My understanding of people's main complaint about the backporting that companies were doing was that it forks kernel development.
But that's nothing new. The kernel has forks in it anyway. The PowerPC kernel, for instance, exists as its own set of patches to the main kernel tree. Linux can't be everything to everyone so this is an inevitable development.
I think that's the point of open-sourcing your code. If someone else can write a better (more appropriate) one, more power to them!
I think the difference between H2 energy storage and chemical batteries is that batteries degrade after many, many cycles. I think the problem is that there are more possible reactions than the primary charge/discharge, and the battery develops memory. The hydrogen production/usage is a single reaction only, so probably will last much longer without having to change out the system.
Hydrogen (gaseous that is, not liquid) is actually a reasonably safe fuel. As far as explosiveness, it's roughly equivalent to, say, natural gas, and much less explosive than acedalene.
Keeping hydrogen in a tank (outside of a house or in a vehicle) is fairly safe. If the tank is ruptured, the hydrogen is so light that it leaks into the air and floats up and away very quickly. (Unlike, say, gasoline, which tends to sit on the ground, mix with air, and cause explosions). (The article said that the H2 tank was _outside_; having it inside _would_ be dangerous.)
By the way, the reason that the Hindenburg was such a horrific accident wasn't primarily because it was filled with Hydrogen. It was because the body of the blimp was painted with a substance that was essentially rocket fuel.
Getting network access as a student on a campus usually requires signing a blanket document that acknowledges that that the campus can monitor traffic that you send/receive. On many campuses, a student's choice is likely to be sign the form, or not get any access.
Of course, you could always ssl all of your connections. Hmmm...that could get ugly quickly. I wonder how that would stack up against the DMCA?
Just for the record, in one of Asimov's robot books (I forget which one) this happens as well. A woman has an intimate relationship with a humaniform robot.
She wanted it to (thus satisfying Law 2) and it made her feel good (indirectly satisfying Law 3).
Do you think that it's possible for an artificial system to model a personality sufficiently complexly that interacting with it would be indistinguishable from interacting with an actual human?
The slashdot article mentions the Gallileo's mission lasting "3 decades". However, as the nasa.gov link states, Galileo was launched in 1989, 14 years ago. The author must be confused with Voyager I and II, which were launched in the 70's.
Amen. I've never worn a suit in a professional capacity. As a grad student, I would occasionally wear slacks and a button shirt for presentations for the funding agencies.
I just started a job as a research scientist for the NCSA. Dress code is the same. I actually showed up for the second interview in my interview suit (some NCSA big-wigs were there) and they acted all surprised, and said so.
It looks like the Mimbari species changing machine from B5. The case will slowly be assembled over this season.
When the machine is turned on and rebooted, then the author of the page will go into a chrysalis and emerge three weeks later as a chartered accountant.
It's great that after several years of using the excuse of "we don't what Linux distribution to support", they're finally making the port to a Linux based OS.
Unfortunately, this may be too little too late as far as academic users of the software are concerned. A couple of years ago, ProE files generated by the education version of the software started to not be capatible with the full version software, cutting off university research groups that wanted to be able to design things with ProE and have their files merged with bigger systems.
I'm part of a research group that was fighting for our research collaboration with several other universities and national lab to use ProE for the design and integration of the sub-systems. However we lost the fight when it was realized that the educational version (cheap at $5k per seat) wasn't capatible with the super-duper version that the lab has.
Yep, this story is not a surprise. A couple of months ago, I sold the last of my Transformers collection for about 3x the original price to finance the purchase of a PS2.
Remember, that in 1986, Hasbro (producer of the transformers) was KING of the toy market. They had GI Joe and Transformers, the two best selling toy lines of that era.
The 1986 _Transformers The Movie_ included cast voice cast:
Lenard Nimoy
Robert Stack
Orson Welles
(the guy who did the micro-machines commercials)
Judd Nelson
It was not a small thing to be able to assemble a cast like that for any animated film.
What I meant by the comment at the end was was that I was trying to prevent rating inflation. Making all ratings of reasonably good movies 10s on a 10 point scale dilutes the value. So the idea is TRON is better than 99 other randomly chosen movies, but not 999.
I did, in fact, spend 4 or 5 hours on a laptop going through the various sections of the DVD before writing the review, which is why I've seen it on a progressive display.
Sorry you don't like the film--I admit its cheese factor is pretty high.
And the computer world stuff with the people was live action. HOWEVER,
Every scene in the computer world was composited people in the foreground with CG generated backgrounds. All of those scenes were shot on a black set--I don't remember the number, but I think there was about 40 minutes of live+CG footage in the film. Granted, the CG backgrounds and the live action were probably optically composited.
In addition, there was roughly 20 minutes of pure CG in the film. The flying sequences and the MCP sequences in particular.
I have to say upon further reflection, the Geekness "Cool!" rating should have been higher, considering that's one of the extrordinary things about the film. I would say it should definintely an 8.5, and I think perhaps a 9.
When I wrote this, I was trying to stay away from "Oh, it's so great, it gets all 10s!" sort of review that dilutes the effectiveness of a really great review. That's why the end mentions the scaling is designed to make 99% of movies fall in the 2 to 8 range. However, given the Ultra-geekness of this film, and being that's one of the greatest things about it, I think that a 9 is appropriate.
Realize that this the first formal movie review I've ever written, so the scaling needs a bit of work.:-)
I'm glad people are concerned about this. What we have is conflicting terminology.
Anamorphic is technicaly a lens system used in film cameras to squeeze an image.
DVDs use two methods to store widescreen movies. One is letterboxing, a-la VHS. This however puts out those that have widescreen TVs.
The other mothod is to stretch the image vertically. When played back by the DVD player on a normal TV, the images is compressed back and the black bars are added on the fly. However, on a wide screen TV, the image is stretched horizontally, filling the whole widescreen TV.
The second process is by far superior, but there is no industry standard way to label movies that have this feature. The mis-nomer "Anamorphic" is sometimes used. However, the term that is starting to become more standard is "Enhanced for widescreen TVs", which I mentioned in the review and that's precisely why I made a big deal about it.
First of all, I used Irix as the primary OS doing research for almost 4 years. The machine was (and is) a Powerchallenge 8000 running 5 CPUs.
Irix is a good operating system, certainly, and stable, and relatively well supported. I would say that besides GL hardware related things, it's slightly nicer that the large commercial Linux distributions. Linux distributions are growing so fast that things are not necessarily thought out completely.
As far as Linux running on SGI hardware, I think they're seeing the writing on the wall. On slashdot several months ago, there was an article highlighting the machine that is doing the rendering for the _Lord of the Rings_ film. They bought a rack full of dual-CPU SGI boxes, but they're running Linux. As it turns out, it was cheaper to just buy more CPUs to make up for the performance hit of Linux than it was to licence Irix for that many machines.
Irix is an excellent, solid, operating system that is great if you need to close ties to graphics. But unless you need that particular graphics capability, it's not particularly extraordinary.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding of people's main complaint about the backporting that companies were doing was that it forks kernel development.
But that's nothing new. The kernel has forks in it anyway. The PowerPC kernel, for instance, exists as its own set of patches to the main kernel tree. Linux can't be everything to everyone so this is an inevitable development.
I think that's the point of open-sourcing your code. If someone else can write a better (more appropriate) one, more power to them!
Controlling temperature is always a problem in space. I wonder how they're going to keep them chilled like that for 16 months?
In any case, good luck!
I think the difference between H2 energy storage and chemical batteries is that batteries degrade after many, many cycles. I think the problem is that there are more possible reactions than the primary charge/discharge, and the battery develops memory. The hydrogen production/usage is a single reaction only, so probably will last much longer without having to change out the system.
Hydrogen (gaseous that is, not liquid) is actually a reasonably safe fuel. As far as explosiveness, it's roughly equivalent to, say, natural gas, and much less explosive than acedalene.
Keeping hydrogen in a tank (outside of a house or in a vehicle) is fairly safe. If the tank is ruptured, the hydrogen is so light that it leaks into the air and floats up and away very quickly. (Unlike, say, gasoline, which tends to sit on the ground, mix with air, and cause explosions). (The article said that the H2 tank was _outside_; having it inside _would_ be dangerous.)
By the way, the reason that the Hindenburg was such a horrific accident wasn't primarily because it was filled with Hydrogen. It was because the body of the blimp was painted with a substance that was essentially rocket fuel.
Yes, but the beauty of it is, you don't have to answer. The phone is your servant, you are NOT its.
Getting network access as a student on a campus usually requires signing a blanket document that acknowledges that that the campus can monitor traffic that you send/receive. On many campuses, a student's choice is likely to be sign the form, or not get any access.
Of course, you could always ssl all of your connections. Hmmm...that could get ugly quickly. I wonder how that would stack up against the DMCA?
I thought it was Douglas Adams, but I don't remember which book it's from.
Wait, the dots resolve into a 6!
Does that mean I owe my optometrist a bunch of money?
Just for the record, in one of Asimov's robot books (I forget which one) this happens as well. A woman has an intimate relationship with a humaniform robot.
She wanted it to (thus satisfying Law 2) and it made her feel good (indirectly satisfying Law 3).
Do you think that it's possible for an artificial system to model a personality sufficiently complexly that interacting with it would be indistinguishable from interacting with an actual human?
The slashdot article mentions the Gallileo's mission lasting "3 decades". However, as the nasa.gov link states, Galileo was launched in 1989, 14 years ago. The author must be confused with Voyager I and II, which were launched in the 70's.
Amen. I've never worn a suit in a professional capacity. As a grad student, I would occasionally wear slacks and a button shirt for presentations for the funding agencies.
I just started a job as a research scientist for the NCSA. Dress code is the same. I actually showed up for the second interview in my interview suit (some NCSA big-wigs were there) and they acted all surprised, and said so.
Unfortunately, I think many poeple will have a hard time planning to go to a conference only 2 1/2 months away.
It looks like the Mimbari species changing machine from B5. The case will slowly be assembled over this season.
When the machine is turned on and rebooted, then the author of the page will go into a chrysalis and emerge three weeks later as a chartered accountant.
It can always be sold as a piece of modern art when the machine is retired. :-)
It's great that after several years of using the excuse of "we don't what Linux distribution to support", they're finally making the port to a Linux based OS.
Unfortunately, this may be too little too late as far as academic users of the software are concerned. A couple of years ago, ProE files generated by the education version of the software started to not be capatible with the full version software, cutting off university research groups that wanted to be able to design things with ProE and have their files merged with bigger systems.
I'm part of a research group that was fighting for our research collaboration with several other universities and national lab to use ProE for the design and integration of the sub-systems. However we lost the fight when it was realized that the educational version (cheap at $5k per seat) wasn't capatible with the super-duper version that the lab has.
You are correct, it was rated PG.
I believe _Transformers The Movie_ was the only time that Transforms swore ("dammit" was used), and just about the only time that they died.
Several characters in the series were killed, like dead, for real, and it changed the cast around for the seasons following the movie.
Yep, this story is not a surprise. A couple of months ago, I sold the last of my Transformers collection for about 3x the original price to finance the purchase of a PS2.
The 1986 _Transformers The Movie_ included cast voice cast:
Lenard Nimoy
Robert Stack
Orson Welles
(the guy who did the micro-machines commercials)
Judd Nelson
It was not a small thing to be able to assemble a cast like that for any animated film.
What I meant by the comment at the end was was that I was trying to prevent rating inflation. Making all ratings of reasonably good movies 10s on a 10 point scale dilutes the value. So the idea is TRON is better than 99 other randomly chosen movies, but not 999.
I did, in fact, spend 4 or 5 hours on a laptop going through the various sections of the DVD before writing the review, which is why I've seen it on a progressive display.
Sorry you don't like the film--I admit its cheese factor is pretty high.
And the computer world stuff with the people was live action. HOWEVER,
Every scene in the computer world was composited people in the foreground with CG generated backgrounds. All of those scenes were shot on a black set--I don't remember the number, but I think there was about 40 minutes of live+CG footage in the film. Granted, the CG backgrounds and the live action were probably optically composited.
In addition, there was roughly 20 minutes of pure CG in the film. The flying sequences and the MCP sequences in particular.
I have to say upon further reflection, the Geekness "Cool!" rating should have been higher, considering that's one of the extrordinary things about the film. I would say it should definintely an 8.5, and I think perhaps a 9.
:-)
When I wrote this, I was trying to stay away from "Oh, it's so great, it gets all 10s!" sort of review that dilutes the effectiveness of a really great review. That's why the end mentions the scaling is designed to make 99% of movies fall in the 2 to 8 range. However, given the Ultra-geekness of this film, and being that's one of the greatest things about it, I think that a 9 is appropriate.
Realize that this the first formal movie review I've ever written, so the scaling needs a bit of work.
One of Steven Lisberger's (writer/director of TRON) constant beefs is that TRON didnt' even get nominated for any Academy awards.
So no, I don't think that's true.
Sorry.
I'm glad people are concerned about this. What we have is conflicting terminology.
Anamorphic is technicaly a lens system used in film cameras to squeeze an image.
DVDs use two methods to store widescreen movies. One is letterboxing, a-la VHS. This however puts out those that have widescreen TVs.
The other mothod is to stretch the image vertically. When played back by the DVD player on a normal TV, the images is compressed back and the black bars are added on the fly. However, on a wide screen TV, the image is stretched horizontally, filling the whole widescreen TV.
The second process is by far superior, but there is no industry standard way to label movies that have this feature. The mis-nomer "Anamorphic" is sometimes used. However, the term that is starting to become more standard is "Enhanced for widescreen TVs", which I mentioned in the review and that's precisely why I made a big deal about it.
First of all, I used Irix as the primary OS doing research for almost 4 years. The machine was (and is) a Powerchallenge 8000 running 5 CPUs.
Irix is a good operating system, certainly, and stable, and relatively well supported. I would say that besides GL hardware related things, it's slightly nicer that the large commercial Linux distributions. Linux distributions are growing so fast that things are not necessarily thought out completely.
As far as Linux running on SGI hardware, I think they're seeing the writing on the wall. On slashdot several months ago, there was an article highlighting the machine that is doing the rendering for the _Lord of the Rings_ film. They bought a rack full of dual-CPU SGI boxes, but they're running Linux. As it turns out, it was cheaper to just buy more CPUs to make up for the performance hit of Linux than it was to licence Irix for that many machines.
Irix is an excellent, solid, operating system that is great if you need to close ties to graphics. But unless you need that particular graphics capability, it's not particularly extraordinary.