I've got one of these at work to make an X-terminal out of. It comes with three fans, a 60x10mm fan on the short heatsink that sounds like a jet engine, a rather noisy 60x25mm fan as the case exhaust, and a tiny 25mm fan in the power supply. Even without a hard drive, it's a very noisy machine.
In order to quiet it down, I got a low power VIA C6 CPU for it, the 800Mhz samuel2 1.6V model. I couldn't find the C3 ezra 1.3V cpu for sale anywhere at the time. The small heatsink wasn't enough to cool the chip without the fan. I've ordered the Alpha PAL6035 heatsink to see if that will cool the C3 ok without a fan. There isn't much space in the case to put a large heatsink in. The intel OEM PIII heatsink is too wide, so is the Alpha PAL8045 and Thermalright SK6. The Swiftech MCX370 should fit, and I think the Zalman heatsinks can fit if you cut and bend some of the fins and don't have a harddrive.
SCSI's disconnect ability looks good in theory, but in practice it's not such a great advantage. With SCSI you can attach up to 15 devices to a single channel, and effectively access them all the the same time. With IDE you can attach up to two devices to a single channel, and only access one at a time. Sounds like SCSI is lots better, but only if you have a single IDE/SCSI channel and more than one drive. If you put each IDE drive on a seperate channel, and you can buy IDE controllers with 8 channels, then there really is no advantage to SCSI's disconnect/reconnect ability.
Furthermore, the actual drive mechanics are the same for both
SCSI and IDE versions of a drive
Why do people keep repeating this myth? If you look at the physical parameters for any SCSI and IDE drive made in the last 5 years, you will see that they are completely different. I dare anyone to find a SCSI and IDE drive from the same manufacture produced since 1998 that has the same number of heads, spins at the same speed, and has the same capacity. You won't find any.
I found
tigerdirect has the 800Mhz chip, but nothing faster. These are from the previous version of the C3 that run at 1.6V and don't support SSE. The newest C3, called Ezra, runs at something like 1.2V and uses less power. I think they also have SSE support but I'm not sure about that. I can't find anyone selling these chips. Pricewatch doesn't list newer via chips, google searches just turn up reviews, etc.
Actually, infringing on a copyright is now a criminal offense too. It used to be civil, but that meant when someone didn't gain anything from their infringement and the holder didn't suffer any damages, they couldn't recover any damages (read: no money). Though in some cases they could get punitive damages. It also meant that if they wanted to enforce their copyright, they had to pay to take someone to court. Taking some 13 year old to court because he copied a 18 year old rom from an obsolete game system isn't going to happen.
But, thanks to Sonny Bono and Disney, copyright infringement is now a criminal offense. That means the taxpayers get to pay millions of dollars for the FBI to converge the houses of twenty-six 13 year olds. It also means you can go to jail for longer than you would get for killing someone (if you use a car), even if you made no many and caused the company no damages.
But can you run that gasoline or diesel generator inside a machine room? You've got to somehow put it in a furnace room with ventilation or outside and run wiring. Building additions like that cost a lot of money, so this could be competitive. You also don't have to pay for the super expensive fuel unless the power goes out.
What does beowulf clustering have to do with ext3? Nothing! Someone should have modded your post (+1, Buzzwords).
There are filesystems designed for beowulfs, like
PVFS, which let you take the hard drives in a bunch of computers and merge them into one big filesystem. But ext3 has nothing to do with this.
Sounds like all they are saying is that the new
IDE driver can support 48 bit addressing. With 2^48 seconds of 512 bytes, you get 144 PB. But there are a LOT of other barriers to huge filesystems or files.
For instance, the Linux SCSI driver has always support 32 bit addressing, good enough for 2 terabytes on a single drive. But until recently, you couldn't have a file larger than 2 gigabytes (1024x smaller) in Linux. I think that the ext2 filesystem still has a limit of 4 TB for a single partition.
So while the IDE driver may be able to deal with a hard drive 144 PB in size, you would still have to chop it into 4 TB partition.
Re:He still uses only his legs ...
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 2
Using extra muscles won't make any difference. The limit of human performance is caused by oxygen delivery to the muscles. This is limited by cardiac output and hematocrit levels in the blood. Using your arm muscles won't make you go any faster.
Pro cyclists don't have huge leg muscles. If more muscle was better, then they would work more on building leg strength. But instead they train at altitude and take EPO to increase hematocrit levels.
It takes a lot of oxygen to produce the power needed for a world record attempt. He is sealed inside a carbon fiber shell with no holes. If there was an open window for the air to blow in, that would ruin the aerodynamics. He uses the breathing mask with air tube to help get air inside without compromising the aerodynamics.
Not really human powered...
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
These auto paced records aren't really human powered. The current world record holder is Fred Rompleberg with 166.94 mph. If you look at the photo at
his site, you can see how the bike is partway covered by a fairing behind the dragster that's pacing him. The force of the air rushing in to fill the vacuum behind the fairing creates a suction effect that pulls the bike along. Almost all of the power is comming from the dragster's engine, not the rider. He might as well just use a rope.
In the episode with the Tavloids, er Tavleks, Rygel gets choaked to death by a guard before a commerical, then after the break he is brought back to life by the squid thing in the cell next to him.
Stark is killed when he's dispersed as a punishment for blowing up the nuclear waste aliens' ship after D'argo rats on him. But then he comes back to life in another episode.
Durka, the captain of the Zelbenion, is a dead corpse in the episode "PK Tech Girl", but in "Durka Returns" it turns out he faked his death and was captured by the Nebari and frozen for 100 years or so. His ship is sucked out of Moya and explodes at the end of that eposide. But then later it turns out he lived (he ducked when the ship exploded) and now leads the Zenetan pirates. He appears right before a commercial break and then Rygel kills him and sticks his head on a stick right afterwards.
Maldus, the magic vampire guy, gets killed at the end of the episode, but then comes back in another and is killed again.
In one episode Crichton appears to have killed Scorpius after his cooling rods explode, but then we find out he didn't die, just got a headache.
D'Argo appears to get eaten in the episode "Eat Me", but then we find out the weird dude made a backup copy of D'Argo before eating him so he's still around. Chiana also gets eaten (not like that! maybe the uncut verison..) but we see her get copied first so it's not a return from the dead.
The weak surgeon alien that took apart Chrichton's brain appears to die when Scorpius breathes on him. But next season we find out he was just passed out, and he survies just long enough to put Chrichton's brain back before a scaran breathes on him and dies for good.
In one episode Chrichton is frozen in carbonite (it worked for Han Solo) and his head is cut off and tossed in a pool of hot acid. But carbonite is tuff stuff, so in the next episode they fish out his head, stick it back on, and revive him.
Aeryn's mother Xhalax cuts Rygel in half when she escapes in the episode "Relativity". But then Stark stiches him back together with magic healing vine and he comes back to life.
In that same epsidode, Crais kills Xhalax when they recapture her, but then she comes back in another episode because Crais just really just pretended to kill her.
And Zhaan might not really be dead. The last episode ended with Stark staying Zhaan is trying to contact him from behond the grave (compost pile?) and he's going to leave Moya for a while and look for her.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but clearly there have been quite a few "he wasn't really dead" plot twits.
You don't need special equipment, just a camera with a flash. It does help to have a SLR though. I did this back in HS for my final project in photography class. I had a water baloon exploding, a hatchet smashing a lightbulb, milk drop in a bowl, and a ice cube splashing into a glass.
The hardest part was figuring out how to trigger the events remotely, since I didn't have a helper. I just needed to take a dozen pictures of each thing to get a few that turned out well. I would take one that was early, like an ice cube just above the glass, and then a better one where the ice cube was in the glass and water was splashing out to make a sequence. You can't tell that it's not the same ice cube.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine
wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question.
Try running your X server in 16 bit mode, that seems to speed up the mouse a lot. When I first started the demo in 24bpp, the mouse was far too choppy to be usable. But with 16bpp I didn't even need to use the X11 mouse to get acceptable speed. I've got an old S3 Virge/VX graphics card, so if I can run the demo, then just about anyone should.
Hopefully one of these days someone will create a hardware color mouse cursor extension for XFree86, so games like this can have hardware color cursors that are perfectly smooth just like the hardware B&W cursors.
There are a bunch of debian bugs, and I'm sure there were lots of other bug reports that didn't get mentioned on the news page. But what did get mentioned on the tuxracer site:
Arbitrary joystick axes can be mapped to Tux controls (thanks to Julie Brandon for suggestion and patch).
Fixed some 32-bit-isms to allow compiling on 64-bit machines (like Alphas); thanks to Jay Estabrook for the patch.
Darrell Walisser has ported Tux Racer to the Mac! We've placed a link in the Downloads section. Thanks Darrell!
I believe that this makes Tux Racer the first open-source game to feature adaptive LOD terrain. Many thanks to Thatcher Ulrich, whose code was used (see Thatcher's excellent Gamasutra article for a description of the algorithm and a link to the demo code).
Matt Majka has ported Tux Racer 0.61 to Mac OS X.
I also found this news item interesting..
I'm very happy to announce that Tux Racer is now being developed by
Sunspire Studios, a very talented team of artists and developers (which
happens to include me;-). This is great news, since it means that Tux
Racer development will proceed at a much faster rate. And you needn't
worry --
Tux Racer will continue to be an open source game.
The NERDS, the American team in the UK series, tell about it on their website. It looks like they've got half an hour left and have barely even started, but in fact they "finished" early and were never in any danger of not having a working machine.
It is 10 hours compressed into less than 30 minutes(*) air time. It would be easy to show the first 25 minutes comming from the firt hour, and pack the last 9 hours into the remaining 5 minutes.
* Yes I know it's an hour show. That means about 43 minutes of actual material. Minus the final contest and the sketches, it's less than 30 for the building part.
I'll just cat all those 1024 byte packets together and PGP the whole thing. The increase in size would be insignificant.
Of course, you probably think that one needs to PGP each packet individually, and stick the key name and PGP signature on each packet. Only a fucking idiot game developer would do that. The only reason not to encrypt game packets is processing time, not bandwidth.
Paradise 2000, a Netrek client for Linux, uses IBM's viavoice for linux to get speech output. Netrek is probably the oldest real-time graphical game on the internet. It has a sophisticated text messaging and macro system, but pre-dates normal computers even having sound hardware, much less the power for voice over IP.
With a text-to-speech system, you can get voice output without having to worry about bandwith issues, poor quality sound, or people without a microphone.
With Netrek's RCD macro system, it's pretty nifty the things you can do. For example, a player who is in a base is hurt, and pushes a single key for generic distress, causing everyone on their team to get a message like: F0->FED Help(SB)! 0% shd, 50% dmg, 70% fuel, WTEMP! 9 armies!
But your client will speak, "Base hurt, weapon temped", because all those numbers are a pain to listen to. Later the base is ok, so he pushes the same key. F0->FED Help(SB)! 99% shd, 0% dmg, 99% fuel, 1 army!
Now the client just speaks, "Base is ok". The macros can have "if" statements based on the relevant values, e.g. if(damage>50) "hurt" else "is ok". It's a lot faster to just push a key than to say the relevant information. And if you don't have all the noise, you don't lose text communication with your teammates.
BTW, if it wasn't obvious, this is a shameless plug.
Don't bother downloading the README, nothing interesting there. It's source only, no binaries yet. Also no change log or release notes either, so you'll have to wait to find out what's new.
Just think of how much cryogenic Super Monster Z1+ Reference Poo-Bah Pro Mega Speaker Interconnects could cost! Does the danish article say how much these 100 foot cables cost? They might be competitive with the MIT Cables Oracle V1, which is a mear $14,995 for an 8' cable. The reviews for that cable are just jokes, but looks like some of the other cables that only cost a couple thousand really have been purchased by people with far too much money to waste.
I'm suprised the audiophile market doesn't have any superconducting products. It seems these people will buy anything as long as it costs enough.
I think it is quite a good tradeoff, given that space is allocated much more often.
If you think about it, almost as much space gets allocated as gets deleted overall. In fact, the difference between total space allocated and total space freed is equal to the space in use.
Just run over the RAMBUS execs with a car. If you kill someone with a car, it's not really a crime. If you're not drunk, the most you can get is a few months. If you're drunk, then you can get up to 4 years.
Compare that to watching a legally purchased DVD on a Linux system. For violating the DMCA you can get 5 years!
Sorry to intrude on the popular/. topic of American bashing, but this isn't true. NASA used pencils until 1967, when Paul Fisher, on his own, decided to develop the space pen. The Russians have used this pen since 1968 as well. See http://www.snopes2.com/business/genius/spacepen.ht m
Slashdot Mirror
I've got one of these at work to make an X-terminal out of. It comes with three fans, a 60x10mm fan on the short heatsink that sounds like a jet engine, a rather noisy 60x25mm fan as the case exhaust, and a tiny 25mm fan in the power supply. Even without a hard drive, it's a very noisy machine.
In order to quiet it down, I got a low power VIA C6 CPU for it, the 800Mhz samuel2 1.6V model. I couldn't find the C3 ezra 1.3V cpu for sale anywhere at the time. The small heatsink wasn't enough to cool the chip without the fan. I've ordered the Alpha PAL6035 heatsink to see if that will cool the C3 ok without a fan. There isn't much space in the case to put a large heatsink in. The intel OEM PIII heatsink is too wide, so is the Alpha PAL8045 and Thermalright SK6. The Swiftech MCX370 should fit, and I think the Zalman heatsinks can fit if you cut and bend some of the fins and don't have a harddrive.
SCSI's disconnect ability looks good in theory, but in practice it's not such a great advantage. With SCSI you can attach up to 15 devices to a single channel, and effectively access them all the the same time. With IDE you can attach up to two devices to a single channel, and only access one at a time. Sounds like SCSI is lots better, but only if you have a single IDE/SCSI channel and more than one drive. If you put each IDE drive on a seperate channel, and you can buy IDE controllers with 8 channels, then there really is no advantage to SCSI's disconnect/reconnect ability.
I found tigerdirect has the 800Mhz chip, but nothing faster. These are from the previous version of the C3 that run at 1.6V and don't support SSE. The newest C3, called Ezra, runs at something like 1.2V and uses less power. I think they also have SSE support but I'm not sure about that. I can't find anyone selling these chips. Pricewatch doesn't list newer via chips, google searches just turn up reviews, etc.
Actually, infringing on a copyright is now a criminal offense too. It used to be civil, but that meant when someone didn't gain anything from their infringement and the holder didn't suffer any damages, they couldn't recover any damages (read: no money). Though in some cases they could get punitive damages. It also meant that if they wanted to enforce their copyright, they had to pay to take someone to court. Taking some 13 year old to court because he copied a 18 year old rom from an obsolete game system isn't going to happen.
But, thanks to Sonny Bono and Disney, copyright infringement is now a criminal offense. That means the taxpayers get to pay millions of dollars for the FBI to converge the houses of twenty-six 13 year olds. It also means you can go to jail for longer than you would get for killing someone (if you use a car), even if you made no many and caused the company no damages.
But can you run that gasoline or diesel generator inside a machine room? You've got to somehow put it in a furnace room with ventilation or outside and run wiring. Building additions like that cost a lot of money, so this could be competitive. You also don't have to pay for the super expensive fuel unless the power goes out.
There are filesystems designed for beowulfs, like PVFS, which let you take the hard drives in a bunch of computers and merge them into one big filesystem. But ext3 has nothing to do with this.
Sounds like all they are saying is that the new
IDE driver can support 48 bit addressing. With 2^48 seconds of 512 bytes, you get 144 PB. But there are a LOT of other barriers to huge filesystems or files.
For instance, the Linux SCSI driver has always support 32 bit addressing, good enough for 2 terabytes on a single drive. But until recently, you couldn't have a file larger than 2 gigabytes (1024x smaller) in Linux. I think that the ext2 filesystem still has a limit of 4 TB for a single partition.
So while the IDE driver may be able to deal with a hard drive 144 PB in size, you would still have to chop it into 4 TB partition.
Using extra muscles won't make any difference. The limit of human performance is caused by oxygen delivery to the muscles. This is limited by cardiac output and hematocrit levels in the blood. Using your arm muscles won't make you go any faster.
Pro cyclists don't have huge leg muscles. If more muscle was better, then they would work more on building leg strength. But instead they train at altitude and take EPO to increase hematocrit levels.
It takes a lot of oxygen to produce the power needed for a world record attempt. He is sealed inside a carbon fiber shell with no holes. If there was an open window for the air to blow in, that would ruin the aerodynamics. He uses the breathing mask with air tube to help get air inside without compromising the aerodynamics.
These auto paced records aren't really human powered. The current world record holder is Fred Rompleberg with 166.94 mph. If you look at the photo at his site, you can see how the bike is partway covered by a fairing behind the dragster that's pacing him. The force of the air rushing in to fill the vacuum behind the fairing creates a suction effect that pulls the bike along. Almost all of the power is comming from the dragster's engine, not the rider. He might as well just use a rope.
There have been a few more than that.
In the episode with the Tavloids, er Tavleks, Rygel gets choaked to death by a guard before a commerical, then after the break he is brought back to life by the squid thing in the cell next to him.
Stark is killed when he's dispersed as a punishment for blowing up the nuclear waste aliens' ship after D'argo rats on him. But then he comes back to life in another episode.
Durka, the captain of the Zelbenion, is a dead corpse in the episode "PK Tech Girl", but in "Durka Returns" it turns out he faked his death and was captured by the Nebari and frozen for 100 years or so. His ship is sucked out of Moya and explodes at the end of that eposide. But then later it turns out he lived (he ducked when the ship exploded) and now leads the Zenetan pirates. He appears right before a commercial break and then Rygel kills him and sticks his head on a stick right afterwards.
Maldus, the magic vampire guy, gets killed at the end of the episode, but then comes back in another and is killed again.
In one episode Crichton appears to have killed Scorpius after his cooling rods explode, but then we find out he didn't die, just got a headache.
D'Argo appears to get eaten in the episode "Eat Me", but then we find out the weird dude made a backup copy of D'Argo before eating him so he's still around. Chiana also gets eaten (not like that! maybe the uncut verison..) but we see her get copied first so it's not a return from the dead.
The weak surgeon alien that took apart Chrichton's brain appears to die when Scorpius breathes on him. But next season we find out he was just passed out, and he survies just long enough to put Chrichton's brain back before a scaran breathes on him and dies for good.
In one episode Chrichton is frozen in carbonite (it worked for Han Solo) and his head is cut off and tossed in a pool of hot acid. But carbonite is tuff stuff, so in the next episode they fish out his head, stick it back on, and revive him.
Aeryn's mother Xhalax cuts Rygel in half when she escapes in the episode "Relativity". But then Stark stiches him back together with magic healing vine and he comes back to life.
In that same epsidode, Crais kills Xhalax when they recapture her, but then she comes back in another episode because Crais just really just pretended to kill her.
And Zhaan might not really be dead. The last episode ended with Stark staying Zhaan is trying to contact him from behond the grave (compost pile?) and he's going to leave Moya for a while and look for her.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but clearly there have been quite a few "he wasn't really dead" plot twits.
You don't need special equipment, just a camera with a flash. It does help to have a SLR though. I did this back in HS for my final project in photography class. I had a water baloon exploding, a hatchet smashing a lightbulb, milk drop in a bowl, and a ice cube splashing into a glass.
The hardest part was figuring out how to trigger the events remotely, since I didn't have a helper. I just needed to take a dozen pictures of each thing to get a few that turned out well. I would take one that was early, like an ice cube just above the glass, and then a better one where the ice cube was in the glass and water was splashing out to make a sequence. You can't tell that it's not the same ice cube.
Try running your X server in 16 bit mode, that seems to speed up the mouse a lot. When I first started the demo in 24bpp, the mouse was far too choppy to be usable. But with 16bpp I didn't even need to use the X11 mouse to get acceptable speed. I've got an old S3 Virge/VX graphics card, so if I can run the demo, then just about anyone should.
Hopefully one of these days someone will create a hardware color mouse cursor extension for XFree86, so games like this can have hardware color cursors that are perfectly smooth just like the hardware B&W cursors.
-
Arbitrary joystick axes can be mapped to Tux controls (thanks to Julie Brandon for suggestion and patch).
- Fixed some 32-bit-isms to allow compiling on 64-bit machines (like Alphas); thanks to Jay Estabrook for the patch.
-
Darrell Walisser has ported Tux Racer to the Mac! We've placed a link in the Downloads section. Thanks Darrell!
- I believe that this makes Tux Racer the first open-source game to feature adaptive LOD terrain. Many thanks to Thatcher Ulrich, whose code was used (see Thatcher's excellent Gamasutra article for a description of the algorithm and a link to the demo code).
- Matt Majka has ported Tux Racer 0.61 to Mac OS X.
I also found this news item interesting..The NERDS, the American team in the UK series, tell about it on their website. It looks like they've got half an hour left and have barely even started, but in fact they "finished" early and were never in any danger of not having a working machine.
It is 10 hours compressed into less than 30 minutes(*) air time. It would be easy to show the first 25 minutes comming from the firt hour, and pack the last 9 hours into the remaining 5 minutes.
* Yes I know it's an hour show. That means about 43 minutes of actual material. Minus the final contest and the sketches, it's less than 30 for the building part.
Why does this surprise you? The media in other countries is exactly the same way.
I'll just cat all those 1024 byte packets together and PGP the whole thing. The increase in size would be insignificant.
Of course, you probably think that one needs to PGP each packet individually, and stick the key name and PGP signature on each packet. Only a fucking idiot game developer would do that. The only reason not to encrypt game packets is processing time, not bandwidth.
With a text-to-speech system, you can get voice output without having to worry about bandwith issues, poor quality sound, or people without a microphone.
With Netrek's RCD macro system, it's pretty nifty the things you can do. For example, a player who is in a base is hurt, and pushes a single key for generic distress, causing everyone on their team to get a message like:
F0->FED Help(SB)! 0% shd, 50% dmg, 70% fuel, WTEMP! 9 armies!
But your client will speak, "Base hurt, weapon temped", because all those numbers are a pain to listen to. Later the base is ok, so he pushes the same key.
F0->FED Help(SB)! 99% shd, 0% dmg, 99% fuel, 1 army!
Now the client just speaks, "Base is ok". The macros can have "if" statements based on the relevant values, e.g. if(damage>50) "hurt" else "is ok". It's a lot faster to just push a key than to say the relevant information. And if you don't have all the noise, you don't lose text communication with your teammates.
BTW, if it wasn't obvious, this is a shameless plug.
Don't bother downloading the README, nothing interesting there. It's source only, no binaries yet. Also no change log or release notes either, so you'll have to wait to find out what's new.
I'm suprised the audiophile market doesn't have any superconducting products. It seems these people will buy anything as long as it costs enough.
If you think about it, almost as much space gets allocated as gets deleted overall. In fact, the difference between total space allocated and total space freed is equal to the space in use.
Just run over the RAMBUS execs with a car. If you kill someone with a car, it's not really a crime. If you're not drunk, the most you can get is a few months. If you're drunk, then you can get up to 4 years.
Compare that to watching a legally purchased DVD on a Linux system. For violating the DMCA you can get 5 years!
Sorry to intrude on the popular /. topic of American bashing, but this isn't true. NASA used pencils until 1967, when Paul Fisher, on his own, decided to develop the space pen. The Russians have used this pen since 1968 as well. See http://www.snopes2.com/business/genius/spacepen.ht m