Some of these tips are very good. I've published a few dozen papers in the GPS field, and I work with engineers and scientists who have done so also. I am sure they would agree with a lot of the (more positive) tips you have received.
This is what I can add: who do you want to know about this? Think of your original problem, and the process by which you came to a solution. No doubt you were trying to solve a real problem for real people. Those people are a great first audience for your work. What do they read when it comes to technical works? When they look for technical solutions, where do they look? If you want a broader audience, and you don't know what they read, ask them. Myself, I read GPS World a lot, and I consult the proceedings of the Institute of Navigation meetings.
This might sound like a small step but remember you *can* repeat it. First an company newsletter, then a conference, then a journal. Good luck!
FYI, you don't need p4 or even access to the WWW to get a copy of jam -- just ftp here. It builds under a standard C or C++ compiler. Furthermore there are at last count two extension to jam available -- Boost.jam and FT jam. Regards, Ben
I whole heartedly agree with your all of your observations. To date most GPS processing software is either closed source or comes with an NDA--even software from universities.
I believe that there are a number of projects that would complement the GPSTk. GnuRadio is the first. Sharc, which performs receiver communication and control, is another. Finally, OpenSourceGPS might also benefit from the GPSTk.
My Anonymous Friend... The salutations are appreciated. It has been a challenge for our team to develop and to share the GPSTk. I hope you discover its benefits, and I hope they outweigh the distastefulness of Perforce and Jam.
Please allow me to briefly explain why Jam was deliberately chosen over the GNU autoconf toolchain as the build process for GPSTk.
Jam addresses a larger set of users than GNU autoconf. Does configure work using the Borland free compiler? With MS.NET or MSVCC? No. We did not want to ignore that important community, not did we desire to support multiple build processes. Can make resolve library dependencies dynamically (upon invocation)? No. These are practical examples of why Jam was chosen over the autoconf/configure/make toolchain for the GPSTk.
Jam is not just a "hack" as one reply claims but a serious contender for the replacement for the make/configure/autoconf toolchain. If autoconf/make is such the obvious choice for all projects--then why are there so many alternatives? Other make variations or replacements include ant, cmake, qmake, and confix.
However I will be the first to admit Jam has flaws. Poor documentation is perhaps the greatest. Lack of familiarity is a runner up IMHO. Despite its flaws, Jam was chosen for its simplicity.
Perhaps the above sounds too defensive. I don't want to make the impression that the GPS Toolkit team would not consider switching to, say, CMake or autoconf. We have chosen the Open Source route for this project. The "many eyes" principle is founded upon challenge--we should accept this challenge to our build process. And we know we are asking for challenge by not following the autoconf convention. But the effort to switch build processes would only be considered if (1) the new build process broadened the user base or (2) it addressed technical inability in the current build process. Otherwise, the choice of build tool is arbitrary and if so, our choice is Jam.
Let's see if we can beat this dead horse a little bit more. There's still some visible meat....
Gold is arguing that Solar Radition Pressure (SRP) does not exist. However SRP models are confirmed daily when estimating satellite orbits.
SRP is a small force, compared to, say, gravity. The acceleration due to SRP is on the order of 1 ten millionth of a meter per second squared. However over the course of an orbit, even a 3 hour orbit, the cumulative effect of this acceleration is on the order of several meters.
A familar example is the Global Positioning System. The effect of solar pressure moves a GPS satellite tens of meters during just one of its twelve hour orbits. If this effect were not taken into acount by the control segment of GPS, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of GPS users would see the comparable errors (10's of meters) when performing stand-alone positioning.
I plunked down my $250 and waited three weeks to get this board. IMHO it was worth the wait! The system has been entirely stable, dual booting both Red Hat 7.1 and Win2k. I use it for video processing and it's a workhorse. I can encode DVD quality MPEG-2's from DV source in practically real-time, with motion search filtering and a high bit rate for output.
However I tried to triple boot with Windows 98 so I can use a cheap video grabber card--my advice is DON'T EVEN TRY to install Win98 on this board. Mine installed fine but would not boot Win98.
Placing the heatsink/fans on the CPUs was kind of tricky. I had 2mm of clearance between my heatsink/fan of choice and the single row of capacitors on the board. If the caps didn't wiggle I wouldn't have been able to install the heatsink/fans.
I found humor on the inside cover of the manual. I was pleased to see in print that this motherboard is certified for *both* Win2k and RH 7.1. However that textual note was marked with an asterisk to the effect:
This Tyan board is fully supported by Red Hat 7.1; however Tyan is not responsible if Red Hat no longer continues to support Red Hat 7.1.
Hello Tyan! I believe Microsoft will stop meaningful support of Win2k long before that RH would stop meaningful support of RH 7.1. More info about that assertion here, here and here.
Also, a warning. If you choose to install 1 Gb or so of ECC, registered memory, then booting takes a long time. There's some kind of POST that occurs for this kind of memory that delays my boot by like 30 seconds.
Finally, I just want to say that SMP is no magic bullet. For my purposes this board is fabulous. But in fact, some applications run more slowly on a dual CPU system. For example, any given single threaded program (read: first person shooter) will take a hit, say 2-5% of its speed. Your application has to use multiple threads to take advantage of this environment. Of course you can run more processes, that's nice.
You can judge for yourself if this is a good board for you. Look at the reviews for the Tyan Thunder K7, I feel they apply to the Tiger when it comes to processor performance. You can find review for that board here and here
And of course I have costumes for these quotes. A Barbie scalp for the former, baby sunglasses for the latter.
More sound bite or song suggestions would be appreciated... it's pretty easy to make the Bass say a given phrase. It takes about 10 minutes to transcribe a saying.
I'm the guys who made the Billy Bass project. That's a good suggestion about having Billy say "Hello, this is Linus...". I'll do it. And no one will get tired of it because Billy says so many different things....
The Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) was birthed in the eighties as a universal vector and bitmap file format. It is an ISO standard. Even MSOffice can import it. There's even a movement to make it more popular, and to apply it to web graphics.
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Some of these tips are very good. I've published a few dozen papers in the GPS field, and I work with engineers and scientists who have done so also. I am sure they would agree with a lot of the (more positive) tips you have received.
This is what I can add: who do you want to know about this? Think of your original problem, and the process by which you came to a solution. No doubt you were trying to solve a real problem for real people. Those people are a great first audience for your work. What do they read when it comes to technical works? When they look for technical solutions, where do they look? If you want a broader audience, and you don't know what they read, ask them. Myself, I read GPS World a lot, and I consult the proceedings of the Institute of Navigation meetings.
This might sound like a small step but remember you *can* repeat it. First an company newsletter, then a conference, then a journal. Good luck!
FYI, you don't need p4 or even access to the WWW to get a copy of jam -- just ftp here. It builds under a standard C or C++ compiler. Furthermore there are at last count two extension to jam available -- Boost.jam and FT jam. Regards, Ben
I whole heartedly agree with your all of your observations. To date most GPS processing software is either closed source or comes with an NDA--even software from universities.
I believe that there are a number of projects that would complement the GPSTk. GnuRadio is the first. Sharc, which performs receiver communication and control, is another. Finally, OpenSourceGPS might also benefit from the GPSTk.
My Anonymous Friend... The salutations are appreciated. It has been a challenge for our team to develop and to share the GPSTk. I hope you discover its benefits, and I hope they outweigh the distastefulness of Perforce and Jam.
.NET or MSVCC? No. We did not want to ignore that important community, not did we desire to support multiple build processes. Can make resolve library dependencies dynamically (upon invocation)? No. These are practical examples of why Jam was chosen over the autoconf/configure/make toolchain for the GPSTk.
Please allow me to briefly explain why Jam was deliberately chosen over the GNU autoconf toolchain as the build process for GPSTk.
Jam addresses a larger set of users than GNU autoconf. Does configure work using the Borland free compiler? With MS
Jam is not just a "hack" as one reply claims but a serious contender for the replacement for the make/configure/autoconf toolchain. If autoconf/make is such the obvious choice for all projects--then why are there so many alternatives? Other make variations or replacements include ant, cmake, qmake, and confix.
However I will be the first to admit Jam has flaws. Poor documentation is perhaps the greatest. Lack of familiarity is a runner up IMHO. Despite its flaws, Jam was chosen for its simplicity.
Perhaps the above sounds too defensive. I don't want to make the impression that the GPS Toolkit team would not consider switching to, say, CMake or autoconf. We have chosen the Open Source route for this project. The "many eyes" principle is founded upon challenge--we should accept this challenge to our build process. And we know we are asking for challenge by not following the autoconf convention. But the effort to switch build processes would only be considered if (1) the new build process broadened the user base or (2) it addressed technical inability in the current build process. Otherwise, the choice of build tool is arbitrary and if so, our choice is Jam.
The aforementioned code is in the "public domain," so I think we could do anything we want to with it...
Let's see if we can beat this dead horse a little bit more. There's still some visible meat....
Gold is arguing that Solar Radition Pressure (SRP) does not exist. However SRP models are confirmed daily when estimating satellite orbits.
SRP is a small force, compared to, say, gravity. The acceleration due to SRP is on the order of 1 ten millionth of a meter per second squared. However over the course of an orbit, even a 3 hour orbit, the cumulative effect of this acceleration is on the order of several meters.
A familar example is the Global Positioning System. The effect of solar pressure moves a GPS satellite tens of meters during just one of its twelve hour orbits. If this effect were not taken into acount by the control segment of GPS, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of GPS users would see the comparable errors (10's of meters) when performing stand-alone positioning.
However I tried to triple boot with Windows 98 so I can use a cheap video grabber card--my advice is DON'T EVEN TRY to install Win98 on this board. Mine installed fine but would not boot Win98.
Placing the heatsink/fans on the CPUs was kind of tricky. I had 2mm of clearance between my heatsink/fan of choice and the single row of capacitors on the board. If the caps didn't wiggle I wouldn't have been able to install the heatsink/fans.
I found humor on the inside cover of the manual. I was pleased to see in print that this motherboard is certified for *both* Win2k and RH 7.1. However that textual note was marked with an asterisk to the effect:
Hello Tyan! I believe Microsoft will stop meaningful support of Win2k long before that RH would stop meaningful support of RH 7.1. More info about that assertion here, here and here.Also, a warning. If you choose to install 1 Gb or so of ECC, registered memory, then booting takes a long time. There's some kind of POST that occurs for this kind of memory that delays my boot by like 30 seconds.
Finally, I just want to say that SMP is no magic bullet. For my purposes this board is fabulous. But in fact, some applications run more slowly on a dual CPU system. For example, any given single threaded program (read: first person shooter) will take a hit, say 2-5% of its speed. Your application has to use multiple threads to take advantage of this environment. Of course you can run more processes, that's nice.
You can judge for yourself if this is a good board for you. Look at the reviews for the Tyan Thunder K7, I feel they apply to the Tiger when it comes to processor performance. You can find review for that board here and here
Oh yeah there are two other quotes I plan to post as movies on the Hacking Billy Bass website.
And of course I have costumes for these quotes. A Barbie scalp for the former, baby sunglasses for the latter.
More sound bite or song suggestions would be appreciated... it's pretty easy to make the Bass say a given phrase. It takes about 10 minutes to transcribe a saying.I'm the guys who made the Billy Bass project. That's a good suggestion about having Billy say "Hello, this is Linus...". I'll do it. And no one will get tired of it because Billy says so many different things....
The Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) was birthed in the eighties as a universal vector and bitmap file format. It is an ISO standard. Even MSOffice can import it. There's even a movement to make it more popular, and to apply it to web graphics.