Was the whole movie shot with digital film? I think that would be overwhelmingly expensive.
I think that one of the arguments for digital is just the opposite... Conventional film is shoot once, develop and never use again. It is very expensive to develop those hundreds of thousands of feet of footage. (24 frames / sec is like 3ft/sec of 35mm film... and they almost never shoot that slow, that's just what the print ends up with)
The argument goes that with digital you take what you like, copy it without loss in quality to a master and then you can reuse that tape / drive / whatever.
The argument against digital has always been that it is inferior in quality to conventional film. Lucas believes that the state of the art in digital has progressed to the point that digital is equal in quality as far as 35mm is concerned to film. He has even said it was a enormous boon because of the lowered cost of production. You can go from the set to the cutting room in minutes, not days.
Check out this site if you're curious. It's a broadcast quality digital camcorder that costs to buy about what a 35mm motion picture camera costs to rent for one day. Canon is so happy with this camera they produced a commercial for a lower end digital camcorder using this one.
Except, of course, for Newton's laws, which have been around for 300 years.
Um, you do know that Newton's laws aren't quite right, right? They are only a good approximation at low speed and manageable mass.
Incorrect. Survival of the fittest is a speculation made by Charles Darwin. He does not propose a way to disprove his statement.
For starters it was a speculation popularized by Darwin. And if you cannot think of a way to disprove his statements, you are in serious need of a basic science course. Science doesn't require you to publish how something can be shown false, only that an educated person can.
Gravity is a phenomenon initially observed by human beings on the planet Earth
What a coincidence! Evolution is a phenomenon that was also initially observed by human beings on the planet Earth!
Because some scientist somehere says something, everyone believes it, without question.
You know, there is a scientist somewhere who says he can detect silicone leaked from breast implants showing up in patient's bloodstreams... And the *only* ones who believe him are the lawyers who stand to make money and the women who are trying to figure out why their joints aren't as good at 40 as they were at 18.
When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Evolution, not only did the world not believe it, but neither did he.
This is another bit of evangelical christian propaganda taking a bit of what he said out of context and ignoring the body of evidence of Darwin defending his conclusions... But in any case, it doesn't matter whether what Darwin said is completely correct or if he believed it. Contrary to what hard line creationists think, Origin of Species is not a scientific holy book. Science moves on and keeps discovering, improving and adding to its body of knowledge.
any critical person, should be able to see that the theory of evolution is only a THEORY
The rules of science are pretty clear cut... Whatever your idea is it must be testable, repeatable and falsifiable. The requirements for something to move from not being a theory anymore aren't so clear, but if evolution is testable, repeatable and falsifiable it isn't really a theory, it moves into the accepted body of knowledge.
Case in point, why is Einsteins Relativity called "Theory", when Relativity has never not been observed?
With all of our intelligence, we have not been able to create life in a lab, and this is with inteligent input.
General Electric patented an oil eating microbe it had developed for reducing the ecological devastation from oil spills in the ocean. No organism like it is known to have previously existed. I recently saw a program on the Soviet biological weapons program where they developed a virus which caused a myelin-like gene expression which the immune system attacked. After recovering from the infection, affected rabbits died of complications from their immune system attacking the myelin around their nervous system. This certainly didn't exist before. In both cases the intended function of the new life was determined before starting the lab work to create it. Was it created from scratch? No. Was it evolved through selection and a little genetic engineering? YES.
Okay, sounds easy enough... But when someone else thinks it would be funny to connect to your network via the airport and start having your cluster raytrace his pr0n models, how do you keep them out? I didn't see any indication of security in there. Isn't that what we deride microsoft for? That Window's default state is "unsecure".
What if each node is told to crack the root password of itself? What is the permission set for the cluster app running on a particular box?
Most of the complexity of setting up a beowulf cluster is working around the security. Is it assumed that apple seeds will not be connected to the internet in any way, nor have any wireless access point attached to them? That isn't a reasonable expectation these days.
I have no doubt that someone could write a $100/client application that would make Linux clustering easy. Unfortunately, nobody would buy it.
I thought in the US the defendant was presumed innocent until found guilty by a court of law.
That only applies to the government (federal, state or local). Not many people believe that because OJ Simpson was acquitted he is innocent.
If this guy walked in to a restaurant and the owner said "hey, you're that bomb making anarchist, we don't serve you here", the owner can kick him out whether he is convicted, innocent until proven guilty or whatever.
The FBI alleges that he defaced websites, the person in question admitted doing so. No reasonable person doubts that he committed an illegal act. Short of some new bizarre twist coming up (his girlfriend is the anarchist and defaced the web sites and he is protecting her), I think that the previous poster's statement is reasonable.
Bill Gibson's site was DDoS'ed by over 100 computers. The defacements on the other hand came because one computer managed to break in.
The computers that DDoSed grc.com were themselves hacked windows machines and the owners of those machines were not complicit in the attack.
The computers that DDoSed grc.com were windows machines which have very poor logging of IP access and activity.
The defacements came from one computer which likely passed through a router logging traffic through it.
Finding out who DDoSed grc.com would require a huge expenditure of effort, and may well be impossible unless the culprit brags about it somewhere.
Finding out who defaced the websites would be considerably easier.
Maybe the FBI is selectively enforcing based on it's ability to assemble sufficient information to prosecute the person in question.
Many people have managed to get their message out on the web while in prison through mediaries. If this guy has a following, the website isn't just going to go away because the government jailed the guy. The FBI is well aware of that.
I disagree. If I pay UPS to ship something, that does not convey the right of them to inspect what they are shipping beyond that necessary to insure I am not sending explosives, radioactive or hazardous materials and the like. UPS cannot say "hey let's look inside this box to make sure there aren't smaller boxes of goods being shipped inside it".
Even if the terms of service state they can spy on my data, I don't think they have the right to do so.
Case in point: Theatres can make it against the rules for you to enter with food from outside. They own the theatre, their theatre their rules. But they absolutely cannot search you on a whim to make sure you are abiding by the rules.
I'm kind of curious about this. What you say could likely be right (the VAX 11/780 was specifically designed to host a whole lot of dumb terminal connections), but I'm not sure that saying the PC could not do some of those things is correct
I've heard of PC's hosting a large number of concurrent NetHack players for NetHack contests. That is pretty close to dumb terminal connections (though all the terminals use a network connection instead of RS-232).
If you really wanted to connect that many dumb terminals, you could get one of the USB RS-232 port adapters. One of them can drive 8 ports.
As for compiling... well, I'm betting that running 80 simultaneous instances of gcc would cause a great deal of consternation to your PC. However, GCC is a huge compiler. I doubt its equal existed in the day for the VAX. So if you instead ran 80 instances of a tiny C compiler with cfront for C++, I think the machine could handle it. It might run slow, but you wouldn't expect a VAX running 80 simultaneous compiles to run any faster.
Out of curiousity, how do you know that the human eye cannot see 100fps? When you say that, what do you mean? Cannot make out detail? The flash from a camera usually lasts less than 10ms, but we see it.
I ask this because I once believed as you did and created a simple experiment to prove I was right. I took an old manual camera, removed the lens, set the shutter to 1/60 sec (its flash sync), opened up the back, put my eye up to the shutter curtain, pointed the camera at my wife, asked her to hold up some fingers but not to tell me how many, and snapped the shutter.
To my somewhat surprise, I had no trouble telling how many fingers she was holding up. So I started clicking the shutter up to higher speeds. Only at 1/1000 sec did I start having trouble.
Thus I had proved myself, and conventional wisdom, wrong. If you are getting 100fps, and you monitor is drawing 100ftps, if something important happens even for only a frame or two there is no reason your brain won't register it.
I assume that was important when the only way to get stuff was on printed paper and there could be ambiguity between a decimal point and an artifact (or an excrement). If you have a problem with fly shit on your monitor, you should clean it. I regularly clean my monitor with a soft lint-free cloth and a 10M solution of HCl.
Why would anybody who came up with an innovative application release it only for Linux? Linux is always going to be playing catch up, it doesn't have the monster market share and so things are going to be developed for Windows first.
There are innovative window managers out there, but they just aren't as common because most people using Linux previously used Windows and are comfortable pressing alt-f4 to close an application, even though there is nothing intuitive about it.
That won't happen as long as I can't watch my.mov files (easily) or have a seamless experience with copy & paste, URL's, being able to print, etc.
Every one of those points I wholeheartedly agree with! Just yesterday I tried printing an email from Kmail. For reasons completely unclear to me, Kmail sent 8 1/2 x 11 formatted data to the printer. The result of course was that the printer has gutter space on every side of the paper so it didn't print those regions and the printout was unreadable. I opened the same mail in Eudora on windows and got a perfectly formatted print (was darker and therefore more readable too).
There's just no point in trying to get C++ bespoke work any more since most projects are done in Java.
It's interesting to hear different perspectives in different parts of the country. I live in Sacramento, CA and I've had recruiters tell me "We need to focus on your skills other than Java because I have a stack of Java programmers looking for work right now". They are telling me to brush up on my STL and newer C++ technologies to generate some interest from employers. I've been exclusively a Java developer for the last 3 years and have some contact experience with nearly every common enterprise used Java technology... But companies don't care about your JDBC experience unless the target database was Oracle.
What if the manager does circumvent (or in this case, ignore) the policy that says all candidates have to go through HR first?
Do you remember back when you had a toy car, and someone else came and took the toy car from you without asking? I mean, had they asked you would have let them play with the toy car. But they didn't ask you, and that made you mad. Well, think of HR as a beauracracy of 6 year olds.
Is the company going to penalize him for finding an excellent candidate on his own?
HR is going to penalize him for circumventing them, yes. HR is going to find some procedure or reason to avoid hiring the candidate, yes.
And if so, is that a company you want to work for?
It's called office politics, and there isn't a company in the world with more than a dozen employees that doesn't have it. If you try bullying in on HR's turf (handling hiring without them), you're asking for a conflict.
HR Departments usually openly solicit employees to reccomend their friends and have their friends apply to the company. Doing so allows the company to hire good people without using a recruiter who will want tens of thousands of dollars for the placement of a new hire. This is the old "it isn't what you know it's who you know" in action.
Well, considering that the Earth masses about 81 times as much as the Moon, then yes, it does have something more of an effect on Lunar satellites than the Moon does on Earth satellites.
And don't forget the sun... it's 330,000 times as massive as the earth and moon put together!
I think if you work through the numbers, you'll find that the satellite's close proximity to the moon makes the earth's immediate influence negligible. The Earth is still massive enough to pull both of them into an orbit around them, and the Sun is massive enough to pull all three of them into an orbit around it, and so on.
I've found an interesting solution to the moon's uneven grvty bt t mrg 2
So has anybody actually read their patent and care to speculate about prior art that may exist?
Reading through the claims of the patent in question, I think that SNMP may be an instance of prior art. SNMP contains all that atomic, compound, "endo-dynamic" and static information contained in an hierarchical identification node schema. Take the data returned from an SNMP tree walk and put it in XML and you have something nearly identical to what they've patented.
I'm an OOP fanatic myself. OOP is a wonderful tool for most tasks. The article author's tasks however aren't among those.
A good example of his issues is a Mandelbrot program. If you want code to solve a single problem, like rendering a Mandelbrot set, OOP is not going to give you any advantage. The problem is specific to matching a set of input data (the set boundaries) to its corresponding result (the set). If you wrote this using OO, the meat of the software would be a single Mandelbrot object. Everything else would be necessary fluff for display and handling mouse clicks.
However, if you needed something that would render Mandelbrots, Julias, and Recursive Serpentine something-or-others then OOP would be an appropriate tool. The fractal itself is an object and the higher level managing code doesn't need to know anything about the fractal objects except that they are derivatives of a base fractal class and therefore support an intelligent set of generic methods.
My experience with engineering software written in Fortran has been that the program is tightly coupled to one narrowly scoped problem (like the Mandelbrot example) and doesn't lend itself to an OOP implementation.
It probably has to do with how you hold the mouse. Many players will only have the pads of their fingers on the mouse because it gives a more accurate feel (you are fine adjusting your aim by moving your fingers instead of your wrist). Not everyone does it. Some are great shots even with their whole hand on the mouse. But for the "delicate touch" types this is a pretty cute hack. It is rather annoying when the sweat drips from your palms, down your fingers to your fingertips and starts making the mouse slippery.
Thanks for the link to the ArsTechnica article, you are right it is a much better read on KLAT2. I was particularly interested by the network design, I'd never thought about how to solve that problem and thought the KLAT2 solution was great.
There is an NP Complete problem affecting the backbone of the internet:
Several router manufacturers are designing their new equipment with support for MPLS. MPLS, among other things, offers better support for traffic engineering. Traffic engineering means deciding which router hops to take to get from border point A to border point B (it also means you can select an alternate route depending on network congestion or backbone router failures).
Finding the most efficient path between the two endpoints is an NP complete problem.
I think this problem also exists for BGP/IGP networks, but I'm not experienced with them. I do know that the promise of the internet being secure and redundant and safe from one node being bombed is a bunch of nonsense. Although the technology to route around outages exists, the chore of houskeeping for it has turned out to be rather intractable so it is minimally implemented at best. Usually if a large backbone provider suffers a hardware failure and can't swap in a backup, they call in one of their router guru's to look at their topology map and configure their other routers to route data around the bad router at that time. That's the automated process.
All the providers out there would *REALLY* like a tool that could take their network topology map and output a reasonable set of LSPs (MPLS tags that indicate the route the packet is to take) for them in a reasonable amount of time. However, since this problem is NP complete, such a tool would have to compute every possible path and then choose those at the top of the list.
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Was the whole movie shot with digital film? I think that would be overwhelmingly expensive.
I think that one of the arguments for digital is just the opposite... Conventional film is shoot once, develop and never use again. It is very expensive to develop those hundreds of thousands of feet of footage. (24 frames / sec is like 3ft/sec of 35mm film... and they almost never shoot that slow, that's just what the print ends up with)
The argument goes that with digital you take what you like, copy it without loss in quality to a master and then you can reuse that tape / drive / whatever.
The argument against digital has always been that it is inferior in quality to conventional film. Lucas believes that the state of the art in digital has progressed to the point that digital is equal in quality as far as 35mm is concerned to film. He has even said it was a enormous boon because of the lowered cost of production. You can go from the set to the cutting room in minutes, not days.
Check out this site if you're curious. It's a broadcast quality digital camcorder that costs to buy about what a 35mm motion picture camera costs to rent for one day. Canon is so happy with this camera they produced a commercial for a lower end digital camcorder using this one.
This opens up some great possibilities for
digitizing 3D models. Anybody heard of this
technology already being used for that?
Except, of course, for Newton's laws, which have been around for 300 years.
Um, you do know that Newton's laws aren't quite right, right? They are only a good approximation at low speed and manageable mass.
Incorrect. Survival of the fittest is a speculation made by Charles Darwin. He does not propose a way to disprove his statement.
For starters it was a speculation popularized by Darwin. And if you cannot think of a way to disprove his statements, you are in serious need of a basic science course. Science doesn't require you to publish how something can be shown false, only that an educated person can.
Gravity is a phenomenon initially observed by human beings on the planet Earth
What a coincidence! Evolution is a phenomenon that was also initially observed by human beings on the planet Earth!
You know, there is a scientist somewhere who says he can detect silicone leaked from breast implants showing up in patient's bloodstreams... And the *only* ones who believe him are the lawyers who stand to make money and the women who are trying to figure out why their joints aren't as good at 40 as they were at 18.
When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Evolution, not only did the world not believe it, but neither did he.
This is another bit of evangelical christian propaganda taking a bit of what he said out of context and ignoring the body of evidence of Darwin defending his conclusions... But in any case, it doesn't matter whether what Darwin said is completely correct or if he believed it. Contrary to what hard line creationists think, Origin of Species is not a scientific holy book. Science moves on and keeps discovering, improving and adding to its body of knowledge.
any critical person, should be able to see that the theory of evolution is only a THEORY
The rules of science are pretty clear cut... Whatever your idea is it must be testable, repeatable and falsifiable. The requirements for something to move from not being a theory anymore aren't so clear, but if evolution is testable, repeatable and falsifiable it isn't really a theory, it moves into the accepted body of knowledge.
Case in point, why is Einsteins Relativity called "Theory", when Relativity has never not been observed?
With all of our intelligence, we have not been able to create life in a lab, and this is with inteligent input.
General Electric patented an oil eating microbe it had developed for reducing the ecological devastation from oil spills in the ocean. No organism like it is known to have previously existed. I recently saw a program on the Soviet biological weapons program where they developed a virus which caused a myelin-like gene expression which the immune system attacked. After recovering from the infection, affected rabbits died of complications from their immune system attacking the myelin around their nervous system. This certainly didn't exist before. In both cases the intended function of the new life was determined before starting the lab work to create it. Was it created from scratch? No. Was it evolved through selection and a little genetic engineering? YES.
Okay, sounds easy enough... But when someone else thinks it would be funny to connect to your network via the airport and start having your cluster raytrace his pr0n models, how do you keep them out? I didn't see any indication of security in there. Isn't that what we deride microsoft for? That Window's default state is "unsecure".
What if each node is told to crack the root password of itself? What is the permission set for the cluster app running on a particular box?
Most of the complexity of setting up a beowulf cluster is working around the security. Is it assumed that apple seeds will not be connected to the internet in any way, nor have any wireless access point attached to them? That isn't a reasonable expectation these days.
I have no doubt that someone could write a $100/client application that would make Linux clustering easy. Unfortunately, nobody would buy it.
That only applies to the government (federal, state or local). Not many people believe that because OJ Simpson was acquitted he is innocent.
If this guy walked in to a restaurant and the owner said "hey, you're that bomb making anarchist, we don't serve you here", the owner can kick him out whether he is convicted, innocent until proven guilty or whatever.
The FBI alleges that he defaced websites, the person in question admitted doing so. No reasonable person doubts that he committed an illegal act. Short of some new bizarre twist coming up (his girlfriend is the anarchist and defaced the web sites and he is protecting her), I think that the previous poster's statement is reasonable.
one word: "wartime"
The rules change during that. Consult the constitution and history for examples of rule changing.
Well, let's look at some of the facts...
Bill Gibson's site was DDoS'ed by over 100 computers. The defacements on the other hand came because one computer managed to break in.
The computers that DDoSed grc.com were themselves hacked windows machines and the owners of those machines were not complicit in the attack.
The computers that DDoSed grc.com were windows machines which have very poor logging of IP access and activity.
The defacements came from one computer which likely passed through a router logging traffic through it.
Finding out who DDoSed grc.com would require a huge expenditure of effort, and may well be impossible unless the culprit brags about it somewhere.
Finding out who defaced the websites would be considerably easier.
Maybe the FBI is selectively enforcing based on it's ability to assemble sufficient information to prosecute the person in question.
Many people have managed to get their message out on the web while in prison through mediaries. If this guy has a following, the website isn't just going to go away because the government jailed the guy. The FBI is well aware of that.
Maybe it just isn't a conspiracy afterall.
I disagree. If I pay UPS to ship something, that does not convey the right of them to inspect what they are shipping beyond that necessary to insure I am not sending explosives, radioactive or hazardous materials and the like. UPS cannot say "hey let's look inside this box to make sure there aren't smaller boxes of goods being shipped inside it".
Even if the terms of service state they can spy on my data, I don't think they have the right to do so.
Case in point: Theatres can make it against the rules for you to enter with food from outside. They own the theatre, their theatre their rules. But they absolutely cannot search you on a whim to make sure you are abiding by the rules.
As much as I hate to reply to an AC...
I'm kind of curious about this. What you say could likely be right (the VAX 11/780 was specifically designed to host a whole lot of dumb terminal connections), but I'm not sure that saying the PC could not do some of those things is correct
I've heard of PC's hosting a large number of concurrent NetHack players for NetHack contests. That is pretty close to dumb terminal connections (though all the terminals use a network connection instead of RS-232).
If you really wanted to connect that many dumb terminals, you could get one of the USB RS-232 port adapters. One of them can drive 8 ports.
As for compiling... well, I'm betting that running 80 simultaneous instances of gcc would cause a great deal of consternation to your PC. However, GCC is a huge compiler. I doubt its equal existed in the day for the VAX. So if you instead ran 80 instances of a tiny C compiler with cfront for C++, I think the machine could handle it. It might run slow, but you wouldn't expect a VAX running 80 simultaneous compiles to run any faster.
Dear lord, you must have some serious pitting in the plastic parts of your monitor!
:)
Yeah, but there's no fly shit on it.
Out of curiousity, how do you know that the human eye cannot see 100fps? When you say that, what do you mean? Cannot make out detail? The flash from a camera usually lasts less than 10ms, but we see it.
I ask this because I once believed as you did and created a simple experiment to prove I was right. I took an old manual camera, removed the lens, set the shutter to 1/60 sec (its flash sync), opened up the back, put my eye up to the shutter curtain, pointed the camera at my wife, asked her to hold up some fingers but not to tell me how many, and snapped the shutter.
To my somewhat surprise, I had no trouble telling how many fingers she was holding up. So I started clicking the shutter up to higher speeds. Only at 1/1000 sec did I start having trouble.
Thus I had proved myself, and conventional wisdom, wrong. If you are getting 100fps, and you monitor is drawing 100ftps, if something important happens even for only a frame or two there is no reason your brain won't register it.
I assume that was important when the only way to get stuff was on printed paper and there could be ambiguity between a decimal point and an artifact (or an excrement). If you have a problem with fly shit on your monitor, you should clean it. I regularly clean my monitor with a soft lint-free cloth and a 10M solution of HCl.
Why would anybody who came up with an innovative application release it only for Linux? Linux is always going to be playing catch up, it doesn't have the monster market share and so things are going to be developed for Windows first.
There are innovative window managers out there, but they just aren't as common because most people using Linux previously used Windows and are comfortable pressing alt-f4 to close an application, even though there is nothing intuitive about it.
That won't happen as long as I can't watch my .mov files (easily) or have a seamless experience with copy & paste, URL's, being able to print, etc.
Every one of those points I wholeheartedly agree with! Just yesterday I tried printing an email from Kmail. For reasons completely unclear to me, Kmail sent 8 1/2 x 11 formatted data to the printer. The result of course was that the printer has gutter space on every side of the paper so it didn't print those regions and the printout was unreadable. I opened the same mail in Eudora on windows and got a perfectly formatted print (was darker and therefore more readable too).
It's interesting to hear different perspectives in different parts of the country. I live in Sacramento, CA and I've had recruiters tell me "We need to focus on your skills other than Java because I have a stack of Java programmers looking for work right now". They are telling me to brush up on my STL and newer C++ technologies to generate some interest from employers. I've been exclusively a Java developer for the last 3 years and have some contact experience with nearly every common enterprise used Java technology... But companies don't care about your JDBC experience unless the target database was Oracle.
Do you remember back when you had a toy car, and someone else came and took the toy car from you without asking? I mean, had they asked you would have let them play with the toy car. But they didn't ask you, and that made you mad. Well, think of HR as a beauracracy of 6 year olds.
Is the company going to penalize him for finding an excellent candidate on his own?
HR is going to penalize him for circumventing them, yes. HR is going to find some procedure or reason to avoid hiring the candidate, yes.
And if so, is that a company you want to work for?
It's called office politics, and there isn't a company in the world with more than a dozen employees that doesn't have it. If you try bullying in on HR's turf (handling hiring without them), you're asking for a conflict.
HR Departments usually openly solicit employees to reccomend their friends and have their friends apply to the company. Doing so allows the company to hire good people without using a recruiter who will want tens of thousands of dollars for the placement of a new hire. This is the old "it isn't what you know it's who you know" in action.
And don't forget the sun... it's 330,000 times as massive as the earth and moon put together!
I think if you work through the numbers, you'll find that the satellite's close proximity to the moon makes the earth's immediate influence negligible. The Earth is still massive enough to pull both of them into an orbit around them, and the Sun is massive enough to pull all three of them into an orbit around it, and so on.
I've found an interesting solution to the moon's uneven grvty bt t mrg 2
Even worse: L2 is unstable and would require occasional burns to put the satellite back.
So has anybody actually read their patent and care to speculate about prior art that may exist?
Reading through the claims of the patent in question, I think that SNMP may be an instance of prior art. SNMP contains all that atomic, compound, "endo-dynamic" and static information contained in an hierarchical identification node schema. Take the data returned from an SNMP tree walk and put it in XML and you have something nearly identical to what they've patented.
Anybody seen this?
I'm just going to add another "Dead on" response.
I'm an OOP fanatic myself. OOP is a wonderful tool for most tasks. The article author's tasks however aren't among those.
A good example of his issues is a Mandelbrot program. If you want code to solve a single problem, like rendering a Mandelbrot set, OOP is not going to give you any advantage. The problem is specific to matching a set of input data (the set boundaries) to its corresponding result (the set). If you wrote this using OO, the meat of the software would be a single Mandelbrot object. Everything else would be necessary fluff for display and handling mouse clicks.
However, if you needed something that would render Mandelbrots, Julias, and Recursive Serpentine something-or-others then OOP would be an appropriate tool. The fractal itself is an object and the higher level managing code doesn't need to know anything about the fractal objects except that they are derivatives of a base fractal class and therefore support an intelligent set of generic methods.
My experience with engineering software written in Fortran has been that the program is tightly coupled to one narrowly scoped problem (like the Mandelbrot example) and doesn't lend itself to an OOP implementation.
Yes, we've read all about it.
It probably has to do with how you hold the mouse. Many players will only have the pads of their fingers on the mouse because it gives a more accurate feel (you are fine adjusting your aim by moving your fingers instead of your wrist). Not everyone does it. Some are great shots even with their whole hand on the mouse. But for the "delicate touch" types this is a pretty cute hack. It is rather annoying when the sweat drips from your palms, down your fingers to your fingertips and starts making the mouse slippery.
Thanks for the link to the ArsTechnica article, you are right it is a much better read on KLAT2. I was particularly interested by the network design, I'd never thought about how to solve that problem and thought the KLAT2 solution was great.
So here's a link describing the NP complete problem (I think, I probably should read the whole thing first).
You are right, Dijsktra's algorithm will solve the general case shortest path from any source to every other reachable point.
Several router manufacturers are designing their new equipment with support for MPLS. MPLS, among other things, offers better support for traffic engineering. Traffic engineering means deciding which router hops to take to get from border point A to border point B (it also means you can select an alternate route depending on network congestion or backbone router failures).
Finding the most efficient path between the two endpoints is an NP complete problem.
I think this problem also exists for BGP/IGP networks, but I'm not experienced with them. I do know that the promise of the internet being secure and redundant and safe from one node being bombed is a bunch of nonsense. Although the technology to route around outages exists, the chore of houskeeping for it has turned out to be rather intractable so it is minimally implemented at best. Usually if a large backbone provider suffers a hardware failure and can't swap in a backup, they call in one of their router guru's to look at their topology map and configure their other routers to route data around the bad router at that time. That's the automated process.
All the providers out there would *REALLY* like a tool that could take their network topology map and output a reasonable set of LSPs (MPLS tags that indicate the route the packet is to take) for them in a reasonable amount of time. However, since this problem is NP complete, such a tool would have to compute every possible path and then choose those at the top of the list.