I remember reading about a conference on communication with ET's where one person prepared a message, not encrypted, but just expressed in a strange way
Yeah I saw something similar. The guy had made a file containing the binary data and handed to fellow ET researchers, asking if they could decode it. Nobody was able to do it. The trick was that if you printed out the 1's and 0's using a certain column width, it drew a picture.
There's a LOT of ways to encode data, which might seem intuative to some but will baffle others. I don't think you'll have to go further than the various file formats we got to see that;)
Afaik deadline-less WU's are genome@home style WU's. At least that's my impression.
Anyway, it sure might be possible to throttle the cpu usage, I was just trying to say that FAH isn't the best sort of project for doing that. Consider my P3 733Mhz. This machine is on 24/7 and mostly idles. It used about five and a half day for the last completed WU, in other words about 125 CPU hours. The preferred deadline for this WU (after which the WU is considered lost and reissued) was 30 days.
Considering a laptop which is in use 10 hours a day, that's 30 * 10 * 20% = 60 CPU hours available for it to finish the WU. So like I said, either you need a spiffy laptop (which is not running in a low power state), or you have to leave your laptop on for more than 10 hours a day. Or you miss the deadline and aren't really contributing that much.
Now, WU's without deadlines is a different thing, and would be much more suited for this sort of thing, I agree.
One minimalistic "sleep" or "delay" into your mainloop, and whoop's , you're going to get more work done than you have ever before. Until then, nothing will fold on my machines over here.
The problem is that this won't work well for Folding@Home. It doesn't work like distributed.net where one can just assign some part of the keyspace to one client and have it work on that. The work units returned are used to generate new work units. That's why they have such "tight" deadlines. See their FAQ for details.
So for Folding@Home, you'll most likely end up past the deadline (unless you got a VERY spiffy laptop), and not helping all that much (although your work will be used for double-checking afaik).
However for other projects, distributed.net style, it would work out nicely, and I belive BOINC already has an option for this (the new F@H client might aswell, I can't remember, all my folding is done on my linux box now, and I haven't touched it in ages).
Is anyone working on a Ray-Tracing evuivalent of OpenGL?
Actually, yes: OpenRT. Some games which uses it can be found here, although nothing you can try at home unfortunately, only videos available for download.
I always understood that the universe was thought to be infinite. Does this mean the universe has been proven to have an edge?
Afaik, that's the size of the observable universe. Last thing I read was that the universe was very very flat, so either it's infinite (perfectly flat) or it's so huge that our "local patch" seems flat.
All the laptops I've used since 1999 have done exactly that - hibernation. It works very well for me. Startup time is around 5 seconds normally.
Except if you have large amounts of ram. At least on my desktop machine, with 1.5Gbyte ram, it takes almost twice as long to resume from hibernation than to start normally.
I'm unsure of the interaction of multiple low-priority applications. For instance, what happens when I have Shareaza, Folding@home, and Norton Anti-virus all running in the background at lower priorities? If one is slightly lower than the others will it get muscled out completely?
Potentially, yes, but usually no. This has actually been covered before.
Priorities in Windows is a bit special. First of all you must know that processes (applications like F@H or Shareaza) are merely "umbrellas", and that the actual execution is done in threads. Each process has at least one thread.
Threads are issued a priority level ranging from zero (lowest) to 31 (highest), which is calculated based on the priority class of the process and the priority level of the thread within the priority class of its process.
The Idle _thread_ priority level is a bit special. Unlike the other levels, it "overrides" the priority class of the process. So if a high priority process has an idle priority thread, the thread's priority level is still 1 (lowest, 0 is reserved).
Most PC's have just one processor, but lots of threads that needs to do work. In order for them to appear to work "at the same time", the OS allows each thread to execute for a short period of time (called a time slice, around 20ms on Windows XP I belive). It then allows another thread to execute.
In order to determine which threads gets to run, it picks one of the highest priority threads in a round-robin fashion. If none of those require CPU time, it checks the next-highest priority level. And so on. However, if a lower priority thread is executing, and a higher priority thread becomes active, the system immediately ditches the lower priority thread, regardless of how much of it's timeslice it has had, in favour of the higher priority thread.
Ok this got a bit lenghty, but the deal is this: Assume you have your game running at normal priority, and assuming it does not lower the priority of its threads (a reasonable assumption). You also have F@H running at idle priority (which is the default setting). This means that F@H will only execute when your game is not requesting any CPU time. For instance if it must wait for data from the harddisk. The instant the game is ready to use the CPU, the F@H client will be ditched and your game will be catered.
So the only thing you have to worry about performance wise, is the memory it uses. However if the game sucks up all the CPU, not letting the F@H client have any, Windows will swap out all of the F@H clients memory, so the impact should be minimal.
I can get a t-shirt for next to nothing at any yard/garage sale, flea market for 1$ US or less, WTF?!?!?!
I think you missed the bold part: "For a mere 140 SEK ($19 USD) per year, they will pay all your fines and give you a t-shirt if you get convicted for file sharing."
Might come in handy when RIAA knocks on your door to claim $5000 in damage per cd you have potentially managed to distribute had you been uploading it at full speed since you were born, or whatever they do...
Consider a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. The Print subtends an angle of 53 x 35.3 degrees, thus requiring 53*60/.3 = 10600 x 35*60/.3 = 7000 pixels, for a total of ~74 megapixels to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity.
Reminds me of my electronics class some years ago. Working in teams of two, we had hooked up a small circuit to an oscilloscope to watch how the signal was affected by the circuit.
After some time, I hear from the back of the room, with a nervous tone: "it's getting bigger, it's getting bigger!" followed promptly by "turn it off turn it off!", to which the other guy replied "but it IS off!". Next there was a loud crack, like a big firecracker had gone off. I turn around and see the two guys sitting there all frozen up and confused, covered in fine fur along with the table.
If I were a content provider, say Google, and verizon said "give us money all we'll lower the speed of your connections" I'd say "get bent". Then I would walk to my firewall and block Verizon's subnet from accessing my lovely Google search engine. Then wait a week, and see if Verizon would like to talk about selective traffic control.
Actually, I think I'd do it a bit differently. I'd still serve pages, and I'd serve the ads real quick, but put in an artifical slowdown on the "real" content. Above that I'd put a nice large message saying: "Want your search results faster? Contact your ISP now.", where the last part is linked to the ISP's support page (say Verizon in this case). Or something to that effect.
If the customers just get a connection failure, they'll just use your competitor...
This leads us to the answer to another pressing problem in mathematics - Why Do We Care?
Really, what does this have to do with how we deal with reality? Will we be buying amazing products that are based on this? Breaking encryption? Making pigs fly?
In the the 18th and 19th century, the foundations were laid for something called finite fields, which had little to no impact on reality then. Fast forward to 1960, when a couple of guys figured out a way to use finite fields in a way that enables you to still play a scratched cd, or ensuring your raid-5 is working properly when a disk fails.
So do you still think the mathematicians back in the 18th and 19th century should have done something else, something with direct applications in their time?
How does filesharing substantially hurt 24 and Lost? The shows have already aired and made their money by the time they get onto filesharing sites.
Here in Norway, tv shows usually lag behind with a season or more. However one station did something daring with Lost when it was about to premier, they spent a lot of money to get it very quickly, only a few eps behind. Since the show was such a hit in the beginning, a lot of people couldn't manage to wait and downloaded the eps from BT etc.
Now if enough people had done this instead of watching it on tv, it's obvious that the tv station could not have afforded to buy the episodes so early. So they would probably have waited a season. Which means the owners of the series would have made less money off it.
What you claim only holds true if the series is only aired on one network, and not sold to others. If it is sold, p2p has a very real chance of affecting revenues for that show.
Mp3 is, like JPEG, based on the discreet cosine transform (DCT). The reason for this is "because it has a strong "energy compaction" property: most of the signal information tends to be concentrated in a few low-frequency components of the DCT".
Oh yeah it's real. QueryPerformanceCounter is not guaranteed to return consistent results between cores. So what happens is it queries the start count on core 1, then gets scheduled on core 2, and measures the stop count there. Then it subtracts and voila, minus X msecs. The workaround is to use SetThreadAffinityMask on threads that uses QueryPerformanceCounter, to force it to run on only one core.
I don't know what sort of switches you use, but my home LAN, with two hops (including one over a wireless bridge) through only slightly-above-lowest-end DLink hardware, I consistantly get under 1ms.
Wow, you must use some really old hardware. My packets arrive before I send them:
Pinging 10.0.0.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=-11ms TTL=63 Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=63 Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=-11ms TTL=63 Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=63
Ping statistics for 10.0.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = -11ms, Average = 1073741819ms
But it's not like it's a solid wall or similar. The magnetic field is everywhere, and at some points it has certain properties which makes us say the point is part of "the edge". The Voyager probes have been measuring the magnetic field as they've been travelling, so we have datapoints along their entire path, not just from "the edge".
and a good brain, I don't seem to miss having any AV. Last time I had a virus was around DOS 5.0 days. And I use Windows (although not for the firewall;).
I generally find AV software to be in the way, generating conflicts with other software and generally slowing the machine down a LOT.
I have a 400GB Seagate SATA hard drive and it gets no where near 100MB/s, what kind of hard drive are you planning on using?
I got two 74Gb WD Raptors in RAID 0, which can write 90-95Mbyte/s sustained (perhaps more, I measured it using VirtualDub, "recoding" an AVI to uncompressed rgb on an NTFS partition).
games based on Valve's game Engine look graphically more polished and have more realistic effects [...] is it a matter of DirectX vs. OpenGL?
No, it's more a matter of what they were aiming for. You can do pretty much the same with DX as you can with OGL. I admit that I have only played Doom3 for a bit, and that I do not know exactly what the engine is capable of. However it seems as though the main focus in Doom3 was highly detailed indoor hallways. This contrasts Half-Life 2 which features a largeish (albeit very restricted) city with mainly shabby concrete buildings.
Because of the distance to the light sources, shadows in Doom3 would be hard. In Half-Life 2 you'll want soft shadows. In Doom3 there's not THAT much to gain from HDR, while in Half-Life 2 you have a very bright sun which affects lighting a lot.
Because you only see about 5m ahead of you at any given time in Doom3, walls could be polygon rich, making for lots of details (lots of cables and ducts). In Half-Life 2, you could see several blocks down the street, and so walls in Half-Life 2 were relatively flat, using textures for detail.
Making a 3d engine always involves tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs will determine what you can and cannot do. As a recent example, look at Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. They opted for deferred rendering. This allows for complex shaders, but as "Chuck" from ATI put it: "[Anti-aliasing is] not 100% impossible, and I'm not giving up on the possibility, but there is no playable solution right now". So the result is nice looking surfaces and effects, but lose nice anti-aliased edges.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading about a conference on communication with ET's where one person prepared a message, not encrypted, but just expressed in a strange way
;)
Yeah I saw something similar. The guy had made a file containing the binary data and handed to fellow ET researchers, asking if they could decode it. Nobody was able to do it. The trick was that if you printed out the 1's and 0's using a certain column width, it drew a picture.
There's a LOT of ways to encode data, which might seem intuative to some but will baffle others. I don't think you'll have to go further than the various file formats we got to see that
Afaik deadline-less WU's are genome@home style WU's. At least that's my impression.
Anyway, it sure might be possible to throttle the cpu usage, I was just trying to say that FAH isn't the best sort of project for doing that. Consider my P3 733Mhz. This machine is on 24/7 and mostly idles. It used about five and a half day for the last completed WU, in other words about 125 CPU hours. The preferred deadline for this WU (after which the WU is considered lost and reissued) was 30 days.
Considering a laptop which is in use 10 hours a day, that's 30 * 10 * 20% = 60 CPU hours available for it to finish the WU. So like I said, either you need a spiffy laptop (which is not running in a low power state), or you have to leave your laptop on for more than 10 hours a day. Or you miss the deadline and aren't really contributing that much.
Now, WU's without deadlines is a different thing, and would be much more suited for this sort of thing, I agree.
One minimalistic "sleep" or "delay" into your mainloop, and whoop's , you're going to get more work done than you have ever before. Until then, nothing will fold on my machines over here.
The problem is that this won't work well for Folding@Home. It doesn't work like distributed.net where one can just assign some part of the keyspace to one client and have it work on that. The work units returned are used to generate new work units. That's why they have such "tight" deadlines. See their FAQ for details.
So for Folding@Home, you'll most likely end up past the deadline (unless you got a VERY spiffy laptop), and not helping all that much (although your work will be used for double-checking afaik).
However for other projects, distributed.net style, it would work out nicely, and I belive BOINC already has an option for this (the new F@H client might aswell, I can't remember, all my folding is done on my linux box now, and I haven't touched it in ages).
I just hope they don't produce more Ridiculons. If you ask me, we got enough of them already...
Is anyone working on a Ray-Tracing evuivalent of OpenGL?
Actually, yes: OpenRT. Some games which uses it can be found here, although nothing you can try at home unfortunately, only videos available for download.
It will suck if they start realizing how much more money they could be making by defining a core as a CPU for licensing...
Wouldn't it be better to license per "worker thread" or something like that (depending on application of course)?
Want more power? Purchase another thread license (assuming you have a spare core to run it on).
Obviously this won't work for all programs, but I'd say it should work for a lot of programs out there.
Obviously you haven't gone fast enough... Watch what happens when you start pushing a 5-8 Gbit/sec stream through your dual socket server.
;)
Yeah coz like, games are so demanding these days...
For "real" work, what you say is true (or so I guess), but for gaming, who usually doesn't go above ISDN speeds...
I always understood that the universe was thought to be infinite. Does this mean the universe has been proven to have an edge?
Afaik, that's the size of the observable universe. Last thing I read was that the universe was very very flat, so either it's infinite (perfectly flat) or it's so huge that our "local patch" seems flat.
All the laptops I've used since 1999 have done exactly that - hibernation. It works very well for me. Startup time is around 5 seconds normally.
Except if you have large amounts of ram. At least on my desktop machine, with 1.5Gbyte ram, it takes almost twice as long to resume from hibernation than to start normally.
just what the world needs, "smart" mines... Haven't they seen Screamers?
A modern 7200 rpm SATA desktop drive can sustain just shy of 70 mbyte/s
Just for the first 50 gb or so.
I'm unsure of the interaction of multiple low-priority applications. For instance, what happens when I have Shareaza, Folding@home, and Norton Anti-virus all running in the background at lower priorities? If one is slightly lower than the others will it get muscled out completely?
Potentially, yes, but usually no. This has actually been covered before.
Priorities in Windows is a bit special. First of all you must know that processes (applications like F@H or Shareaza) are merely "umbrellas", and that the actual execution is done in threads. Each process has at least one thread.
Threads are issued a priority level ranging from zero (lowest) to 31 (highest), which is calculated based on the priority class of the process and the priority level of the thread within the priority class of its process.
The Idle _thread_ priority level is a bit special. Unlike the other levels, it "overrides" the priority class of the process. So if a high priority process has an idle priority thread, the thread's priority level is still 1 (lowest, 0 is reserved).
Most PC's have just one processor, but lots of threads that needs to do work. In order for them to appear to work "at the same time", the OS allows each thread to execute for a short period of time (called a time slice, around 20ms on Windows XP I belive). It then allows another thread to execute.
In order to determine which threads gets to run, it picks one of the highest priority threads in a round-robin fashion. If none of those require CPU time, it checks the next-highest priority level. And so on. However, if a lower priority thread is executing, and a higher priority thread becomes active, the system immediately ditches the lower priority thread, regardless of how much of it's timeslice it has had, in favour of the higher priority thread.
Ok this got a bit lenghty, but the deal is this: Assume you have your game running at normal priority, and assuming it does not lower the priority of its threads (a reasonable assumption). You also have F@H running at idle priority (which is the default setting). This means that F@H will only execute when your game is not requesting any CPU time. For instance if it must wait for data from the harddisk. The instant the game is ready to use the CPU, the F@H client will be ditched and your game will be catered.
So the only thing you have to worry about performance wise, is the memory it uses. However if the game sucks up all the CPU, not letting the F@H client have any, Windows will swap out all of the F@H clients memory, so the impact should be minimal.
I can get a t-shirt for next to nothing at any yard/garage sale, flea market for 1$ US or less, WTF?!?!?!
I think you missed the bold part:
"For a mere 140 SEK ($19 USD) per year, they will pay all your fines and give you a t-shirt if you get convicted for file sharing."
Might come in handy when RIAA knocks on your door to claim $5000 in damage per cd you have potentially managed to distribute had you been uploading it at full speed since you were born, or whatever they do...
I found this page interesting. Here's a quote:
Theres nothing to explode when its a capacitor.
:)
Reminds me of my electronics class some years ago. Working in teams of two, we had hooked up a small circuit to an oscilloscope to watch how the signal was affected by the circuit.
After some time, I hear from the back of the room, with a nervous tone: "it's getting bigger, it's getting bigger!" followed promptly by "turn it off turn it off!", to which the other guy replied "but it IS off!". Next there was a loud crack, like a big firecracker had gone off. I turn around and see the two guys sitting there all frozen up and confused, covered in fine fur along with the table.
So yeah, cap's can be fun
If I were a content provider, say Google, and verizon said "give us money all we'll lower the speed of your connections" I'd say "get bent". Then I would walk to my firewall and block Verizon's subnet from accessing my lovely Google search engine. Then wait a week, and see if Verizon would like to talk about selective traffic control.
Actually, I think I'd do it a bit differently. I'd still serve pages, and I'd serve the ads real quick, but put in an artifical slowdown on the "real" content. Above that I'd put a nice large message saying: "Want your search results faster? Contact your ISP now.", where the last part is linked to the ISP's support page (say Verizon in this case). Or something to that effect.
If the customers just get a connection failure, they'll just use your competitor...
This leads us to the answer to another pressing problem in mathematics - Why Do We Care?
Really, what does this have to do with how we deal with reality? Will we be buying amazing products that are based on this? Breaking encryption? Making pigs fly?
In the the 18th and 19th century, the foundations were laid for something called finite fields, which had little to no impact on reality then. Fast forward to 1960, when a couple of guys figured out a way to use finite fields in a way that enables you to still play a scratched cd, or ensuring your raid-5 is working properly when a disk fails.
So do you still think the mathematicians back in the 18th and 19th century should have done something else, something with direct applications in their time?
How does filesharing substantially hurt 24 and Lost? The shows have already aired and made their money by the time they get onto filesharing sites.
Here in Norway, tv shows usually lag behind with a season or more. However one station did something daring with Lost when it was about to premier, they spent a lot of money to get it very quickly, only a few eps behind. Since the show was such a hit in the beginning, a lot of people couldn't manage to wait and downloaded the eps from BT etc.
Now if enough people had done this instead of watching it on tv, it's obvious that the tv station could not have afforded to buy the episodes so early. So they would probably have waited a season. Which means the owners of the series would have made less money off it.
What you claim only holds true if the series is only aired on one network, and not sold to others. If it is sold, p2p has a very real chance of affecting revenues for that show.
mp3 uses wavelets
Mp3 is, like JPEG, based on the discreet cosine transform (DCT). The reason for this is "because it has a strong "energy compaction" property: most of the signal information tends to be concentrated in a few low-frequency components of the DCT".
Oh yeah it's real. QueryPerformanceCounter is not guaranteed to return consistent results between cores. So what happens is it queries the start count on core 1, then gets scheduled on core 2, and measures the stop count there. Then it subtracts and voila, minus X msecs. The workaround is to use SetThreadAffinityMask on threads that uses QueryPerformanceCounter, to force it to run on only one core.
Wow, you must use some really old hardware. My packets arrive before I send them:(Yes I have a dual-core
But it's not like it's a solid wall or similar. The magnetic field is everywhere, and at some points it has certain properties which makes us say the point is part of "the edge". The Voyager probes have been measuring the magnetic field as they've been travelling, so we have datapoints along their entire path, not just from "the edge".
and a good brain, I don't seem to miss having any AV. Last time I had a virus was around DOS 5.0 days. And I use Windows (although not for the firewall ;).
I generally find AV software to be in the way, generating conflicts with other software and generally slowing the machine down a LOT.
I have a 400GB Seagate SATA hard drive and it gets no where near 100MB/s, what kind of hard drive are you planning on using?
I got two 74Gb WD Raptors in RAID 0, which can write 90-95Mbyte/s sustained (perhaps more, I measured it using VirtualDub, "recoding" an AVI to uncompressed rgb on an NTFS partition).
games based on Valve's game Engine look graphically more polished and have more realistic effects [...] is it a matter of DirectX vs. OpenGL?
No, it's more a matter of what they were aiming for. You can do pretty much the same with DX as you can with OGL. I admit that I have only played Doom3 for a bit, and that I do not know exactly what the engine is capable of. However it seems as though the main focus in Doom3 was highly detailed indoor hallways. This contrasts Half-Life 2 which features a largeish (albeit very restricted) city with mainly shabby concrete buildings.
Because of the distance to the light sources, shadows in Doom3 would be hard. In Half-Life 2 you'll want soft shadows. In Doom3 there's not THAT much to gain from HDR, while in Half-Life 2 you have a very bright sun which affects lighting a lot.
Because you only see about 5m ahead of you at any given time in Doom3, walls could be polygon rich, making for lots of details (lots of cables and ducts). In Half-Life 2, you could see several blocks down the street, and so walls in Half-Life 2 were relatively flat, using textures for detail.
Making a 3d engine always involves tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs will determine what you can and cannot do. As a recent example, look at Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. They opted for deferred rendering. This allows for complex shaders, but as "Chuck" from ATI put it: "[Anti-aliasing is] not 100% impossible, and I'm not giving up on the possibility, but there is no playable solution right now". So the result is nice looking surfaces and effects, but lose nice anti-aliased edges.