Here are a couple of decent pics of the Pro Keyboard. The first photo shows the keyboard in its natural habitat (next to the Apple speakers, Apple mouse, and the old Apple CRT monitor). Sort of fits in with Apple's "I wanna be crystal" plastics. Second two are stock Apple photos of the thing. Last one is a link to a page with some Apple mouse photos (what a *weird* mouse!).
I thought the same thing... "wow, *THREE* books on AT&T's Plan 9?!". You're not alone. One of these days I'll put Plan 9 on a slightly more "exotic" machine. Maybe an Indy or a BeBox.
Hot tap water is usually not hot enough to sterilize a container intended for beverages. You really outta boil water in and around the container for at least 5 minutes. The following link has some additional information and you should be able to pick up some pamphlets from your local FEMA or FDA office. http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/fire/emerg_prep/oh no/emergh2o.html
Slashdot is in a sad, sad situation when someone can predict the posts with this sort of accuracy. Another two months of study and slashcode could have an AI module to post to itself and completely fool the readers.
Heh. You don't do much computation, do you? Call us a bunch of nerds, but our hpcc group was pretty happy when SGI sent us the latest update to their f77/f90/f95 compilers about a momnth ago. "Yay, compiling with -o3 will shave an extra day off this run!"
Fortan is still alive and works like a charm, especially for tried and true atmospheric model algorithms. Heck, the SGI Origin 3400 machine we run most of our jobs on was announced by SGI in July of 2000 and our latest CPU cards were announced in April of 2001.
Go down to Fry's and buy a couple IDE hotswap trays and install it in a spare 5.25" bay. Get some spare drives. Pretend your PC is a Nintendo and insert your cartridge (drive) of choice... BeOS, NT, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS 6.22, Darwin, QNX, WinXP, OS/2, Solaris x86, etc...
Would have it been too hard to actually publish the formatting protocol at the time the data was recorded to tape?? My goodness, Viking wasn't even that long ago. I would like to see NASA somehow extract the data from the tape (in any form) and post a huge tarball on their website. Let the community try to make heads or tails of it.
I reinstalled Red Hat 7.1 and as soon as I get it to compile, I'll be running kernel 2.4.7!!! Gotta love linux, no paying or waiting for service packs! Woohoo!!
I've been a long time Mutt user (and Pine before that) so I was pretty excited about trying out Evolution. I've heard some pretty rave reviews and decided to give it a spin, thinking I may be convinced to take the GUI mail client plunge. Beta 1 was completely stable for me, but I really didn't see what was so impressive about the thing. To be totally honest, it looks and feels very much like an Outlook clone. It certainly has all of the latest wizbang features, but I honestly had expected a better, more innovative interface from the folks at Ximian.
All in all, it's a very solid, feature-complete client. Especially for those with Outlook envy. But I think the GTK/GNOME community could do (and would like) something a bit more original. But hey, it's certainly a lot better than the Netscape mail client!
If I were an ISP, I'd have one for the reliability and make damn sure I advertised it.
A high availability cluster is just that, a "high availablility cluster". I was refering to computational "Beowulf-style" clusters. There is an ISP in my area that brags about their 24 node computational cluster. I can't imagine what they could possibly be using it for, other than maybe datamining their logfiles to figure out trends in their customers' surfing habits.
Getting back to high availability, I totally agree. Anyone with a mission critical server setup really outta have a hot spare / mirror of each machine ready to take over should the first one fail. Or better yet (if the application can handle it) use a load balanced system to allow machines to be added and removed on the fly.
There is a *major* difference between "pure" computational and high availability clusters, though each can borrow aspects from the other. Simply setting up a beowulf-style cluster will not automatically solve every problem with availability and scaling. I don't know how many times I've seen people asking "how do I install Apache, Sendmail, and mySQL on my beowulf cluster". It's not that easy. Beowulf is not a magic fairy wand that turns a stack of PCs into one supercomputer.
But what about those $1000+ graphics cards from 3dlabs? How do those help render scenes?
See my previous comment. The expensive graphics cards only produce better quality real-time previews. They don't (and can't) assist in rendering, which is a totally differnet process that uses a different technique to handle reflections, refractions, shadows, etc.
The same applies to even a $$$ Millions SiliconGraphics Onyx2 or Onyx3000 "Reality Monster" (1 - 16 graphics pipelines, 2 - 512 CPUs, 64 MB - 1024 GB RAM, taking up 1 - 24 *racks* of space). This beast is a single machine and can drive up to 128 independent (different view/angle) monitors or projectors (8 displays x 16 pipelines) and can handle 9 GB of gfx ram (4 GB texture ram + 5 GB of framebuffer). Yet... even this beast can only use its CPUs for photorealistic raytracing rendering. The InfiniteReality3 graphics pipes can only be used for real-time graphics (simulations, flythrus, low-quality previews of animations and movies, etc). When it comes to the final high quality rendering, only the CPUs are put to use.
What is more important for a render farm, the processor or the graphics card? Because when you
distribute something for rendering across the nodes, would it be handled by the processors of the node or the GPU on the
graphics card?
CPU and Memory bandwidth, by far. You don't even need a graphics card on cluster nodes, as the graphics will never be used. Rendering is purely a CPU operation and thus is slow, but results in a far better image than your graphics card could ever dream of producing. The best your graphics card can do is lower-quality real-time previews. The better the graphics card, the better quality of the real-time imagery. A Quadro2 Pro, FireGL4, or Wildcat II can produce some mighty nice real-time images when modeling and previewing your 3D graphics, but are nowhere near as nice as the final rendered product. There really is no way to put your graphics card to use as a "coprocessor" in the rendering process, either, as rendering software and your graphics card differ greatly in the way they produce their images. Think of your Geforce 3 as "quick, lossy, and cheap" and a render sever (or cluster) as "slow, lossless/beautiful, and expensive".
Just what is a real cluster? I've looked through all "Beowulf" documentation I could find...
I don't belive there is a *proper* published, accepted usage of the term, "Beowulf". And you're correct, it is interesting how the kids are just now discovering distributed computation.
It may also be worth noting that "Beowulf", when used in a converstation, is often followed by "Schweeet", and is mostly said by l33d d00d wannabes in their prepubescent years. (Or by buzzword kings of any age).
What truly scares me is how folks like this are lusting over something they could never even utilize. I could *maybe* understand someone's desire for a Cray (and even that's a stretch), given the company's interesting history (and even more interesting founder, Seymour Cray). But a cluster of PCs?? What's so great about having racks upon racks filled with x86 systems sitting in your den that will recieve little or no use? And really, what's so great about a Cray in your own home? What are you going to run on either? Distributed TTYGNOME? And no, you're not going to be able to recompile the Linux kernel in two seconds with -any- cluster. You're better off builing a nice desktop PC and a companion server. Lust over the 100 GHz PC that you'll be running in just 8 years.
I hear this A LOT. There are even ISPs in my area that advertise their clusters. I honestly can't think of a reason why the -average- geek (and by definition, most of us geek -are- average) would need a cluster in his home, especially with PCs with CPU clockspeeds in the GHz range. Perhaps an MP3 machine in the living room and a nice fileserver tucked away in the wiring closet, but no need for a cluster.
That's not to say clusters aren't of use.... they're wonderful cheap solutions for certain supercomputing tasks and are awesome for most forms of rendering. BUT... that doesn't mean every one of us needs an 8-node cluster to render the 3D images we make in Blender about four times a year. Nor is a cluster a magic fairy wand that can turn a pile of older, slower PCs into one magical, fast, new PC. It's not that easy. There is no free lunch. Programming for parallel processing is no simple task and adapting an existing project for a cluster can be extremely painful work at best. I'll leave "distributed GNOME" to someone else.
(That, and you had to
use IRIX. Barf. "Oh we're sorry, our latest patch screwed up X11|NFS|OtherCriticalThing. Please wait till we get our act together").
IRIX patch dependancy hell in the past wasn't fun, in fact it was a complete pain in the ass. (Though about equal to my experiences with XFree86 in the months following the release of the nVidia TNT2 and geFORCE 256). However, SGI did rectify the situation in May 1998 with the release of IRIX 6.5. Among other things, 6.5 brough about a new update system, a quarterly 6.5.x overlay that updates any version of 6.5 to the latest version. Any problems needing immediate fixes between updates could be applied with a patch, but were overridden and replaced come the next quarterly update. 6.5.0 - 6.5.2 had some issues, but it's been smooth sailing since then. Most of my machines are running the latest, 6.5.12. All has been great. Simple updates every 3 months, no patches to worry about, and the guarantee of a stable update (SGI tends to stay about 5 months ahead of their customers by testing future releases on all of their internal machines first). The folks with a fetish for large version numbers don't like the fact that "SGI is still at 6.5" but the rest of us that like our machines to just work and realize that each new 6.5.x release contains updates and new features couldn't be more happy. SGI even updates http://freeware.sgi.com along the same timeline. Slick.
Of course there are always those that hate IRIX with a passion, but each to his own. GNOME and KDE are availalbe at the freeware site. CDE is available free for the asking (ask your SGI rep for the no-charge "CDE 5.0" CD). IRIX security is a bitch if you're not familar with the initial setup. Keep your SGIs behind a firewall or learn the steps to lock down an IRIX box (it takes 8 minutes).
Slashdot Mirror
URLs Presented In Plain Text For Your Protection!
That brought me to my knees! The imagry! Teehee!
I thought the same thing... "wow, *THREE* books on AT&T's Plan 9?!". You're not alone. One of these days I'll put Plan 9 on a slightly more "exotic" machine. Maybe an Indy or a BeBox.
Hot tap water is usually not hot enough to sterilize a container intended for beverages. You really outta boil water in and around the container for at least 5 minutes. The following link has some additional information and you should be able to pick up some pamphlets from your local FEMA or FDA office.h no/emergh2o.html
http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/fire/emerg_prep/o
Ppl will say same of zip disks 30 years from now.
Proprietary disk formats are bad, mkay?
Which "open" disk format do you prefer? MSDOS floppy?
Slashdot is in a sad, sad situation when someone can predict the posts with this sort of accuracy. Another two months of study and slashcode could have an AI module to post to itself and completely fool the readers.
Dont You Remember, Fortran wasnt Y2K compatable
Heh. You don't do much computation, do you? Call us a bunch of nerds, but our hpcc group was pretty happy when SGI sent us the latest update to their f77/f90/f95 compilers about a momnth ago. "Yay, compiling with -o3 will shave an extra day off this run!"
Fortan is still alive and works like a charm, especially for tried and true atmospheric model algorithms. Heck, the SGI Origin 3400 machine we run most of our jobs on was announced by SGI in July of 2000 and our latest CPU cards were announced in April of 2001.
Go down to Fry's and buy a couple IDE hotswap trays and install it in a spare 5.25" bay. Get some spare drives. Pretend your PC is a Nintendo and insert your cartridge (drive) of choice... BeOS, NT, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS 6.22, Darwin, QNX, WinXP, OS/2, Solaris x86, etc...
What was your wiring configuration? All of my cases with Turbo switches just used a dinky single pole, single throw push button for Turbo.
*Sigh*
Would have it been too hard to actually publish the formatting protocol at the time the data was recorded to tape?? My goodness, Viking wasn't even that long ago. I would like to see NASA somehow extract the data from the tape (in any form) and post a huge tarball on their website. Let the community try to make heads or tails of it.
POTS = Plain, Off The Shelf
Seriously, WTF does "WC", in this context, refer to?
This looks quite similar to the Ross SPARCplug from yesteryear:
http://www.dm-int.com/sparcplug.htm
Neat little gizmo that many of our engineers had several years back. Though, I'll probably buy a BriQ as soon as someone ports Darwin to it.
Sig? What Sig?
I reinstalled Red Hat 7.1 and as soon as I get it to compile, I'll be running kernel 2.4.7!!! Gotta love linux, no paying or waiting for service packs! Woohoo!!
I've been a long time Mutt user (and Pine before that) so I was pretty excited about trying out Evolution. I've heard some pretty rave reviews and decided to give it a spin, thinking I may be convinced to take the GUI mail client plunge. Beta 1 was completely stable for me, but I really didn't see what was so impressive about the thing. To be totally honest, it looks and feels very much like an Outlook clone. It certainly has all of the latest wizbang features, but I honestly had expected a better, more innovative interface from the folks at Ximian.
All in all, it's a very solid, feature-complete client. Especially for those with Outlook envy. But I think the GTK/GNOME community could do (and would like) something a bit more original. But hey, it's certainly a lot better than the Netscape mail client!
the camera wouldn't turn on so he threw it at one of his helpers
I belive said helper is now flipping burgers at a Cupertino McDonalds...
I was under the impression that the (original) UK version was known as "Scrapheap Challenge".
If I were an ISP, I'd have one for the reliability and make damn sure I advertised it.
A high availability cluster is just that, a "high availablility cluster". I was refering to computational "Beowulf-style" clusters. There is an ISP in my area that brags about their 24 node computational cluster. I can't imagine what they could possibly be using it for, other than maybe datamining their logfiles to figure out trends in their customers' surfing habits.
Getting back to high availability, I totally agree. Anyone with a mission critical server setup really outta have a hot spare / mirror of each machine ready to take over should the first one fail. Or better yet (if the application can handle it) use a load balanced system to allow machines to be added and removed on the fly.
There is a *major* difference between "pure" computational and high availability clusters, though each can borrow aspects from the other. Simply setting up a beowulf-style cluster will not automatically solve every problem with availability and scaling. I don't know how many times I've seen people asking "how do I install Apache, Sendmail, and mySQL on my beowulf cluster". It's not that easy. Beowulf is not a magic fairy wand that turns a stack of PCs into one supercomputer.
But what about those $1000+ graphics cards from 3dlabs? How do those help render scenes?
See my previous comment. The expensive graphics cards only produce better quality real-time previews. They don't (and can't) assist in rendering, which is a totally differnet process that uses a different technique to handle reflections, refractions, shadows, etc.
The same applies to even a $$$ Millions SiliconGraphics Onyx2 or Onyx3000 "Reality Monster" (1 - 16 graphics pipelines, 2 - 512 CPUs, 64 MB - 1024 GB RAM, taking up 1 - 24 *racks* of space). This beast is a single machine and can drive up to 128 independent (different view/angle) monitors or projectors (8 displays x 16 pipelines) and can handle 9 GB of gfx ram (4 GB texture ram + 5 GB of framebuffer). Yet... even this beast can only use its CPUs for photorealistic raytracing rendering. The InfiniteReality3 graphics pipes can only be used for real-time graphics (simulations, flythrus, low-quality previews of animations and movies, etc). When it comes to the final high quality rendering, only the CPUs are put to use.
What is more important for a render farm, the processor or the graphics card? Because when you distribute something for rendering across the nodes, would it be handled by the processors of the node or the GPU on the graphics card?
CPU and Memory bandwidth, by far. You don't even need a graphics card on cluster nodes, as the graphics will never be used. Rendering is purely a CPU operation and thus is slow, but results in a far better image than your graphics card could ever dream of producing. The best your graphics card can do is lower-quality real-time previews. The better the graphics card, the better quality of the real-time imagery. A Quadro2 Pro, FireGL4, or Wildcat II can produce some mighty nice real-time images when modeling and previewing your 3D graphics, but are nowhere near as nice as the final rendered product. There really is no way to put your graphics card to use as a "coprocessor" in the rendering process, either, as rendering software and your graphics card differ greatly in the way they produce their images. Think of your Geforce 3 as "quick, lossy, and cheap" and a render sever (or cluster) as "slow, lossless/beautiful, and expensive".
Just what is a real cluster? I've looked through all "Beowulf" documentation I could find...
I don't belive there is a *proper* published, accepted usage of the term, "Beowulf". And you're correct, it is interesting how the kids are just now discovering distributed computation.
It may also be worth noting that "Beowulf", when used in a converstation, is often followed by "Schweeet", and is mostly said by l33d d00d wannabes in their prepubescent years. (Or by buzzword kings of any age).
What truly scares me is how folks like this are lusting over something they could never even utilize. I could *maybe* understand someone's desire for a Cray (and even that's a stretch), given the company's interesting history (and even more interesting founder, Seymour Cray). But a cluster of PCs?? What's so great about having racks upon racks filled with x86 systems sitting in your den that will recieve little or no use? And really, what's so great about a Cray in your own home? What are you going to run on either? Distributed TTYGNOME? And no, you're not going to be able to recompile the Linux kernel in two seconds with -any- cluster. You're better off builing a nice desktop PC and a companion server. Lust over the 100 GHz PC that you'll be running in just 8 years.
What would you do with a cluster? Seriously.
I hear this A LOT. There are even ISPs in my area that advertise their clusters. I honestly can't think of a reason why the -average- geek (and by definition, most of us geek -are- average) would need a cluster in his home, especially with PCs with CPU clockspeeds in the GHz range. Perhaps an MP3 machine in the living room and a nice fileserver tucked away in the wiring closet, but no need for a cluster.
That's not to say clusters aren't of use.... they're wonderful cheap solutions for certain supercomputing tasks and are awesome for most forms of rendering. BUT... that doesn't mean every one of us needs an 8-node cluster to render the 3D images we make in Blender about four times a year. Nor is a cluster a magic fairy wand that can turn a pile of older, slower PCs into one magical, fast, new PC. It's not that easy. There is no free lunch. Programming for parallel processing is no simple task and adapting an existing project for a cluster can be extremely painful work at best. I'll leave "distributed GNOME" to someone else.
For the 6.022x10^23rd time, not all clusters are "Beowulf Clusters".
(That, and you had to use IRIX. Barf. "Oh we're sorry, our latest patch screwed up X11|NFS|OtherCriticalThing. Please wait till we get our act together").
IRIX patch dependancy hell in the past wasn't fun, in fact it was a complete pain in the ass. (Though about equal to my experiences with XFree86 in the months following the release of the nVidia TNT2 and geFORCE 256). However, SGI did rectify the situation in May 1998 with the release of IRIX 6.5. Among other things, 6.5 brough about a new update system, a quarterly 6.5.x overlay that updates any version of 6.5 to the latest version. Any problems needing immediate fixes between updates could be applied with a patch, but were overridden and replaced come the next quarterly update. 6.5.0 - 6.5.2 had some issues, but it's been smooth sailing since then. Most of my machines are running the latest, 6.5.12. All has been great. Simple updates every 3 months, no patches to worry about, and the guarantee of a stable update (SGI tends to stay about 5 months ahead of their customers by testing future releases on all of their internal machines first). The folks with a fetish for large version numbers don't like the fact that "SGI is still at 6.5" but the rest of us that like our machines to just work and realize that each new 6.5.x release contains updates and new features couldn't be more happy. SGI even updates http://freeware.sgi.com along the same timeline. Slick.
Of course there are always those that hate IRIX with a passion, but each to his own. GNOME and KDE are availalbe at the freeware site. CDE is available free for the asking (ask your SGI rep for the no-charge "CDE 5.0" CD). IRIX security is a bitch if you're not familar with the initial setup. Keep your SGIs behind a firewall or learn the steps to lock down an IRIX box (it takes 8 minutes).