My kids are smart enough to check what's running on their PC. Can I install a logger on my WRT54G (running hyperWRT + Thibor 15c firmware)?
I've never done it, but I don't see why it would be difficult. IMs are generally sent as plain text. If the kids are clever enough to use encryption, you may have problems, but I imagine that few kids would bother. I'm most familiar with AIM, but I wouldn't expect MSN/Yahoo messages to be much more difficult to intercept. You may even be able to set up a firewall rule to silently break HTTPS and whatnot to the appropriate netblock just incase they do try to set up an encrypted connection.
You can't be 100% sure that you will get eveything, but unless your kids are really savvy and sufficiently paranoid for planning major drug deals, you should be fine. Of course, if they need to keep secrets that badly, they can probably get ahold of a laptop of their own and wireless internet billed to a dummy corporation and there won't be too much you can do.:)
I have problems believing a USB sound card would be the best solution. Mainly because I do not trust USB and Firewire for realtime transfers. If you're going to sugest an external box, how about one with a better connection to the computer? Some in the Creative Audigy series have external boxes that connect to an internal sound card. Most of the processing is done in the box, not on board. Works great and is just as convienient.
Well, feel free to not believe all you want. You can pry my USB audio hardware from my cold, dead hands. Now, I will admit that if you are doing some crazy multi-device work which requires perfect synchronisation, you may run into some very very slight issues by mixing USB and PCI sound hardware. But, you will probably run into very similar issues by mixing different types of PCI hardware, so I don't consider this a weakness of USB. Almost nobody actually needs that kind of latency. Those who do, shouldn't ask about it on slashdot.
My USB hardware isn't even high end. It was $30 dollars and came with a headset with microphone. Seriously. It sounds better than the internal audio hardware on my Mac, my Dell, and my Athlon64. I've also tried one or two PCI sound cards in the Athlon. I even did a blind test with my room mate to see if I was just imagining the better sound quality. Moving the DAC outside of the computer has a very appreciable effect. What's more, I can bring it with me and plug it into a laptop when I want to record something on location, and I can plug it into my Athlon when I want to record using my nice dual monitor workstation. It works with Windows, Linux, and OS-X. (I've had some issues with Linux, but I always seem to have shit luck with Linux and sound, so I don't think it's any fiddlier than PCI sound hardware would be.)
And, if I wanted, I could get a half dozen of the little USB audio dongles to do multitrack recording. I don't have that many PCI slots. Certainly not in my laptop.
"Europeans, with shorter flights and lower expectations of privacy"
It has nothing to do with privacy, and everything to do with the fact that nobody wants to sit in a tin can listening to some guy talk for 2 hours about his hemorrhoids and digestive problems.
Indeed. Considering the current issues of warrantless wiretapping, I can't imagine why Americans would have higher expectations of privacy. We just know that our fellow americans would abuse the ability to talk loudly in a confined place. Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a reasonably priced sound proof phone booth on the airplane. If I need to make an important call, I can. But, I can do it without disturbing other passengers. Hell, maybe just put phones in the bathroom, and make them dual purpose...
Pay the money to people with a family history of long lifespans if they breed with other qualifiers. Even if this prize leads to mice with long lifespans it may not deliver usable insights into human ageing
My own idea was similar, but a bit different. Tax the hell out of all children from people less than 50 years old. Use the money to pay folks who have children past 50. As the program progresses, you can increase the cutoff age.
Most of our genetic selection pressure really doesn't have much to do with what happens past the age of 50 or so. By then, the genes are already passed on. So, if you live long, but are really frail and old by 65, then you haven't gained a whole lot. If, on the other hand, You promote passing on genes for the people who are still in good enough shape to go at it in their 70's, you can promote a trend toward propagating genes of people who stay fit at that age.
Of course, whenever I mention this "master plan" somebody always mutters something about how eugenics has gone out of style.::sigh::
Real men just input the entire program at the command line using cat>myprog.c Of course, "real men" score higher on machismo than common sense. C'mon.. there is nothing that really needs saying on this topic, let the flame wars begin.
To just jump straight tho the logical terminus of the "real men" jokes...
Real men don't need software. They just impliment directly in hardware. And they get it right the first time. None of this, "oops, made a typo, just recompile and run it again."
Because the DoD allegedly likes freedom and wants to promote it. It is their reason for existance. If "Open Source" is hurting the adoption effort use the original name "Free Software".
Naw... Then it sounds cheap. I say we actually start calling it "Freedom Software," rather than constantly having to explain that Free doesn't mean cheap because it means Freedom.
Excuse me, but I *am* a professor and I fail to see what Wikipedia has to do with cheating.....
Well... I *am* a student, and I can see exactly how useful Wikipedia is for cheating.;)
More seriously, I don't think that Wikipedia should be blamed for rampant cheating. I mean, if we were living in a less technological age, and I cited some obscure (possibly existing) article and made shit up, the professor might not know if he couldn't track down the article. Now, it's easy for the professor to easily see if the article exists and at very least get an abstract online to see if I am just talking out of my ass. Likewise, I can't easily just type in the stuff from the hypothetical obscure journal article and change the name on it for the same reason -- the professor can google my text and realise I just copied it.
Personally, I have used Wikipedia for every paper I've written recently. It's a fantastic resource. I've never once tried to just copy and paste information from wikipedia because a lot of it just isn't of an appropriate quality level. Information is scatterred between several different articles, it is clearly inconsistent in tone because it was written by 30 different people. It's also sometimes wrong. So, I need to at least check out a couple of other websites to sanity check wikipedia. (Or else already be sufficiently familiar with the subject that I don't need wikipedia in the first place.) So, you pretty much *have* to write your own paper.
One "cheat" I have done once or twice is to cite the items that a wikipedia article cites, without actually tracking them down. I do feel bad about that, though I haven't quite decided how bad I think it is. (I'd love to hear other academic's opinions on the matter.) I am indirectly using information apparently from them. If I get information from an abstract, then I should cite the article, right? It certainly helps pad out my references a bit, but I still haven't even managed to 100% convince myself that it's not what I'm supposed to do. (You really aren't supposed to cite an encyclopedia anyway...)
On a related note, one concern I have is "necessary plagarism." Sometimes, there is really only one logical way to make a particular statement. The XYZ does ABC every Tuesday, or whatever. In my efforts to avoid just blatantly ripping off a source, if I do need to make a similar statement, I generally try to reword it, or rearrange the paragraph so I don't need to make the exact same statement. However, sometimes this effort results in a rather convoluted structure. On many Tuesdays, it is noted that ABC occurs. This is largely a result of XYZ's efforts. How much effort should a student go to to avoid ripping off an occasional sentence, and how much clarity should he be willing to sacrifice in order to avoid being called a cheater?
(I particularly remember an Alien world in the old Jon Pertwee Dr. Who episodes that was a coal slag heap shot through a blue filter), and maybe they ought to just go with a more out-there version of that. However, it would be nice if the environment the actors are in looked as good as it did for the later, unwatchable, versions.
Ahhh, yes... Metebelis III. Yes, it was just a quarry with a blue filter. But, it sure was novel considering that most of the other planets were just the quarry without the filter. (Occasionally, Dr. Who actually did just use the quarry as a quarry...)
And then, for us Unix geeks, there is Terminal, which brings the Bash shell and the assorted Unix tools one expects. And the GUI even has a port scanner, finger and whois built into the network settings, so you don't even need to open the terminal for those functions.
I love my Mac, but there are a few quirks that the average UNIX buff should be aware of (things some of my friends and I had expected as a result of a more UNIXy background):
-X11 is optional, and the standard apps don't use it. So, no you can't display iTunes over the network on your Linux box. X11 is, however, pretty easy to install. It runs like a normal app, and you can display your Linux apps on your Mac over the network without too much trouble.
-Terminal is certainly better than cmd.exe or straight xterm. However, it doesn't do tabs or any of the really whizzy stuff that you expect on your Linux/BSD box's kterm/gnome-terminal. Incidentally, what do other slashdotters reccomend as a replacement?
-You do get to use your favorite command line tools. Choose between darwin ports and fink for installing them. But, some will work a bit different. For example, you get to use cdrecord, but some of the options are a bit different because it uses IOKit to talk to the hardware. Also, gcc is a bit different...
-Dev tools are based on gcc, but have a few quirks. A lot of those quirks relate to frameworks (or Objective C). Frameworks are really whizzy library like doodads. They are also the reason why your OpenGL headers aren't where you expect them to be. So, you need a few extra #if's in your code, and a few extra switches for gcc. (especially the -framework one)
Those are the ones that strike me off the top of my head. A lot of what pisses you off about Windows and Linux will be fixed in Mac OS X, but some of what you are pleasantly used to will be different. Anybody have any other good Mac OS X "gotchas" for the average technically competant switcher that I've forgotten?
Though I'm not a computer scientist I am a mathematician, another field inhabited by nerds with a large ratio of men to women. While there are definatly tensions created by this ratio I have never seen the men try to exclude girls or form a clique and not let them in. However, often shyness or lack of social skills will be interpreted by a more socially competent girl as a form of exclusion.
Yes, I think this is the key point. If a bunch of IT/math/whatever geek guys are all keeping their heads down, not talking, and avoiding eye contact, then they are doing everything in their power to make the girl feel welcome. Seriously. In the limited geek-understanding of social skills, one of the few key points that the smart ones manage to figure out is usually, "Don't stare at her boobs, don't hit on her. If I do that, I'll scare her away and she won't talk to me anymore." Personally, I'm still working on getting my social skills *up to* that level.
I have pretty much never seen a group of guys actively try to exclude a girl. Sure, it happens occasionally. But, it is pretty rare. Girls just seem to have different expectations of socialising from male geeks.
Generally, it is done without OpenGL. The most common solution is probably just to trace a ray through the scene. It's almost always faster than going back and forth with the GPU.
You can't create demand for something that can be infinitely and freely copied.
Wow. How can you say all that and still miss the point. There's no problem "creating demand", there's only the problem of "limiting supply" and you can actually do that, but to do so requires you to be so fuckin' evil that you're willing to get in everyone's face and prevent them from helping others.
Actually, I think that there is a point to that. Sure, there is some amount of demand for something that can be infinitely and free copied. But, you can't really create demand for it. Not to say that there isn't any demand, but it's very hard to create new demand. Everybody who wants it will get it without any issues, so extra advertising won't be especially useful.
Now, imagine you go to a concert and if you show your copy of the CD, you get better seating. The better seat can't be infinitely copied, so you are able to make your CD much more attractive, hence people will be more interested in it. Once you abandon the idea of selling something that can be infinitely copied, then you can increase demand to the point where people will pay more for it.
Also, my room mate loves having physical CD's so that he can lend them to friends, play them in his portable CD player without the expense of an iPod, etc. Downloading and burning a physical CD takes some time. It also has some cost. Not huge, but the notion that a CD can be pirated "infinitely" is actually very wrong. It can be pirated easily, but not with zero investment. Therefore, just buying a physical CD can be a convenience win.
I should note, however, that her actual recommendations to Congress seem fairly reasonable. She suggests, for example, that ESRB members should actually play the games, hardly a radical suggestion. And somewhat ironically, she suggests that they should do what she failed to do herself in her testimony--"make its rating process and the terms that it uses in its ratings more
Sure, I have no problems with ESRB play testing their games... But, it really does kind of assume that all games are like Pac Man where playing through a level gives you a pretty complete understanding of the game. Unfortunately, in a modern game, you can beat the game four times over (after investing weeks of time) and never see the most violent/naughty bits of the game. The current method of, "let us see what the worst parts are on video," makes a lot of sense. If an ESRB rater can sit down for an hour's worth of clips and see the special ending that you unlock if you find every fragment of the ancient and glorious burlap bag, and also the seven pieces of the mace of stupendous blugeoning where you get to rape the princess, that's much more valuable for the ratings process than if the rating person has to try to play the game. If he isn't able to unlock everything, then his rating will likely be senselessly tame.
So, sure, playtest the game *in addition* to watching the clips reel. But, I hear some people suggesting that just playing the game is a solution. That's super dumbliness.
Pacman isn't violent, it's just drug obsessed. You're essentially boiled down to a simple mouth with the single goal of avoiding what can only be your own hallucinations (ghosts?!) while constantly munching down little pills fervently just to stay alive. You're so fucked up that most of these drugs just keep you going, nothing more. However, you're on a quest for the real good stuff, the uppers that let you conquer your darkest demons. Still, even these hi-powered feel good drugs really only serve to drop you even harder when you come down and suddenly you're closer to your fears and problems than ever before. Yeah, pacman is a really loser-junkie if you ask me. Sure he might turn to violent crime eventually to feed his habit, he might even slap Mrs. Pacman around a little bit, but I think that's reading into the game a bit much don't you Mrs. Thompson?
Wow, you've just given me a bit of a revelation. Here is my take on Pac Man:
The ghosts aren't actually just hallucinations. They are your friends (represented as ghosts because you have basically abandoned the friendships, and you no longer think of them as entirely real) who are trying to reach you. When one of your friends gets too close, they can talk you into giving up your drug habit. That's the end of the game. If you get the really hard drugs, when your friends get to you, they can't pursuade you to stop taking the drugs. They realise that they can see you, but not effect you. Hence, they are represented as eyes. There is some food in the game, but you don't need it. You only need the pills to advance. And, the food is much less common than the pills. The pills are basically the only thing keeping you going, with an occasional bananna being just a bonus treat.
Holy shit! Pac Man is completely non-violent. It is, however, an incredibly dark perspective on addiction.
I am teh Old Skool. Any Debian installation that does not require lamb's blood, sulfur, salt, mercury, a transcription from the original Assyrian, Fermat's Enigma, and a Circle of Power etched in holy chalk consecrated on Michaelmas is a Debian installation for which I have no use.
Friggin' noobs...
Don't worry. It will use a GUI, but it will still work basically the same. They would piss off too many users who have already invested in Lamb's blood if they made it all useless! The only change is that the circle of power will appear onscreen.
I think he just wants a free copy. I mean, who wouldn't?
Personally, I kind of want him to win, so I can demand free stuff from every company in the world, and threaten a law suit. That'd be sweet.
Seriously, this just shows that he think he is above the law, and everybody else is below it. He just can't accept the concept of fairness, if he thinks he has any right to demand that a corporation give him something for free. Especially given that he cites a school board resolution as if that were a major legal binding precident...
Some of my favorites in his crazy person rant: 21. Take-Two is fraudulently and deceptively marketing this game not only because it desperately needs the cash from the sale of this controversial game, whose release has been delayed for over a year in large part because of the efforts of the undersigned petitioner, but also because controversy still swirls about the Bully game, and Take-Two is Hell-bent to defuse it.
Because, you know... No video game in the history of the world ever shipped late, except because of his crusade. It can't possibly be related to needing more time to finish the game. Crazy people like him think they are winning great victories whenever anything happens.
29. Florida Congressman Jeff Stearns, who recently chaired hearings in the United States House of Representatives, discovered how thoroughly flawed the video game rating system is, as the ESRB is actually paid for and operated, in effect, by the video game industry itself. This is a classic case of the fox guarding the chickens. Congressman Stearns has now introduced to Congress a Bill called the "Truth in Video Game Ratings Act" largely because of the illicit collaboration between the ESRB and Take-Two.
Right... Thank god for the Federal Book and movie censors... Because, you know, the MPAA isn't funded by movies. And, why the hell is nobody even bothering to ask the industry to self regulate books? I can read a graphic description of horrible bestiality gang bang child rape and decapitation with a chain saw without having to show ID. But, 30 polygons try to do it doggy style, and it's the end of the world.
Yea yea, we suck. Who were the last people to accept Coninental Drift? Americans. We don't believe in global warming, we don't believe in evolution, but 50% still believe we found WMDs in Iraq. If we couldn't brain drain scientists from other countries, we'd probably still be living in caves.
I just don't get it. What is the deal with people never changing their minds, or letting in new information? Most people aren't stupid...I'm sure the average person in Iceland isn't any smarter than the average american (Kansas excluded). It could just be the religious thing; a lot of european social democracies are much less religious than we are. I mean, I understand we're not a pro-intellectual country, but there is a huge difference between not rhapsodising about your elite scientific tradition, and being completely averse to new knowledge.
Carl Sagan suggested that empires are a shitty place for new ideas. For example, the Netherlands had a lot of cool stuff going on when they were a scrappy young republic competing against the Spanish and the English. Likewise, early Greece. The places that have stable societies with dwindling empires tend to have almost no ability to accept new ideas. At one point, it was the experimental method. Later, the heliocentric universe. Now, evolution.
Korea is special for CDMA because they force CDMA providers to do the same thing ("RUIM" cards) but in North America, most CDMA phones are locked and activated by carrier. But from what I can tell, Cingular and T-Mobile both provide GSM service, and thus would work just fine.
Most GSM phones in the US are locked. I know a guy who had an overseas phone that he brought back to the states. A Cell phone salesman flat refused to believe that it was possible for him to swap SIM cards and have it work. My friend had to actually demo it for the sales guy to believe it. Every phone he could order for his store in the US was locked, and had been tested and didn't work when you tried to just swap the SIM card.
Really, I can't think of very many times I've ever had to carry any liquids on board with me? I pack all toiletries in my checked luggage, can't imagine I'd have use for them in carry on. What do you need really in the cabin that is liquid? I'm good with my computer, books and some dvd's to watch.
I'm only able to guess this hits chicks more than it does guys, with all the makeup and such they carry in purses on board. And seriously, how often are they gonna have an emergency 'make up situation'....just pack it all in checked luggage.
I guess I see all the lines on tv and hear about cancelled flights, and at least on the US side of things where just liquids were banned, I couldn't understand the delays...do THAT many people carry liquids as standard practice in carry on luggage?
Well, I haven't actually checked any luggage in years. So, everything goes in my carryon. I also like to bring a drink onto the airplace. (Some airlines charge quite a bit for drinks on board, and even then the fruit juice tastes like crap.) Lots of people will want to bring contact lens solution. (Especially on flights long enough to sleep and wake up)
Frankly, I don't see why they are bothering to ban liquids. Just get a couple of guys to have baggies with the components of your binary explosive in their crotches, and security will never know. Or, trick out your bag and hide it in their. Odds are excellent that a routine TSA screening wouldn't catch the fact that your hard shell luggage is half an inch thicker than it needs to be. Just make sure there is no air trapped in the cavity, and you won't see/hear any sloshing.
It seems like the terrorists are trying to make do with a lot of dim folks instead of a few bright ones. This makes a lot of sense, considering that a lot of the bright ones don't actually want to kill themselves, so they recruit the dim ones to do the leg work. But, the recent bombing plot apparently involved enough guys that they were going to be able to take down ten planes. That's crazy. You can't maintain effective secrecy with that many people. I am slowly becoming convinced that it is easy for one guy to take down an airplane. It is doable for two. And, it is basically impossible for a bunch of guys to do it.
Sure, taking down ten planes would be more dramatic, but one would have been enough to have a panic. Thankfully, the terrorists are too big for their britches!
But thank you for the canned soundbite about how the west is responsible for the crappy condition of the avg arabs life. Somehow a less biased person might look at the middle east and think that their problems stem from lousy corrupt governments that have a willingness to kill their own citizens, the subsitution of religous precepts for sane government policy and a willingness to blame everyone else in the world for their own problems.
You are blaming arab governments on the arabs? My favorite middle eastern country, in terns of messed up history, is Iran. It isn't technically arab, but a lot of westerners don't bother to make any sort of distinction. Especially those making arbitrary blanket statements like yours.
At the start of the 20th century, there was a movement in Iran to move from a monarchy under the Shah to a nation with a constitution. There was some success, but England and Russia very actively impeded this process, and supported rolling back the role of the constitution. Then, there was a bit of a revolution, and a new Shah who had been involved in getting the constition made came to power.
The western powers hated this guy, basically forced him to abdicate, and had his son take power. In the 50's, the prime minister was asked to step down, tried to have another little revolution in order to move the country from a constitutional monarchy to a proper republic. The English and Americans would have none of it. So, we reinstalled the Shah, and installed a new prime minister. We also set up some official agreements and contracts about oil. A set of western oil companies had full control over the oil in Iran, and Iran couldn't audit the accounts to see if they were getting their contracted cut. So, basically Iran got shit from the exploitation of their own natural resources, because the West decided how the government should be run. (On several occasions!)
Interestingly enough, the Islamic revolution happened right about the same time that those oil contracts ran out. The whole history is far more interesting than I can fir into a slashdot post. My research on the subject is also far from complete. And, that's just one country.
For another interesting tidbit -- after the Islamic revolution in Iran, America was scared, a wanted to avoid having radical Islam spread in the middle east. We wanted to support non-religeous leaders in the area. It was less than a year after the Islamic revolution that Saddam came to power in Iraq.
Oh yes. Im very sorry that I forgot to mention the details. Here they are. Pixels: 720 x 480 Duration: 1:30:32 Audio Bitrate: 1536 Kbps Audio Sample Size: 16 bit Audio Format: PCM Framerate: 29 frames a second (can't lower this anymore, The movie gets too choppy) Video Sample Size: 24 bit
Don't mess with the frame rate. It won't get you anything, because an NTSC DVD will always be 29.97 Frames per second. As for your encoding troubles, somebody already mentioned TMPEGEnc, and ffmpeg. I like both of them. TMPEGEnc has a nice GUI, and runs on windows. ffmpeg has a nice command line interface, and runs on most anything, but is probably most pleasant on some sort of *NIX.
Basically, the problem you are running into is a mediocre encoder. You want an encoder that does a more thorough motion estimation search. Combined with a few other bells and whistles, it will allow very nice quality at a reasonable bit rate. It will also take quite a while to encode. On my Athlon64, at highest settings, I generally plan on leaving an encode running at least over night. A good rule of thumb is that if your encode is any faster than 2X the length of the clip, you probably forgot to turn on enough quality options. (Of course, some encoders are just slow with no benefit -- it's just a vague rule of thumb...)
Now, why are you using a 1.5 Mbit audio rate? That's probably much, much, much higher than you need. Compressing the audio more efficiently will free up more bitrate for video, where you seem to need it. Now, using rough numbers, with 90 minutes on a single layer DVD, you have something like 6 megabits per second to work with. This should be plenty. Hell, it should be plenty even with the big audio.
Now, please go do some research. There is a ton of information available on the Internet, and we shouldn't have to read it for you. Making a DVD is not a mysterious black art. Getting the relevant information doesn't require any secret handshakes or anything. It sounds like you aren't doing anything the least bit unusual.
Unfortunately this seems to be one of the topics that the slashdot bias and ignorance comes out in full force on.
I agree completely.
* Clusters can not compete with supercomputers. They aren't even in the same market space. Cray doesn't make clusters, and clusters have not taken away their business.
This is not exactly a wrong statement, but it is incredibly broad. First off, Cray does make clusters. At a fundamental level, the basic separate-box clusters connected by Ethernet are the exact same thing as a big massively parallel system. They are on different ends of the spectrum, certainly. The sort of interconnects used by Cray certainly make their systems much more suited to certain workloads than more basic clusters. In practice, even Single System Image vs. separate boxes isn't that big a distinction. And, basic clusters certainly do compete with and take business from Cray. If basic clusters weren't an effective means of computing, then there would be a much larger market for the supers. If I refer to "clusters" in this post, I am probably referring to separate-box basic clusters -- like the parent poster seems to be. As unclear as this terminology can be, it is the way the term is usually used.
* Cray doesn't take off the shelf hardware and sell it as fancy clusters. Actually look into the details of these machines. While processors sometimes are off the shelf much of the surrounding hardware and software is custom.
This point I fully agree with. The high end interconnects and whatnot that you see in supers are on a very different level from what you see in the more basic clusters. For the workloads where the supers kill the basic clusters, it's usually related to comms latency between the nodes, which is all about the crazy interconnects.
* This 50 million contract is one of many that cray has. They also just recently in the news got a 200 million dollar contract. They also are a contender in the DARPA HPCS thing. That could be a lot more if they get it. They aren't dieing.
I'll take your word for it. I haven't specifically kept up with Cray's contracts, though it wouldn't surprise me if they are doing pretty well.
* They aren't owned by SGI any longer. They were bought from SGI by Tera who renamed themselves cray.
Yup, no argument there. (See, I may be a jerk, but at least I'm not arguing with everything!;) )
* The top500 list is nonsense. It is based off of 1 benchmark (linpack.) That benchmark doesn't stress the interconnect too much and can allow clusters to appear to compete with supercomputers if you manage to ignore all the other factors. The number of teraflops has very little to do with performance. To see a more well rounded and thought out measurement of top systems check out HPCC's website. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/hpcc_results.cgi
I wouldn't go so far as to call top500 "nonsense." It is a very specific benchmark. People do tend to look at a very narrow, specific piece of information, and generalise it completely. *That* is nonsense. You have to be aware of what you are reading when you see stuff like benchmark numbers. Benchmarking can be very complex.
That said, there are some real world workloads that work quite a lot like linpack. Consequently, there are a lot of very real world tasks where a cluster is an appropriate tool. My personal interest in HPC tends to focus on 3D rendering performance. This tends to need a lot of FLOPS, and relatively little bandwidth. For the guys who are doing really bandwidth/latency intensive stuff, the basic clusters are useless. (I'm told that stuff like weather sim falls into this category, but I can't comment on the details.) Without specifying a workload, saying th
This has been addressed before. nVIDIA cannot open up the source to their drivers because of source code included from their 3DFX acquisition. They have stated time and time again, they would LOVE to open it up, but they legally cannot.
That is miles more than ATI have provided for Linux. Hopefully when the NDA on the contract runs out we will see open drivers actively supported from nVIDIA.
Well, that explains nVidia. What about everybody else? Basically, nobody has released full specs and open source drivers for their video card. I think that the whole area of computer graphics is so rich with obvious patents that basically everybody figures that they must be violating some IP with the cards or drivers. They may not even have any idea exactly what.
So, they come up with excuses, blame 3rd parties. They avoid releasing any real information because they know that it would result in them getting sued.
Personally, I find it hilarious that the GNU movement started out as an open printer driver. Now, we have learned to content ourselves with having everything open (On the typical Linux desktop) except for a closed driver for an output device. Remember to buy the Open Graphics hardware as soon as it somes out!
It's always been my understanding that the bigger bottlenecks are upstream of your NIC. I mean, my home network set up goes gigabit from my desktop to my hardware router, gigabit from my router to my gateway firewall, then gigabit (minus a few MTU) to my DSL modem, and after that the speed gets massively reduced and there's nothing I can do about it. My lan latency is practically non-existant.
Now, maybe I'm completely misunderstanding teh point of this NIC, but...
You are correct. The NIC isn't an appreciable source of latency. Right now, I ping'd a server on another subnet, and I averaged 0.3 ms latency. This is bog standard 100 Mb. Nothing the least bit fancy. That server might have a nice NIC of some sort, but this desktop certainly doesn't. And, that's hopping between subnets. Crossing between buildings over a T-1, with a few routers involved in about 5 ms. Pinging my home machine over the internet is abou 150 ms. So, assuming that of the.3 ms latency I have inside this building, none of it is due to the switch, and none of it is due to actual wire delay, then about half of the latency is my system, and half is from the server. So, my NIC is responsible for abou 0.15 ms of latency.
Now, assuming that I was playing a game with my home computer, moving to a NIC that cut the latency of my PC down by 2/3 (from.15 ms to.05 ms), I'd be shaving my total latency for the connection to 149.9 ms (from 150ms).
Which would improve my lag by.06%
No, dammit. You won't see a noticeable improvement from a lower latency NIC. There are probably a few microbenchmarks where you will get a phenomenal speedup. Gaming isn't one of those cases.
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I've never done it, but I don't see why it would be difficult. IMs are generally sent as plain text. If the kids are clever enough to use encryption, you may have problems, but I imagine that few kids would bother. I'm most familiar with AIM, but I wouldn't expect MSN/Yahoo messages to be much more difficult to intercept. You may even be able to set up a firewall rule to silently break HTTPS and whatnot to the appropriate netblock just incase they do try to set up an encrypted connection.
You can't be 100% sure that you will get eveything, but unless your kids are really savvy and sufficiently paranoid for planning major drug deals, you should be fine. Of course, if they need to keep secrets that badly, they can probably get ahold of a laptop of their own and wireless internet billed to a dummy corporation and there won't be too much you can do.
Well, feel free to not believe all you want. You can pry my USB audio hardware from my cold, dead hands. Now, I will admit that if you are doing some crazy multi-device work which requires perfect synchronisation, you may run into some very very slight issues by mixing USB and PCI sound hardware. But, you will probably run into very similar issues by mixing different types of PCI hardware, so I don't consider this a weakness of USB. Almost nobody actually needs that kind of latency. Those who do, shouldn't ask about it on slashdot.
My USB hardware isn't even high end. It was $30 dollars and came with a headset with microphone. Seriously. It sounds better than the internal audio hardware on my Mac, my Dell, and my Athlon64. I've also tried one or two PCI sound cards in the Athlon. I even did a blind test with my room mate to see if I was just imagining the better sound quality. Moving the DAC outside of the computer has a very appreciable effect. What's more, I can bring it with me and plug it into a laptop when I want to record something on location, and I can plug it into my Athlon when I want to record using my nice dual monitor workstation. It works with Windows, Linux, and OS-X. (I've had some issues with Linux, but I always seem to have shit luck with Linux and sound, so I don't think it's any fiddlier than PCI sound hardware would be.)
And, if I wanted, I could get a half dozen of the little USB audio dongles to do multitrack recording. I don't have that many PCI slots. Certainly not in my laptop.
Indeed. Considering the current issues of warrantless wiretapping, I can't imagine why Americans would have higher expectations of privacy. We just know that our fellow americans would abuse the ability to talk loudly in a confined place. Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a reasonably priced sound proof phone booth on the airplane. If I need to make an important call, I can. But, I can do it without disturbing other passengers. Hell, maybe just put phones in the bathroom, and make them dual purpose...
My own idea was similar, but a bit different. Tax the hell out of all children from people less than 50 years old. Use the money to pay folks who have children past 50. As the program progresses, you can increase the cutoff age.
Most of our genetic selection pressure really doesn't have much to do with what happens past the age of 50 or so. By then, the genes are already passed on. So, if you live long, but are really frail and old by 65, then you haven't gained a whole lot. If, on the other hand, You promote passing on genes for the people who are still in good enough shape to go at it in their 70's, you can promote a trend toward propagating genes of people who stay fit at that age.
Of course, whenever I mention this "master plan" somebody always mutters something about how eugenics has gone out of style.
To just jump straight tho the logical terminus of the "real men" jokes...
Real men don't need software. They just impliment directly in hardware. And they get it right the first time. None of this, "oops, made a typo, just recompile and run it again."
And, just for shits and giggles... Is there any firm number on the percentage of sets with HDMI currently in use?
Because the DoD allegedly likes freedom and wants to promote it. It is their reason for existance. If "Open Source" is hurting the adoption effort use the original name "Free Software".
Naw... Then it sounds cheap. I say we actually start calling it "Freedom Software," rather than constantly having to explain that Free doesn't mean cheap because it means Freedom.
Excuse me, but I *am* a professor and I fail to see what Wikipedia has to do with cheating.....
;)
Well... I *am* a student, and I can see exactly how useful Wikipedia is for cheating.
More seriously, I don't think that Wikipedia should be blamed for rampant cheating. I mean, if we were living in a less technological age, and I cited some obscure (possibly existing) article and made shit up, the professor might not know if he couldn't track down the article. Now, it's easy for the professor to easily see if the article exists and at very least get an abstract online to see if I am just talking out of my ass. Likewise, I can't easily just type in the stuff from the hypothetical obscure journal article and change the name on it for the same reason -- the professor can google my text and realise I just copied it.
Personally, I have used Wikipedia for every paper I've written recently. It's a fantastic resource. I've never once tried to just copy and paste information from wikipedia because a lot of it just isn't of an appropriate quality level. Information is scatterred between several different articles, it is clearly inconsistent in tone because it was written by 30 different people. It's also sometimes wrong. So, I need to at least check out a couple of other websites to sanity check wikipedia. (Or else already be sufficiently familiar with the subject that I don't need wikipedia in the first place.) So, you pretty much *have* to write your own paper.
One "cheat" I have done once or twice is to cite the items that a wikipedia article cites, without actually tracking them down. I do feel bad about that, though I haven't quite decided how bad I think it is. (I'd love to hear other academic's opinions on the matter.) I am indirectly using information apparently from them. If I get information from an abstract, then I should cite the article, right? It certainly helps pad out my references a bit, but I still haven't even managed to 100% convince myself that it's not what I'm supposed to do. (You really aren't supposed to cite an encyclopedia anyway...)
On a related note, one concern I have is "necessary plagarism." Sometimes, there is really only one logical way to make a particular statement. The XYZ does ABC every Tuesday, or whatever. In my efforts to avoid just blatantly ripping off a source, if I do need to make a similar statement, I generally try to reword it, or rearrange the paragraph so I don't need to make the exact same statement. However, sometimes this effort results in a rather convoluted structure. On many Tuesdays, it is noted that ABC occurs. This is largely a result of XYZ's efforts. How much effort should a student go to to avoid ripping off an occasional sentence, and how much clarity should he be willing to sacrifice in order to avoid being called a cheater?
Ahhh, yes... Metebelis III. Yes, it was just a quarry with a blue filter. But, it sure was novel considering that most of the other planets were just the quarry without the filter. (Occasionally, Dr. Who actually did just use the quarry as a quarry...)
I love my Mac, but there are a few quirks that the average UNIX buff should be aware of (things some of my friends and I had expected as a result of a more UNIXy background):
-X11 is optional, and the standard apps don't use it. So, no you can't display iTunes over the network on your Linux box. X11 is, however, pretty easy to install. It runs like a normal app, and you can display your Linux apps on your Mac over the network without too much trouble.
-Terminal is certainly better than cmd.exe or straight xterm. However, it doesn't do tabs or any of the really whizzy stuff that you expect on your Linux/BSD box's kterm/gnome-terminal. Incidentally, what do other slashdotters reccomend as a replacement?
-You do get to use your favorite command line tools. Choose between darwin ports and fink for installing them. But, some will work a bit different. For example, you get to use cdrecord, but some of the options are a bit different because it uses IOKit to talk to the hardware. Also, gcc is a bit different...
-Dev tools are based on gcc, but have a few quirks. A lot of those quirks relate to frameworks (or Objective C). Frameworks are really whizzy library like doodads. They are also the reason why your OpenGL headers aren't where you expect them to be. So, you need a few extra #if's in your code, and a few extra switches for gcc. (especially the -framework one)
Those are the ones that strike me off the top of my head. A lot of what pisses you off about Windows and Linux will be fixed in Mac OS X, but some of what you are pleasantly used to will be different. Anybody have any other good Mac OS X "gotchas" for the average technically competant switcher that I've forgotten?
Yes, I think this is the key point. If a bunch of IT/math/whatever geek guys are all keeping their heads down, not talking, and avoiding eye contact, then they are doing everything in their power to make the girl feel welcome. Seriously. In the limited geek-understanding of social skills, one of the few key points that the smart ones manage to figure out is usually, "Don't stare at her boobs, don't hit on her. If I do that, I'll scare her away and she won't talk to me anymore." Personally, I'm still working on getting my social skills *up to* that level.
I have pretty much never seen a group of guys actively try to exclude a girl. Sure, it happens occasionally. But, it is pretty rare. Girls just seem to have different expectations of socialising from male geeks.
Generally, it is done without OpenGL. The most common solution is probably just to trace a ray through the scene. It's almost always faster than going back and forth with the GPU.
Actually, I think that there is a point to that. Sure, there is some amount of demand for something that can be infinitely and free copied. But, you can't really create demand for it. Not to say that there isn't any demand, but it's very hard to create new demand. Everybody who wants it will get it without any issues, so extra advertising won't be especially useful.
Now, imagine you go to a concert and if you show your copy of the CD, you get better seating. The better seat can't be infinitely copied, so you are able to make your CD much more attractive, hence people will be more interested in it. Once you abandon the idea of selling something that can be infinitely copied, then you can increase demand to the point where people will pay more for it.
Also, my room mate loves having physical CD's so that he can lend them to friends, play them in his portable CD player without the expense of an iPod, etc. Downloading and burning a physical CD takes some time. It also has some cost. Not huge, but the notion that a CD can be pirated "infinitely" is actually very wrong. It can be pirated easily, but not with zero investment. Therefore, just buying a physical CD can be a convenience win.
Sure, I have no problems with ESRB play testing their games... But, it really does kind of assume that all games are like Pac Man where playing through a level gives you a pretty complete understanding of the game. Unfortunately, in a modern game, you can beat the game four times over (after investing weeks of time) and never see the most violent/naughty bits of the game. The current method of, "let us see what the worst parts are on video," makes a lot of sense. If an ESRB rater can sit down for an hour's worth of clips and see the special ending that you unlock if you find every fragment of the ancient and glorious burlap bag, and also the seven pieces of the mace of stupendous blugeoning where you get to rape the princess, that's much more valuable for the ratings process than if the rating person has to try to play the game. If he isn't able to unlock everything, then his rating will likely be senselessly tame.
So, sure, playtest the game *in addition* to watching the clips reel. But, I hear some people suggesting that just playing the game is a solution. That's super dumbliness.
Wow, you've just given me a bit of a revelation. Here is my take on Pac Man:
The ghosts aren't actually just hallucinations. They are your friends (represented as ghosts because you have basically abandoned the friendships, and you no longer think of them as entirely real) who are trying to reach you. When one of your friends gets too close, they can talk you into giving up your drug habit. That's the end of the game. If you get the really hard drugs, when your friends get to you, they can't pursuade you to stop taking the drugs. They realise that they can see you, but not effect you. Hence, they are represented as eyes. There is some food in the game, but you don't need it. You only need the pills to advance. And, the food is much less common than the pills. The pills are basically the only thing keeping you going, with an occasional bananna being just a bonus treat.
Holy shit! Pac Man is completely non-violent. It is, however, an incredibly dark perspective on addiction.
Don't worry. It will use a GUI, but it will still work basically the same. They would piss off too many users who have already invested in Lamb's blood if they made it all useless! The only change is that the circle of power will appear onscreen.
Personally, I kind of want him to win, so I can demand free stuff from every company in the world, and threaten a law suit. That'd be sweet.
Seriously, this just shows that he think he is above the law, and everybody else is below it. He just can't accept the concept of fairness, if he thinks he has any right to demand that a corporation give him something for free. Especially given that he cites a school board resolution as if that were a major legal binding precident...
Some of my favorites in his crazy person rant:
21. Take-Two is fraudulently and deceptively marketing this game not only because it desperately needs the cash from the sale of this controversial game, whose release has been delayed for over a year in large part because of the efforts of the undersigned petitioner, but also because controversy still swirls about the Bully game, and Take-Two is Hell-bent to defuse it.
Because, you know... No video game in the history of the world ever shipped late, except because of his crusade. It can't possibly be related to needing more time to finish the game. Crazy people like him think they are winning great victories whenever anything happens.
29. Florida Congressman Jeff Stearns, who recently chaired hearings in the United States House of Representatives, discovered how thoroughly flawed the video game rating system is, as the ESRB is actually paid for and operated, in effect, by the video game industry itself. This is a classic case of the fox guarding the chickens. Congressman Stearns has now introduced to Congress a Bill called the "Truth in Video Game Ratings Act" largely because of the illicit collaboration between the ESRB and Take-Two.
Right... Thank god for the Federal Book and movie censors... Because, you know, the MPAA isn't funded by movies. And, why the hell is nobody even bothering to ask the industry to self regulate books? I can read a graphic description of horrible bestiality gang bang child rape and decapitation with a chain saw without having to show ID. But, 30 polygons try to do it doggy style, and it's the end of the world.
Carl Sagan suggested that empires are a shitty place for new ideas. For example, the Netherlands had a lot of cool stuff going on when they were a scrappy young republic competing against the Spanish and the English. Likewise, early Greece. The places that have stable societies with dwindling empires tend to have almost no ability to accept new ideas. At one point, it was the experimental method. Later, the heliocentric universe. Now, evolution.
Most GSM phones in the US are locked. I know a guy who had an overseas phone that he brought back to the states. A Cell phone salesman flat refused to believe that it was possible for him to swap SIM cards and have it work. My friend had to actually demo it for the sales guy to believe it. Every phone he could order for his store in the US was locked, and had been tested and didn't work when you tried to just swap the SIM card.
Well, I haven't actually checked any luggage in years. So, everything goes in my carryon. I also like to bring a drink onto the airplace. (Some airlines charge quite a bit for drinks on board, and even then the fruit juice tastes like crap.) Lots of people will want to bring contact lens solution. (Especially on flights long enough to sleep and wake up)
Frankly, I don't see why they are bothering to ban liquids. Just get a couple of guys to have baggies with the components of your binary explosive in their crotches, and security will never know. Or, trick out your bag and hide it in their. Odds are excellent that a routine TSA screening wouldn't catch the fact that your hard shell luggage is half an inch thicker than it needs to be. Just make sure there is no air trapped in the cavity, and you won't see/hear any sloshing.
It seems like the terrorists are trying to make do with a lot of dim folks instead of a few bright ones. This makes a lot of sense, considering that a lot of the bright ones don't actually want to kill themselves, so they recruit the dim ones to do the leg work. But, the recent bombing plot apparently involved enough guys that they were going to be able to take down ten planes. That's crazy. You can't maintain effective secrecy with that many people. I am slowly becoming convinced that it is easy for one guy to take down an airplane. It is doable for two. And, it is basically impossible for a bunch of guys to do it.
Sure, taking down ten planes would be more dramatic, but one would have been enough to have a panic. Thankfully, the terrorists are too big for their britches!
You are blaming arab governments on the arabs? My favorite middle eastern country, in terns of messed up history, is Iran. It isn't technically arab, but a lot of westerners don't bother to make any sort of distinction. Especially those making arbitrary blanket statements like yours.
At the start of the 20th century, there was a movement in Iran to move from a monarchy under the Shah to a nation with a constitution. There was some success, but England and Russia very actively impeded this process, and supported rolling back the role of the constitution. Then, there was a bit of a revolution, and a new Shah who had been involved in getting the constition made came to power.
The western powers hated this guy, basically forced him to abdicate, and had his son take power. In the 50's, the prime minister was asked to step down, tried to have another little revolution in order to move the country from a constitutional monarchy to a proper republic. The English and Americans would have none of it. So, we reinstalled the Shah, and installed a new prime minister. We also set up some official agreements and contracts about oil. A set of western oil companies had full control over the oil in Iran, and Iran couldn't audit the accounts to see if they were getting their contracted cut. So, basically Iran got shit from the exploitation of their own natural resources, because the West decided how the government should be run. (On several occasions!)
Interestingly enough, the Islamic revolution happened right about the same time that those oil contracts ran out. The whole history is far more interesting than I can fir into a slashdot post. My research on the subject is also far from complete. And, that's just one country.
For another interesting tidbit -- after the Islamic revolution in Iran, America was scared, a wanted to avoid having radical Islam spread in the middle east. We wanted to support non-religeous leaders in the area. It was less than a year after the Islamic revolution that Saddam came to power in Iraq.
Don't mess with the frame rate. It won't get you anything, because an NTSC DVD will always be 29.97 Frames per second. As for your encoding troubles, somebody already mentioned TMPEGEnc, and ffmpeg. I like both of them. TMPEGEnc has a nice GUI, and runs on windows. ffmpeg has a nice command line interface, and runs on most anything, but is probably most pleasant on some sort of *NIX.
Basically, the problem you are running into is a mediocre encoder. You want an encoder that does a more thorough motion estimation search. Combined with a few other bells and whistles, it will allow very nice quality at a reasonable bit rate. It will also take quite a while to encode. On my Athlon64, at highest settings, I generally plan on leaving an encode running at least over night. A good rule of thumb is that if your encode is any faster than 2X the length of the clip, you probably forgot to turn on enough quality options. (Of course, some encoders are just slow with no benefit -- it's just a vague rule of thumb...)
Now, why are you using a 1.5 Mbit audio rate? That's probably much, much, much higher than you need. Compressing the audio more efficiently will free up more bitrate for video, where you seem to need it. Now, using rough numbers, with 90 minutes on a single layer DVD, you have something like 6 megabits per second to work with. This should be plenty. Hell, it should be plenty even with the big audio.
Now, please go do some research. There is a ton of information available on the Internet, and we shouldn't have to read it for you. Making a DVD is not a mysterious black art. Getting the relevant information doesn't require any secret handshakes or anything. It sounds like you aren't doing anything the least bit unusual.
By the way, what is the project?
I agree completely.
This is not exactly a wrong statement, but it is incredibly broad. First off, Cray does make clusters. At a fundamental level, the basic separate-box clusters connected by Ethernet are the exact same thing as a big massively parallel system. They are on different ends of the spectrum, certainly. The sort of interconnects used by Cray certainly make their systems much more suited to certain workloads than more basic clusters. In practice, even Single System Image vs. separate boxes isn't that big a distinction. And, basic clusters certainly do compete with and take business from Cray. If basic clusters weren't an effective means of computing, then there would be a much larger market for the supers. If I refer to "clusters" in this post, I am probably referring to separate-box basic clusters -- like the parent poster seems to be. As unclear as this terminology can be, it is the way the term is usually used.
This point I fully agree with. The high end interconnects and whatnot that you see in supers are on a very different level from what you see in the more basic clusters. For the workloads where the supers kill the basic clusters, it's usually related to comms latency between the nodes, which is all about the crazy interconnects.
I'll take your word for it. I haven't specifically kept up with Cray's contracts, though it wouldn't surprise me if they are doing pretty well.
Yup, no argument there. (See, I may be a jerk, but at least I'm not arguing with everything! ;) )
I wouldn't go so far as to call top500 "nonsense." It is a very specific benchmark. People do tend to look at a very narrow, specific piece of information, and generalise it completely. *That* is nonsense. You have to be aware of what you are reading when you see stuff like benchmark numbers. Benchmarking can be very complex.
That said, there are some real world workloads that work quite a lot like linpack. Consequently, there are a lot of very real world tasks where a cluster is an appropriate tool. My personal interest in HPC tends to focus on 3D rendering performance. This tends to need a lot of FLOPS, and relatively little bandwidth. For the guys who are doing really bandwidth/latency intensive stuff, the basic clusters are useless. (I'm told that stuff like weather sim falls into this category, but I can't comment on the details.) Without specifying a workload, saying th
Well, that explains nVidia. What about everybody else? Basically, nobody has released full specs and open source drivers for their video card. I think that the whole area of computer graphics is so rich with obvious patents that basically everybody figures that they must be violating some IP with the cards or drivers. They may not even have any idea exactly what.
So, they come up with excuses, blame 3rd parties. They avoid releasing any real information because they know that it would result in them getting sued.
Personally, I find it hilarious that the GNU movement started out as an open printer driver. Now, we have learned to content ourselves with having everything open (On the typical Linux desktop) except for a closed driver for an output device. Remember to buy the Open Graphics hardware as soon as it somes out!
Now, maybe I'm completely misunderstanding teh point of this NIC, but...
You are correct. The NIC isn't an appreciable source of latency. Right now, I ping'd a server on another subnet, and I averaged 0.3 ms latency. This is bog standard 100 Mb. Nothing the least bit fancy. That server might have a nice NIC of some sort, but this desktop certainly doesn't. And, that's hopping between subnets. Crossing between buildings over a T-1, with a few routers involved in about 5 ms. Pinging my home machine over the internet is abou 150 ms. So, assuming that of the
Now, assuming that I was playing a game with my home computer, moving to a NIC that cut the latency of my PC down by 2/3 (from
Which would improve my lag by
No, dammit. You won't see a noticeable improvement from a lower latency NIC. There are probably a few microbenchmarks where you will get a phenomenal speedup. Gaming isn't one of those cases.