Rumors are that there is a very advanced search technology inside of HyperCard:-D. Remember, you could to full-text searches in your stacks at an amazing speed for the technology at this time?
Then there were plans to integrate a color-HyperCard into QuickTime (i think it was QuickTime 3.0), which would be the flash-killer today. I once implemented a windowing-interface complete with mouse-triple-click handlers and drag and drop, all in HyperTalk.
Yes, it's about "modernization" of universities here in germany, especially Berlin, which means to drastically cut expenses, close faculties, adopt a tuition fee model (studying is free until now in germany). And also funds for profs are dropped. So it's in there interest, too.
You might get some more information on indymedia germany (http://de.indymedia.org), but until now the whole movement is not too much related to social movements in general, more about academics getting a bad future like everyone else does.
Dell cluster vs. Apple cluster; redux
Tuesday, October 14, 2003 @ 12:05am
MacNN reader Dave Shroeder writes: "The University of Texas just rolled out a $38M Dell/Linux cluster that will achieve 3.7 Tflops, not even yet at full capacity. Compare that to Virginia Tech's $5.2M Apple/Mac OS X cluster that achieves 17.6 Tflops, constructed in 3 months." Several readers followed up on the pricing and cost issues involved: [updated]
"The $38M total was NOT for a single supercomputer. Please correct this information immediately. It was announced inFebruary for a total package that included:
The establishment of the new Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES) at UT, including:
four new endowed faculty chairs in ICES at UT
additional funding for the research endowment and the visiting scholars endowment in ICES
the completion of construction of the ACES building (the 4th floor) for use by ICES and TACC
and the establishment of a terascale distributed computing infrastructure at UT, hosted by TACC, including:
two supercomputers at TACC (the cluster you refer to, and the other IBM system)
two massive storage systems at TACC
three leading-edge components to increase UT's networking infrastructure
increases in operations funding over five years for ICES and TACC
The original author also followed-up on the his note:
"The 17.6 Tflops figure is Rpeak (theoretical max performance). LINPACK Rmax (maximum achieved performance), the measured benchmark by which rankings are judged, will be announced at a session on November 18 at Supercomputing 2003.
"It may also be worth pointing out that the $38M figure is for the 5-year life of the project at UT, while the $5.2M figure is the initial cost of the asset itself at VT, and does not include operational money. The dollar amounts aren't directly comparable.
"In fact, based on all the responses I've gotten, this story, as posted, probably isn't very accurate. It might be better to link to both of the articles, mention that the numbers are just theoretical max performance and that "real world" numbers will follow. One could imagine that Apple is bound to make a good showing in price/performance, but the price/Tflop figures are not accurate because the prices include different things."
I wonder why in this whole discussion about anti-aliased fonts in carbon apps or other operating system nobody mentions that quartz text rendering is more than simple anti-aliasing of glyphs (i.e. characters).
if you render a single glyph not aliased, for readibility reasons you have to place it within the pixel matrix. The effect you get if you'd use some sort of "exact" glyph positioning was possible to see if you switched on the "fractional character width" in old classic applications (AppleWorks has this settings in the text preference); using this "exact" character width as opposed to "character width as necessary to the pixel matrix" gives you strange gaps between letters. the fractional character width gives you the same glyph placement at it would be printed on a high-resolution device like a printer.
quartz adopts PDF rendering for exactly this reason. it's not anti-aliased single letters but anti-aliased "whole pages".
i cannot understand the complaints about unreadable anti-aliased text in cocoa-applications. here it's possible to clearly read 6pt text -- as opposed to carbon apps where everything below 9pt is almost unreadable.
btw in omniweb (in 4.1 beta/sneaky peaks) you can immediatly switch off text smoothing in the fonts & colors preferences dialog. simply set the "Smooth text larger than..." to 255.
(this remarks should be rewritten by some native speakers)
Slashdot Mirror
Rumors are that there is a very advanced search technology inside of HyperCard :-D. Remember, you could to full-text searches in your stacks at an amazing speed for the technology at this time?
Then there were plans to integrate a color-HyperCard into QuickTime (i think it was QuickTime 3.0), which would be the flash-killer today. I once implemented a windowing-interface complete with mouse-triple-click handlers and drag and drop, all in HyperTalk.
Awesome. Sad. Good Bye HyperCard.
The remainings can be found here:
plusLibs
You might want to download imdb here:
Alternate InterfacesYes, it's about "modernization" of universities here in germany, especially Berlin, which means to drastically cut expenses, close faculties, adopt a tuition fee model (studying is free until now in germany). And also funds for profs are dropped. So it's in there interest, too.
You might get some more information on indymedia germany (http://de.indymedia.org), but until now the whole movement is not too much related to social movements in general, more about academics getting a bad future like everyone else does.
The following just appeared on macnn.com:
Dell cluster vs. Apple cluster; redux
Tuesday, October 14, 2003 @ 12:05am
MacNN reader Dave Shroeder writes: "The University of Texas just rolled out a $38M Dell/Linux cluster that will achieve 3.7 Tflops, not even yet at full capacity. Compare that to Virginia Tech's $5.2M Apple/Mac OS X cluster that achieves 17.6 Tflops, constructed in 3 months." Several readers followed up on the pricing and cost issues involved: [updated]
"The $38M total was NOT for a single supercomputer. Please correct this information immediately. It was announced inFebruary for a total package that included:
The establishment of the new Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES) at UT, including:
four new endowed faculty chairs in ICES at UT additional funding for the research endowment and the visiting scholars endowment in ICES
the completion of construction of the ACES building (the 4th floor) for use by ICES and TACC
and the establishment of a terascale distributed computing infrastructure at UT, hosted by TACC, including: two supercomputers at TACC (the cluster you refer to, and the other IBM system)
two massive storage systems at TACC
three leading-edge components to increase UT's networking infrastructure
increases in operations funding over five years for ICES and TACC
The original author also followed-up on the his note: "The 17.6 Tflops figure is Rpeak (theoretical max performance). LINPACK Rmax (maximum achieved performance), the measured benchmark by which rankings are judged, will be announced at a session on November 18 at Supercomputing 2003.
"It may also be worth pointing out that the $38M figure is for the 5-year life of the project at UT, while the $5.2M figure is the initial cost of the asset itself at VT, and does not include operational money. The dollar amounts aren't directly comparable.
"In fact, based on all the responses I've gotten, this story, as posted, probably isn't very accurate. It might be better to link to both of the articles, mention that the numbers are just theoretical max performance and that "real world" numbers will follow. One could imagine that Apple is bound to make a good showing in price/performance, but the price/Tflop figures are not accurate because the prices include different things."
http://warez.slashdot.org
don't tell!
I wonder why in this whole discussion about anti-aliased fonts in carbon apps or other operating system nobody mentions that quartz text rendering is more than simple anti-aliasing of glyphs (i.e. characters).
if you render a single glyph not aliased, for readibility reasons you have to place it within the pixel matrix. The effect you get if you'd use some sort of "exact" glyph positioning was possible to see if you switched on the "fractional character width" in old classic applications (AppleWorks has this settings in the text preference); using this "exact" character width as opposed to "character width as necessary to the pixel matrix" gives you strange gaps between letters. the fractional character width gives you the same glyph placement at it would be printed on a high-resolution device like a printer.
quartz adopts PDF rendering for exactly this reason. it's not anti-aliased single letters but anti-aliased "whole pages".
i cannot understand the complaints about unreadable anti-aliased text in cocoa-applications. here it's possible to clearly read 6pt text -- as opposed to carbon apps where everything below 9pt is almost unreadable.
btw in omniweb (in 4.1 beta/sneaky peaks) you can immediatly switch off text smoothing in the fonts & colors preferences dialog. simply set the "Smooth text larger than..." to 255.
(this remarks should be rewritten by some native speakers)
You may also write an article for them about how to nest table-tags correctly.
With my browser the article was somewhere south-east of the "vote for this site" ad.
It's really annoying to have to use IE only because this special error condition isn't already handled by your alternative browser.