As with many renderers, it's very easy to put the 'quality' options up way too high and spend an abnormally long time on a render. I admit, though, that I've spend 4+ days on renders with lots of AA and glass CSG objects...for a 1024x576 image. (Granted, on a 400mhz p2)
If you're interested in comparing some renderers, check out the Internet Raytracing Competition (IRTC)
POV-Ray is good for a number of things, though I would recommend using a modeller if you plan on rendering anything 'organic'. (Defining bezier patches by hand, while possible, is not reccommended.) Animation support has come a little further lately, though mainly you're going to be rendering a number of stills with some computations in the scripts varying based on a clock value which gets passed in.
Oh, and here's one big advantage -- the source code is freely available! Hack to your hearts delight, just follow the rules if you plan to distribute. Binaries are available for a number of platforms, and the generic UNIX source should be fairly easy to compile. Note: If you're using IRIX, check out SGI's freeware site for a binary. I've had fairly good luck compiling it on Solaris, but I don't have the dev libraries for Irix so I use the precompiled version.
If anyone does end up using POV, please at least give a thought to donating a couple of bucks to them, I'm sure they could use it.
Display Properties->Effects->Show Window Contents While Dragging->Apply
Still damn fast, I'll bet.
So OSX is now where Irix was 10 years ago? Ok, so I made that number up, but buy an old SGI box from Indigo r4k and up (about 10 years old), and even with the latest Irix build, the window system (X with 4dwm) flies. I have never seen X on any platform be as snappy as far as responsiveness goes. (I admit my linux boxen are console only so I don't know about how fast that's gotten in the last few years.) Heck, video drivers for windows have had acceleration for drawing window-manager stuff in them for a long time too.
Sorry about the flame, had to vent a little. Don't get me wrong, I love a UI with eyecandy, but I also want to be able to turn all that crap off, or get a hyper-fast text-only window at times too. :-)
I am. In case anyone's interested, the framerate on a pII 233mhz/256mb 60ns sdram/TnT-1 approaches zero.
Ok, Honestly, what on earth do people put behind their LCD monitors? You're not going to have the plane of the screen any further away from you, so you've got about a foot or so of dead space behind your LCD. (Maybe more for huge CRTs put in retirement, but mine just hangs a few inches off the back of the desk.) I'd almost think of putting a mid-tower case behind there, but then I'd be reaching around the side every time I needed to eject a CD or turn the machine off, and on the other side I'd be able to see all the cabling coming off the back of the case.
You know, I like LCDs, but other than the refresh rate problem and blurring, I do a bit of tinkering with graphics, and I play a few games, so I like to change my resolution once in a while and not have to worry about having the graphics look like garbage 'cause I'm not at my native resolution.
I just picked up a copy of DSotM on vinyl at a used records store in Lowell, MA. It was $15, but the album appeared totally mint, and it still has the posters and stickers inside (unstuck, unpush-pinned). Even the cover is in excellent shape, but I've got some sort of nick half-way through 'any colour you like'. Pisses me off...I can't see anything there, but my player apparently does. :)
Of course, I've got several masters on CD, Mobile Fidelity being the best, but those are almost all scratched beyond repair because they were played so much in my car player. Looks like I'll be buying a 4th.
I really wish that once I 'purchased' a specific recording, I could get replacement media at a nominal fee.
I went off to college back in '96 to pursue a degree in Computer Science. I graduated in the top 10 in my High School, but my college career was very different. As soon as I moved in my forced-triple dorm room with two roomates I despised immediately, life was pretty damn bad for the 2.5 years that I stuck with it. Unless you are good-looking or very social or a jock or a frat-boy bastard, there ain't shit to do at college. The majority of my time there was spent trying to complete random assignments, sleeping, and working minimum wage jobs. My grades were poor, my GPA being around 2.05 for classes that I passed. (At WPI, anything under a C is never recorded). I failed so many classes freshman year that I had to take 4 during the summer to retain financial aid...which I barely pulled off. Halfway through the second nightmare year, I wanted out really bad....I wanted to pursue a degree in computer art at SCAD, drove to georgia to interview, got accepted, and couldn't go because of lack of money. I then returned to WPI, took an 8 month co-op position, and hoped when I went back that I would have more motivation again. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I went back, tried to take the required classes that I failed before, and promptly failed them again. (Calculus 4 and analysis of algorithms, if anyone cares.) Now I was out on the street, some $42,000+ in debt, with no degree and huge loan payments. All I can say is thank god that the company I did a co-op for was pleased with my prior performance and gave me a decent job at a pay rate slightly higher than my original co-op.
Now, a couple years later, the company I work for was bought up by a larger company, I survived a round of layoffs, and I'm taking night classes at Clark University to finish off my CS degree. I was able to transfer most of my credits from WPI...and now have about 6 years worth of night courses to fill up random degree requirements not relating to my major. It will be a lot of work, but I would really like someday to have a degree in CS. Partially for my own vindication, so I can actually believe in my abilities again, but also because if I ever got laid off, there is no way in hell I could get a job without a degree.
mpb
I hope that it comes with the same IDE as Turbo C++ 3.0....I've always liked the text-mode interface. :)
If I remember correctly, to enable 64 bit operation on an UltraSPARC 1 cpu (such as that in an Ultra 1 workstation), you need to upgrade to OpenBoot 3.11.1 at a minimum, and then uncomment the line in /platform/sun4u/boot.conf that says this: ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU=true.
I don't know exactly what the bug is with the old UltraSPARC 1's, except that given specific hand-written assembly code, it is possible to lock up the machine.
I have been running mine on the 64 bit kernel for some time now, and haven't noticed any problems, so it's probably safe in most circumstances.
mpb
I totally agree...the extra features on DVD's are good in general, and even better on Director's Cuts. Prior to DVD's, the only way to get ahold of extra features such as deleted scenes, widescreen editions, and extra audio tracks was to purchase the LaserDisc versions. I have a fairly large assortment of special/collectors edition LD's, and I have to say that although I get ~80 lines less resolution, I believe that the LDs are better in some cases. Take the Criterion edition of The Princess Bride on LD...the mastering work looks better than what's on the DVD...probably because more attention was paid to the LD master, because they were pretty strictly marketed to Audio/Videophiles. Another great advantage to LD's is that there are never (in my experience) any god-forsaken commercials on the disc that I pay good money for. Putting in the disc and pressing Play, to be presented with (other than the legal statement) only perhaps a THX intro and the movie itself is more professional and tasteful than having some horribly ugly menu interface and a smattering of advertisements/trailers for other movies.
That, and I can watch Star Wars - Special Edition in Dolby AC-3 (aka 5.1, aka dolby digital), and Indiana Jones movies. :-)
Only down-side is the cost and (recently) the availability of movies on LD. Any new releases I now get on DVD, but the LDs are still holding up well. DVDs will always have a better price point, I admit....the Criterion version of the Princess Bride on LD cost me $100 originally!
Am I the only person who still uses CDs for "CD Quality" music? :-)
Realistically though, 74 minutes of music is probably more than enough for most trips. If not, take two CDs! I just make a couple mix cds and keep them in the back seat.
mpb
The Extreme boardset has (8) GL processors, not three.
:)
Must have got carried away!
As a side note, Indigo^2 owners had to wait until the later purple-box High/MaxImpact grapcics sets to get hardware texturing support and texture RAM.
A truly cool machine is the Crimson Reality Engine. By far, the most sexy deskside box EVER.
I'm curious, what hardware are you rendering on, where the cpu usage for decoding an mp3 stream takes up 10-30% of your cpu? Running winamp with the mini-vis set to 70fps, and checking task manager in NT4Wks reports that winamp uses 0-1% of my cpu. This can actually be taken to read 1-2%, since I am running a dual-processor pentium 2 at 233mhz, with 256mb of 60ns ram, an ISA sb64, and an old pci TNT using old detonator drivers, since the new detonators break avi playback for me.
As an alternative test, I fired up MXaudio on my SGI Indigo, which has a 100mhz r4000 cpu and ELAN graphics, and to decode a 256kilobit mp3 stream, it takes 35% of the cpu. (Not bad considering the age of the machine)
Although I am a sick bastard and raytrace images on the Indigo and my 486sx laptop, I hope you have a slightly more powerful machine for 3DStudio. Perhaps the huge amount of cpu usage for your mp3 player is due to poorly written sound card drivers? I would seriously look into this.
I hope they will continue to include the OpenWindows desktop as well, does anybody know if they are planning to drop OpenWindows in favor of Gnome, or will Openwindows, Gnome, and CDE all be available?
:)
Even though I like OpenWindows, I almost always have my default sessions set to use CDE, since that way I can easily have my window manager the same on all the UNIX platforms I use (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, OSF/1), with the exception of IRIX.