The effect of optimisations depends on the. I agree that many codes will see no, or negligible speed increases, but I have also seen a 3X speed increase. (Suprised the hell out of me.) For some reason, the programmer managed to find a way to do things that the optimiser absolutely had a field day with. Completely by accident. None of us had any particular idea why there was so much of a speedup. Probably some obscure case where the i386 code outputter got horribly confused about something.
All the issues I've heard indicate that while difference isn't bad... It's only good if it adds something. For example, I don't remember the band disaster area in the radio version. It was in the book and the BBC TV version. It was funny. Adding it was good. The fact that I don't remember the apontaneously evolving creatures from the TV version or the book means that something good was lost, but the viewer/reader came out a bit ahead for the trade.
Now, in the movie, I am told that the bulk of the additions consist of pointless explanation of things that don't need it, and scenes that involve finding the right sort of form to fill out, etc.
Another change is during the construction of Earth II. In the original, Slartibartfast wakes up after a multimillion year sleep. The subject of mice comes up, and Arthur makes a reference to 60's sitcoms. "I know nothing of these 60's sitcoms of which you speak... I'm a bit out of touch." It's funny in context.
In the movie, Earth II is being rebuilt from the moment it was destroyed, rather than from the beginning, and Slartibartfast says, "I know not of this cheese of which you speak." Now, this is a weak change. The original line was a call-back to the fact that Slarti had been asleep for five million years, and missed out on current cultural things. But, in the movie, because they are rebuilding the earth from the point where it was destroyed, Slarti must know about cheese because it is being used in the reconstruction.
So, they eliminated a humerous call back, and character explanation, while adding a thing which actually makes absolutely no sense in the context they created for it. It would have been better for them just to eliminate the line if they didn't know why it was there. The other thing they could have done was go into something humerous about what cheese is, and how they had been rebuilding the earth with earwax from antarean megaoxen on everybodys crackers.
But, they didn't decide to have confusion about the nature of cheese, they just butchered the line so that it no longer had any point being in the movie. Earwax on crackers is the sort of thing I could have gotten behind. Even though it isn't Adams' work, it would be an amusing addition to the story. Just changing crap because you don't get it, and ruining it, however, impresses me much less.
Why is this poor bastard being modded troll? He is right. This isn't the slightest bit newsworthy. It's a five node cluster, FFS! I have done 3D rendering using five different architectures simultaneously, and it certainly wasn't noteworthy. A friend used a whole computer lab of Sun boxes as an impromptu cluster. I used a lab of PC's as a renderfarm in school.
If this was a cluster for some really cool task, like rendering for a CAVE used in brain implant research in a 3rd world country, or something, it just might almost be newsworthy. This isn't. Not even a little.
IMHO, babelfish is handy for somebody like me, who can mostly read the German, but doesn't have the vocabulary for all of it. I primarily read the german, and use babelfish as a secondary reference for translations on some of the individual words.
But, yeah, for a non-speaker, babelfish would be pretty much useless. When I use it from a language I don't understand, I am never sure if I understand the translation.
This seems to be a problem that's endemic in recent Microsoft releases, not just in Windows Update. Error messages and error information displayed by M$ OSs and applications seem to get more and more vague with each release. By the time Longhorn actually makes it to market, I fully expect that all error messages will be reduced to a single window that will pop up every so often, reading simply "Something Bad Happened".
Nahh, that's what they say in the Beta. Release will just have a translucent message hovering above all windows that you can't get rid of which states, "Something may have happened, be happening, or be about to happen."
The convenience of downloading it is not impacted by copying restrictions. It's always easy to download it. If it is hard to copy, it may become like console games, where only organised groups of people do the extraction and compression. But, downloading it is always easy.
Likewise, buying is always easy.
The only difficulty is in legit copying. If I want to copy the movie onto my laptop for a trip, or to have a video jukebox HTPC. If it is hard to copy, then I will just download the movie, and put that on my laptop. If it is easy to copy, I will just buy the movie and rip it.
That's what I do with CD's, for the most part. I have "Six Not So Easy Pieces," some lectures on physics by Feynman. (six CD's worth) I bought them. Last night, I ripped them with iTunes, and put them on my iPod. It required hitting "Get track names from internet" and "import," for each CD, and then dragging the tracks onto my iPod (I have auto-sync disabled, or that step would be eliminated). Basically, two buttons per CD. Easy.
Now, if it was hard, I would never have bothered. If audio CDs required me to get DeAudioCSS, and demux, and fiddle, and do this and that, then I just wouldn't buy audio CDs. As long as it is easy to copy, I have a compelling reason to buy the CD. As soon as it becomes hard to copy, I realise I'd like to spend less time getting the CD in my preferred format that I would listening to it. As soon as that threshold is crossed, I become much more likely to just download it.
quote: Is there a such thing as an.AVI (well any playback medium, really...) with subtitles?
Absolutely. I believe QuickTime supports subtitles and multiple audio tracks. I absolutely know that ogg supports them, because i have downloaded ogg's "From The Wild," which I could watch in Japanese, Japanese with English subs, or in English Dub (with or without subs). I didn't need to deal with an external subtitles file, it was right there in the ogg, all I had to do was select which track I wanted.
So, there, ogg ain't just for tree huggers and long hairs. Amazingly enough, it is sufficiently developed to be 100% useful, and "just work." It surprised me, too!
No, ironically enough, they win if it is easy to copy. Everybody will just go buy the damned DVD if it is easy to put on their laptop to take a movie library for the road trip. If copying needs an expert, then you *have* to go download it off the internet, if you want to do anything interesting, which means you have no reason to buy the DVD in the first place.
i like the new Who, but I agree that the long story format was better. 4 eps was just about perfect. I just watched War Games, and it was a ten episode ark! Short enough that I can follow it (B5 was hard to come back to after missing half a season, but you knew Who would reset itself in a few weeks), but long enough to build things up, and have fun with it.
Also, in the new Who, he is the last Time Lord. How does that even make logical sense as an important point in the story? "I am the last, except for all the ones who travelled to the future, and all the ones I can still visit in the past."
*It does, however, have to be done in fixed point mono, and it takes the vast majority of the CPU time from what I recall. But, I think that was only a 33 MHz system, the later 486's probably could have run vi and an MP3 player simultaneously!
Certainly, my 40 MHz SPARC boxes managed to decode an MP3, and they were nearly the same early 90's vintage.
That said, I do video and 3D rendering. I've just started tinkering with some physics sim. My hobbies love fast hardware. I'll be looking very closely at a dual-socket, dual-core opteron in the very near future.:) 3D rendering is one case where even very old software can run very slowly on modern hardware. Just use higher resolutions and more objects, and may ray recursion, and you can slow down the very latest hardware.
uhhh... Using DBAN takes about 5 minutes of my time, and then I leave the PC sitting in an empty cubicle for a few hours. I'm sure I'm cheaper than the HD's would be. Especially because I work at a non-profit, so my salary probably isn't as high as it would be at a more corporate gig.
I recently helped my boss do a powerpoint presentation on HIPAA.
Basically, HIPAA itself doesn't directly mandate data security specifics, but the security rule which was created to accompany it does. This is the animation I inserted into my boss's powerpoint presentation to liven it up a bit. You may find it interesting...
http://216.87.95.173/~will/starwars2.mpg
That should be a link to the clip. It is themed as the opening crawl for star wars, but it says HIPAA WARS. A bit silly, but it made the all-staff rather amusing. It's hosted on my laptop, so if it gets popular, it may get slow. My apologies.
Uhhh... I disagree. I work at an organisation which falls under HIPAA. All the money we would spend on new hard drives for no apparent reason would mean that developmentally delayed persons in the community would be unable to get access to the resources we exist to provide.
Whenever somebody moves from one department to another, they need either a new PC, new HD, or a fresh setup on their old PC after a secure wipe. Every time somebody leaves the organisation, or a new person arrives. Every time a drive dies and the PC needs to get a new one under warranty.
Right now, I am probably doing a minimum of ten secure wipes every month. A new hard drive would cost roughly a hundred bucks. That's 12,000 dollars annually, minimum, just on hard drives, which would be wasted. That's a certain number of hours we would need to cut back the day program, leaving mentally retarded people roaming the streets without any help. Including the mentally retarded people who aren't allowed near children because they have sexually assaulted them in the past. That's a certain number of winter coats that can't be bought for people who can't work a steady job.
So, we use a utility called DBAN, Darik's Boot And Nuke. It's part of a free x86 rescue CD I downloaded. It comes with a bootable linux live CD, which includes an ntfs resizer, and memtest86. I usually just run it in teh machine where the HD is, rather than pulling the HDD out. In particular, this is much handier for laptops than a special device would be. OTOH, it would be easy enough to get an external hot swap caddy, and use it as your appliance, just plug it into any machine.
Also, you can always just dd/dev/random onto your disk a few times. Anybody know any good reason why that would be insuffiecient?
It would zip past voyager in a couple of decades, more realistically. The last high profile mission with an ion engine took a year to reach the moon. Apollo took a few days. Ion engines are wonderfully fuel efficient, but they have incredibly low thrust. They also require a lot of power. Solar panels are fairly light, and work fine in the inner solar system. Solar panels are essentially useless out by Jupiter. So, you need a fairly heavy power generation system in order to power your ion engine, which means that the low thrust will impart an extremely low acceleration. (At least heavier than voyager, because it only had enough power to work electronics, and make heat. The ion engine would need *much* more energy than that.) Sure, after a few years of continuous burn, it'll be going fast, but it does have a long way to catch up.
Well, obviously, different folks will want to see different benchmarks, but how many people concerned with SPEC, Linpack, or Doom3 are even in the target market for this type of system? Seriously, the only useful benchmark is whatever you want to do with a system. Anything else is just bragging rights. Since a lot of people want to play media on these systems, media playback is a logical benchmark.
If there was a hack for the window manager to turn off rounded windows and drop-shadows, I think that would be nifty. I generally run 3D type things that reall would run better if the general UI wasn't using a significant amount of the video card's power...
Set B had to go outside after school for social interaction. Thus, they were too tired to get in fights at school. They got in all their fights after school. QED.
Bah, real men use twm, and then only when they need to move a window. I usually kill twm whenever I am actually working, and then restart it if I need to arrange my windows. (If I don't have an xterm open when I need to restart it, I can always do it from a text vtty.
No, seriously, I have actually done that before...
And that's what I can say with my (in my opinion) quite limited knowledge of languages (grew up in Sweden, spoke Finnish at home, studied English, French and German in school).
I, too, am no expert, but I have picked up varying amounts of French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and a few glances at a few others. Native language is English. Frankly, yes, English really is messed up. English is a hodge podge of the languages of the various peoples who invaded England. This makes it fairly accessible, because there is something that seems familiar to everybody. But, the rules are so inconsistant that trying to program a computer with english is maddening. Not that programming a computer with Latin would be easy, mind you. Just that english is strange.
I am reminded of an old observation about English, which I am probably getting wrong.
A male sheep is a ram. A male donkey is an ass. If someone rams you in the ass, it's a goose.
Oh, and, I won't even try to comment on the rules of pronounciation, which are as bad as the grammer. If you take the rules of pronounciation from various words, "ghoti" should be pronounced "fish" ('touGH' 'fricTIon')
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The effect of optimisations depends on the. I agree that many codes will see no, or negligible speed increases, but I have also seen a 3X speed increase. (Suprised the hell out of me.) For some reason, the programmer managed to find a way to do things that the optimiser absolutely had a field day with. Completely by accident. None of us had any particular idea why there was so much of a speedup. Probably some obscure case where the i386 code outputter got horribly confused about something.
All the issues I've heard indicate that while difference isn't bad... It's only good if it adds something. For example, I don't remember the band disaster area in the radio version. It was in the book and the BBC TV version. It was funny. Adding it was good. The fact that I don't remember the apontaneously evolving creatures from the TV version or the book means that something good was lost, but the viewer/reader came out a bit ahead for the trade.
Now, in the movie, I am told that the bulk of the additions consist of pointless explanation of things that don't need it, and scenes that involve finding the right sort of form to fill out, etc.
Another change is during the construction of Earth II. In the original, Slartibartfast wakes up after a multimillion year sleep. The subject of mice comes up, and Arthur makes a reference to 60's sitcoms. "I know nothing of these 60's sitcoms of which you speak... I'm a bit out of touch." It's funny in context.
In the movie, Earth II is being rebuilt from the moment it was destroyed, rather than from the beginning, and Slartibartfast says, "I know not of this cheese of which you speak." Now, this is a weak change. The original line was a call-back to the fact that Slarti had been asleep for five million years, and missed out on current cultural things. But, in the movie, because they are rebuilding the earth from the point where it was destroyed, Slarti must know about cheese because it is being used in the reconstruction.
So, they eliminated a humerous call back, and character explanation, while adding a thing which actually makes absolutely no sense in the context they created for it. It would have been better for them just to eliminate the line if they didn't know why it was there. The other thing they could have done was go into something humerous about what cheese is, and how they had been rebuilding the earth with earwax from antarean megaoxen on everybodys crackers.
But, they didn't decide to have confusion about the nature of cheese, they just butchered the line so that it no longer had any point being in the movie. Earwax on crackers is the sort of thing I could have gotten behind. Even though it isn't Adams' work, it would be an amusing addition to the story. Just changing crap because you don't get it, and ruining it, however, impresses me much less.
Why is this poor bastard being modded troll? He is right. This isn't the slightest bit newsworthy. It's a five node cluster, FFS! I have done 3D rendering using five different architectures simultaneously, and it certainly wasn't noteworthy. A friend used a whole computer lab of Sun boxes as an impromptu cluster. I used a lab of PC's as a renderfarm in school.
If this was a cluster for some really cool task, like rendering for a CAVE used in brain implant research in a 3rd world country, or something, it just might almost be newsworthy. This isn't. Not even a little.
IMHO, babelfish is handy for somebody like me, who can mostly read the German, but doesn't have the vocabulary for all of it. I primarily read the german, and use babelfish as a secondary reference for translations on some of the individual words.
But, yeah, for a non-speaker, babelfish would be pretty much useless. When I use it from a language I don't understand, I am never sure if I understand the translation.
Nahh, that's what they say in the Beta. Release will just have a translucent message hovering above all windows that you can't get rid of which states, "Something may have happened, be happening, or be about to happen."
The convenience of downloading it is not impacted by copying restrictions. It's always easy to download it. If it is hard to copy, it may become like console games, where only organised groups of people do the extraction and compression. But, downloading it is always easy.
Likewise, buying is always easy.
The only difficulty is in legit copying. If I want to copy the movie onto my laptop for a trip, or to have a video jukebox HTPC. If it is hard to copy, then I will just download the movie, and put that on my laptop. If it is easy to copy, I will just buy the movie and rip it.
That's what I do with CD's, for the most part. I have "Six Not So Easy Pieces," some lectures on physics by Feynman. (six CD's worth) I bought them. Last night, I ripped them with iTunes, and put them on my iPod. It required hitting "Get track names from internet" and "import," for each CD, and then dragging the tracks onto my iPod (I have auto-sync disabled, or that step would be eliminated). Basically, two buttons per CD. Easy.
Now, if it was hard, I would never have bothered. If audio CDs required me to get DeAudioCSS, and demux, and fiddle, and do this and that, then I just wouldn't buy audio CDs. As long as it is easy to copy, I have a compelling reason to buy the CD. As soon as it becomes hard to copy, I realise I'd like to spend less time getting the CD in my preferred format that I would listening to it. As soon as that threshold is crossed, I become much more likely to just download it.
quote: Is there a such thing as an .AVI (well any playback medium, really...) with subtitles?
Absolutely. I believe QuickTime supports subtitles and multiple audio tracks. I absolutely know that ogg supports them, because i have downloaded ogg's "From The Wild," which I could watch in Japanese, Japanese with English subs, or in English Dub (with or without subs). I didn't need to deal with an external subtitles file, it was right there in the ogg, all I had to do was select which track I wanted.
So, there, ogg ain't just for tree huggers and long hairs. Amazingly enough, it is sufficiently developed to be 100% useful, and "just work." It surprised me, too!
No, ironically enough, they win if it is easy to copy. Everybody will just go buy the damned DVD if it is easy to put on their laptop to take a movie library for the road trip. If copying needs an expert, then you *have* to go download it off the internet, if you want to do anything interesting, which means you have no reason to buy the DVD in the first place.
i like the new Who, but I agree that the long story format was better. 4 eps was just about perfect. I just watched War Games, and it was a ten episode ark! Short enough that I can follow it (B5 was hard to come back to after missing half a season, but you knew Who would reset itself in a few weeks), but long enough to build things up, and have fun with it.
Also, in the new Who, he is the last Time Lord. How does that even make logical sense as an important point in the story? "I am the last, except for all the ones who travelled to the future, and all the ones I can still visit in the past."
Bah, a 486 will play an MP3 in real-time*.
:) 3D rendering is one case where even very old software can run very slowly on modern hardware. Just use higher resolutions and more objects, and may ray recursion, and you can slow down the very latest hardware.
*It does, however, have to be done in fixed point mono, and it takes the vast majority of the CPU time from what I recall. But, I think that was only a 33 MHz system, the later 486's probably could have run vi and an MP3 player simultaneously!
Certainly, my 40 MHz SPARC boxes managed to decode an MP3, and they were nearly the same early 90's vintage.
That said, I do video and 3D rendering. I've just started tinkering with some physics sim. My hobbies love fast hardware. I'll be looking very closely at a dual-socket, dual-core opteron in the very near future.
Sorry about that. It is fixed now. If you had posted a UID or something, I'd try to send you a message. Oh well.
uhhh... Using DBAN takes about 5 minutes of my time, and then I leave the PC sitting in an empty cubicle for a few hours. I'm sure I'm cheaper than the HD's would be. Especially because I work at a non-profit, so my salary probably isn't as high as it would be at a more corporate gig.
I recently helped my boss do a powerpoint presentation on HIPAA.
Basically, HIPAA itself doesn't directly mandate data security specifics, but the security rule which was created to accompany it does. This is the animation I inserted into my boss's powerpoint presentation to liven it up a bit. You may find it interesting...
http://216.87.95.173/~will/starwars2.mpg
That should be a link to the clip. It is themed as the opening crawl for star wars, but it says HIPAA WARS. A bit silly, but it made the all-staff rather amusing. It's hosted on my laptop, so if it gets popular, it may get slow. My apologies.
Uhhh... I disagree. I work at an organisation which falls under HIPAA. All the money we would spend on new hard drives for no apparent reason would mean that developmentally delayed persons in the community would be unable to get access to the resources we exist to provide.
/dev/random onto your disk a few times. Anybody know any good reason why that would be insuffiecient?
Whenever somebody moves from one department to another, they need either a new PC, new HD, or a fresh setup on their old PC after a secure wipe. Every time somebody leaves the organisation, or a new person arrives. Every time a drive dies and the PC needs to get a new one under warranty.
Right now, I am probably doing a minimum of ten secure wipes every month. A new hard drive would cost roughly a hundred bucks. That's 12,000 dollars annually, minimum, just on hard drives, which would be wasted. That's a certain number of hours we would need to cut back the day program, leaving mentally retarded people roaming the streets without any help. Including the mentally retarded people who aren't allowed near children because they have sexually assaulted them in the past. That's a certain number of winter coats that can't be bought for people who can't work a steady job.
So, we use a utility called DBAN, Darik's Boot And Nuke. It's part of a free x86 rescue CD I downloaded. It comes with a bootable linux live CD, which includes an ntfs resizer, and memtest86. I usually just run it in teh machine where the HD is, rather than pulling the HDD out. In particular, this is much handier for laptops than a special device would be. OTOH, it would be easy enough to get an external hot swap caddy, and use it as your appliance, just plug it into any machine.
Also, you can always just dd
If I had posted it three days before the story was posted, you probably would have needed to mod me off-topic! :)
I dunno... If I had an army of killer robots, I think a lot of people would learn to cooperate with me.
With FTP, you could always put ads in the MOTD, and in the directory listings.
Huzzah to that! I have seen things like an installer that gets interrupted:
Error! Would you like to quit or continue?
Yes|No|Cancel
If even I have no idea what the computer is going to do, nobody but the developer has a shot. Verbs are good for buttons. It's the best mantra.
It would zip past voyager in a couple of decades, more realistically. The last high profile mission with an ion engine took a year to reach the moon. Apollo took a few days. Ion engines are wonderfully fuel efficient, but they have incredibly low thrust. They also require a lot of power. Solar panels are fairly light, and work fine in the inner solar system. Solar panels are essentially useless out by Jupiter. So, you need a fairly heavy power generation system in order to power your ion engine, which means that the low thrust will impart an extremely low acceleration. (At least heavier than voyager, because it only had enough power to work electronics, and make heat. The ion engine would need *much* more energy than that.) Sure, after a few years of continuous burn, it'll be going fast, but it does have a long way to catch up.
Well, obviously, different folks will want to see different benchmarks, but how many people concerned with SPEC, Linpack, or Doom3 are even in the target market for this type of system? Seriously, the only useful benchmark is whatever you want to do with a system. Anything else is just bragging rights. Since a lot of people want to play media on these systems, media playback is a logical benchmark.
Some people really do use uncompressed BMP's. I've seen it. They need a picture file for their signature, and for the logo, etc... Sad, but true.
If there was a hack for the window manager to turn off rounded windows and drop-shadows, I think that would be nifty. I generally run 3D type things that reall would run better if the general UI wasn't using a significant amount of the video card's power...
Set B had to go outside after school for social interaction. Thus, they were too tired to get in fights at school. They got in all their fights after school. QED.
Bah, real men use twm, and then only when they need to move a window. I usually kill twm whenever I am actually working, and then restart it if I need to arrange my windows. (If I don't have an xterm open when I need to restart it, I can always do it from a text vtty.
No, seriously, I have actually done that before...
I, too, am no expert, but I have picked up varying amounts of French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and a few glances at a few others. Native language is English. Frankly, yes, English really is messed up. English is a hodge podge of the languages of the various peoples who invaded England. This makes it fairly accessible, because there is something that seems familiar to everybody. But, the rules are so inconsistant that trying to program a computer with english is maddening. Not that programming a computer with Latin would be easy, mind you. Just that english is strange.
I am reminded of an old observation about English, which I am probably getting wrong.
A male sheep is a ram.
A male donkey is an ass.
If someone rams you in the ass, it's a goose.
Oh, and, I won't even try to comment on the rules of pronounciation, which are as bad as the grammer. If you take the rules of pronounciation from various words, "ghoti" should be pronounced "fish" ('touGH' 'fricTIon')