Right you are! I found this version of POVRay that supports DRMAA rendering. So it looks like all that is required is a recompile for Solaris AMD64, and it'll be good to go!:-)
Sorry to reply to myself, but Sun actually suggsted a pretty good use in their FAQ: "Entertainment/Media (digital content creation, animation,rendering,digital asset management)"
Perhaps this could be used for video encoding? Certainly, many users would probably encode movies they intend to illegally redistribute, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of users who are looking to make a DVD (eventually Blu-Ray) of their home videos or amatuer movies. Sun's grid could potentially compress all the movie pieces in parallel and return the results. A multi-threaded encoder could handle the compression even faster.
Re:Since I don't remember the earlier stories...
on
Sun Grid Compute Utility
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Do you (the customer) supply the software to run on these distributed boxen?
Cause if that's the case, I can see a business model that involves lophtcrack or John the Ripper.
Considering that Sun has your Credit Card number and your contact information, I highly doubt you'll be getting away with much DDOSing or Spamming. Even if you use a stolen card #, Sun would be likely to kick you off the servers after they notice excessive network and/or mail server usage.
Theoretically banks could check "after the fact" whether there were enough funds in the account at the day of emission.
Theoretically, yes. However, that would entail that a huge number of transactions be rerun to compute the proper transaction order. Most banks aren't going to bother. Check 21, OTOH, makes them happy because they don't need to extend the "float" loans for more than a few minutes or hours.
However the article fails to mention exactly how powerful these Sun CPUs are. How much bang do you get for your buck?
Sun claims that they are "dual-core Sun Fire, Opertron servers". That means that they are likely to be something like the V20z which range from 2.0 GHz to 2.2 GHz. It would be nice if they were a bit more specific (e.g. how do you know they'll upgrade the grid in the future?), but their FAQ makes it sound like they're relying on Solaris CPU stats to charge you. OS stats like that are usually based on time slices rather than actual computational power, thus making a "standardized" CPU/hour difficult to create.
I wonder how long it would take for someone to port the POVRay engine to Sun's grid? At $1 per CPU/hour, this could be a boon for amatuer 3D graphics designers and the Internet Ray Tracing competitors. Use low res renders during testing, then pay Sun $25 to get your high quality result back in 20 minutes rather than the next day. Could be a lot of fun.:-)
Can anyone think of other good uses for the average (or not so average) home user? Perhaps new image compression formats that rely on Sun's Grid to get the best compression/quality tradeoffs through brute-force power?
Your "wrong" is wrong. Sorry. Try reading your own (highly sensational links) next time. Check 21 is all about electronic processing of the check. The moment the check is transferred to the bank (either by hand or by electronics), the bank will make the check electronic and communicate with the bank of origin. This reduces the "float" period between when your check arrives at the destination bank and your bank removes the funds from your account. This used to take several days due to the amount of paper generated.
Or to put it another way, just how do you think that your bank knows that you've written a check and put it in the mailbox before the recipient receives it? Electronic paper, maybe? Your own checkbook is transmitting to your bank?
A quick question if I may. Does IE7 install alongside IE6, or does it automatically take over your system for the period of it's installation?
Having experience with previous Microsoft IE Betas (4.0 w/ the new explorer, and 5.0), I'm not too keen on replacing my stable installation of IE. Without it, I won't be able to properly test web applictions and might as well uninstall IE6.
People more persuasive than I could try to argue that writing a check for money that you don't have (even if you will soon) could constitute fraud.
Check floating isn't the same thing as expecting delays in check cashing. Check floating is the period between when you cash the check with the teller (thus putting money in your account) and the bank of origin removes the money from the account the check is from. Granted, some people may have relied on the float period as opposed to the pre-cashing period, but it still wasn't illegal.
As for writing checks for money you don't have, that can be a little tricky. Some banks provide protection in your contract against overdrafts. If your account dips below zero for any reason, they'll extend you a temporary loan to cover the difference. Thus in these cases, there is still no criminal activity. This can be important because of the way that today's personal finances work. Thanks to practices such as automatic withdraws or payments sent in advance to account for the delay of postal mail, it can happen that transactions can occur in an odd order. In these cases an overdraft may be unintentional. Even your own balance sheet may say differently.
If your bank isn't nice enough to overlook the issue (which isn't really "overlooking" it if they charge you a fee for the privledge), many businesses will often overlook the inconvenience of one or maybe two bounces before black-listing your checks. Of course, they'll charge you a ~$25 fee for their troubles, so try not to step on their good graces.
With the instant scans of the checks, "check float" has been removed, and a big issue that banks had with some illegal behavior that most people thought were ok, is gone.
Check floating is not illegal. It's simply an artifact of the way banks work. You're probably thinking of check kiting, which is an illegal scheme that takes advantage of the float periods.
Which means 1) Accidentally dialing people when buttons get pushed in your pocket (don't laugh, my wife has done this),
It's happened to my wife and I a couple of times. The problem isn't so much the candy bar design of the phone, as the variety of bugs in Nokia's software. A couple of issues that have bit me:
1. When the keypad is locked, certain combinations of buttons still work. This seems to be the cause of a number of dud entries into my phonebook. 2. If you press the lock/unlock combination at the wrong time, the phone will fail to lock. This can be cleared by rebooting the phone.
If phone providers would just fix their software, there wouldn't be so many problems. Unfortunately, the break-neck pace of phone development tends to significantly impact quality control.:-)
Why would bcattwoo run a web browser on his abacus when he has no idea what the Internet is? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a slashdotter defending a major browser vendor, and I'm talkin' about an abacus! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense!If bcattwoo run a web browser on his abacus, you must acquit!
single-handedly (I infer from your post) keeping the project alive
You inferred incorrectly. I was merely a user of Mozilla who wanted an alternative to Netscape 4 and IE for Solaris. (The latter of which didn't work, but DID screw up my CDE profile.) I wanted to contribute back the binaries from my nightly build (since the project didn't have anyone doing it at the time), but my machine was owned by my work. I simply didn't feel comfortable donating resources that weren't mine to give.:)
(raises eyebrow) Getting an Alpha takes you back? Pff. I used to have a cron job that would download and compile Mozilla Nightlies every night on my Solaris box. It would automatically back up the current version just in case the new version didn't work in the morning. Every morning it was a new and wonderful experience to see how stable Mozilla would be today, if it would even run, and if there were any new features.
Back then we didn't have no "Alphas". We had semi-stable code snapshots called "Milestones" and we liked it that way!;)
"Jealousy is an ugly and self-destructive attitude"
You aren't doing yourself any favors with your anger and envy. I think you'll find that in trying to hurt others, you are primarily hurting yourself. You may also find that you'll be a much happier person in life if you try to work with others rather than tearing them down.
Masers (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) predate the invention of the laser. When the laser was invented, it was mostly ignored as nothing more than a special case of the maser.
Seriously, I am highly disappointed in Lazlo. It could have been a great platform if it had compiled all its widgets in AJAX. (And yes, that is possible.) Instead, it copped out and used Flash. Given the number of people who block flash or otherwise hate its guts, that's simply not an option.
it will be really tough since AJAX is not a standard, and it wasn't intended for that purpose.
AJAX is certainly standardized. There's even a W3C standard being worked on that would make XMLHttpRequest official. The rest of the DHTML stuff is all part of the DOM Level 2 standard. (A standard that is several years old.) Even Microsoft supports the standard, with the exception of DOM Events. (I always have to patch their $@#$! browser on the fly to make it fully standards compliant.)
AJAX may be overhyped, but it is a real technology that can work across all browsers. Just code to the standards, and you'll do just fine.:-)
No, I was bashing Microsoft because I thought I was looking at the Atlas page. Got a problem with that? Yes? Too damn bad.
The information presented was WRONG. Thankfully, I managed to provoke someone into posting a reply that set me on the right track. Now this thread records that I was wrong, and I'm happy to be wrong.
Feel free to scream and yell about all the Anti-Microsoft trolls all you want. You won't find any listeners here.
Niiicccce. I'm going to have to look into this one. The "next page" part in the email app means there might be a lot of room for improvement (Rico, for example, has a live data grid), but it looks like an otherwise excellent start! Thanks for the tip!
More likely, the summary is screwed up. It takes you here when you need to go here. I discussed this a bit more in my response to someone else.
This is one of those times that I am actually happy to be wrong. With all the nonsense surrounding AJAX as it is, all we needed was Microsoft throwing fuel on the fire.
I was hoping someone would prove me wrong. I just couldn't believe that Microsoft would call it AJAX without it being AJAX! Your mention of "UpdatePanel" did the trick. I couldn't find it in the API anywhere.
Microsoft needs to be modded -5 bad site design. So if you go to atlas.asp.net (from the summary), does it take you to atlas? No. I was looking at the standard ASP controls that you can get to through the "Tutorials" link. No wonder I was confused! Atlas is actually located here.
The "real" atlas looks more interesting. Half the documentation is broken (e.g. all the "controls" point to the System.UI.Button docs), and I've already managed to find at least one IE-only example, but this is a bit more of what I had in mind.
The whole documentation is so rushed at the moment that it's hard to make a reasonable evaluation. But from what I can tell, Microsoftt is a lot closer, but not quite there yet. We'll have to keep an eye on this one.:-)
1: Does anyone know of any significant javascript code which works on two different browsers without having to have conditionals based on the user agent?
As someone else pointed out, you test the function or member to see if it exists. If not, you patch the browser on the fly. The only IE specific code I have is code to patch it for DOM Events and up-to-date String functions. This is possible because you can do something like this in Javascript:
These sorts of patches are only necessary for IE (Opera, Safari, and Mozilla all seem to follow standards), and will automatically deactivate if Microsoft ever fixes their out-of-date-and-can't-even-support-a-ten-year-old- standard browser.
2: Most AJAX applications break accessibility rules, which are law in many countries (including the UK, where I am).
If by "most" you mean "Google", then I agree with you. It's not necesary to break accessibility rules, though many text-to-speech browsers are so far behind that it's nearly impossible to support them with anything newer than Netscape 3.0 code.
3: AJAX provides another attack vector on websites. Look at the myspace worm. I know that comes down to bad programming, but still it's another chance to miss something.
JavaScript exploits are nothing new. You might be vulnerable even if your site doesn't use a shred of JavaScript itself. i.e. It's entirely a problem with the browser -> site communication, and what your site allows/disallows.
4: A number of companies block javascript at the firewall - trust me, it's true. Imagine how well an AJAX site will work there!
Say, wha? That's the first I've ever heard of such draconian restrictions. Such firewall rules would break a large chunk of the internet for their users. I sincerely doubt that this will be a major problem.
5: Javascript is not available in all UA's (e.g. Lynx) - I firmly believe that no website should ever NEED javascript - in fact in my sites I avoid it all together.
I hate to break it to you, but apps designed to use AJAX are too complex for Lynx to render effectively anyway. When you make an AJAX app, you make a thin-client application that's intended for delivery over the Internet. The 0.001% of the net that refuses to surf with anything other than Lynx will simply have to not use your site. The rest of the world will be reaping the benefits of thin client applications.
Yes. The only problem is that these toolkits are still highly incomplete. They define a few cool widgets and APIs, but certainly nothing on the level of a full GUI toolkit. Progress is being made, though.:)
Slashdot Mirror
POV has been parallelized for years.
:-)
Right you are! I found this version of POVRay that supports DRMAA rendering. So it looks like all that is required is a recompile for Solaris AMD64, and it'll be good to go!
Sorry to reply to myself, but Sun actually suggsted a pretty good use in their FAQ: "Entertainment/Media (digital content creation, animation,rendering,digital asset management)"
Perhaps this could be used for video encoding? Certainly, many users would probably encode movies they intend to illegally redistribute, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of users who are looking to make a DVD (eventually Blu-Ray) of their home videos or amatuer movies. Sun's grid could potentially compress all the movie pieces in parallel and return the results. A multi-threaded encoder could handle the compression even faster.
Do you (the customer) supply the software to run on these distributed boxen?
Yes. See the Sun FAQ.
Cause if that's the case, I can see a business model that involves lophtcrack or John the Ripper.
Considering that Sun has your Credit Card number and your contact information, I highly doubt you'll be getting away with much DDOSing or Spamming. Even if you use a stolen card #, Sun would be likely to kick you off the servers after they notice excessive network and/or mail server usage.
Theoretically banks could check "after the fact" whether there were enough funds in the account at the day of emission.
Theoretically, yes. However, that would entail that a huge number of transactions be rerun to compute the proper transaction order. Most banks aren't going to bother. Check 21, OTOH, makes them happy because they don't need to extend the "float" loans for more than a few minutes or hours.
However the article fails to mention exactly how powerful these Sun CPUs are. How much bang do you get for your buck?
Sun claims that they are "dual-core Sun Fire, Opertron servers". That means that they are likely to be something like the V20z which range from 2.0 GHz to 2.2 GHz. It would be nice if they were a bit more specific (e.g. how do you know they'll upgrade the grid in the future?), but their FAQ makes it sound like they're relying on Solaris CPU stats to charge you. OS stats like that are usually based on time slices rather than actual computational power, thus making a "standardized" CPU/hour difficult to create.
I wonder how long it would take for someone to port the POVRay engine to Sun's grid? At $1 per CPU/hour, this could be a boon for amatuer 3D graphics designers and the Internet Ray Tracing competitors. Use low res renders during testing, then pay Sun $25 to get your high quality result back in 20 minutes rather than the next day. Could be a lot of fun. :-)
Can anyone think of other good uses for the average (or not so average) home user? Perhaps new image compression formats that rely on Sun's Grid to get the best compression/quality tradeoffs through brute-force power?
Your "wrong" is wrong. Sorry. Try reading your own (highly sensational links) next time. Check 21 is all about electronic processing of the check. The moment the check is transferred to the bank (either by hand or by electronics), the bank will make the check electronic and communicate with the bank of origin. This reduces the "float" period between when your check arrives at the destination bank and your bank removes the funds from your account. This used to take several days due to the amount of paper generated.
q =http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_floating3 414351
Or to put it another way, just how do you think that your bank knows that you've written a check and put it in the mailbox before the recipient receives it? Electronic paper, maybe? Your own checkbook is transmitting to your bank?
Here are a few less sensational links:
http://www.bcsalliance.com/credit_checkact.html
http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&start=0&oi=define&
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/
A quick question if I may. Does IE7 install alongside IE6, or does it automatically take over your system for the period of it's installation?
Having experience with previous Microsoft IE Betas (4.0 w/ the new explorer, and 5.0), I'm not too keen on replacing my stable installation of IE. Without it, I won't be able to properly test web applictions and might as well uninstall IE6.
People more persuasive than I could try to argue that writing a check for money that you don't have (even if you will soon) could constitute fraud.
Check floating isn't the same thing as expecting delays in check cashing. Check floating is the period between when you cash the check with the teller (thus putting money in your account) and the bank of origin removes the money from the account the check is from. Granted, some people may have relied on the float period as opposed to the pre-cashing period, but it still wasn't illegal.
As for writing checks for money you don't have, that can be a little tricky. Some banks provide protection in your contract against overdrafts. If your account dips below zero for any reason, they'll extend you a temporary loan to cover the difference. Thus in these cases, there is still no criminal activity. This can be important because of the way that today's personal finances work. Thanks to practices such as automatic withdraws or payments sent in advance to account for the delay of postal mail, it can happen that transactions can occur in an odd order. In these cases an overdraft may be unintentional. Even your own balance sheet may say differently.
If your bank isn't nice enough to overlook the issue (which isn't really "overlooking" it if they charge you a fee for the privledge), many businesses will often overlook the inconvenience of one or maybe two bounces before black-listing your checks. Of course, they'll charge you a ~$25 fee for their troubles, so try not to step on their good graces.
With the instant scans of the checks, "check float" has been removed, and a big issue that banks had with some illegal behavior that most people thought were ok, is gone.
Check floating is not illegal. It's simply an artifact of the way banks work. You're probably thinking of check kiting, which is an illegal scheme that takes advantage of the float periods.
Which means 1) Accidentally dialing people when buttons get pushed in your pocket (don't laugh, my wife has done this),
:-)
It's happened to my wife and I a couple of times. The problem isn't so much the candy bar design of the phone, as the variety of bugs in Nokia's software. A couple of issues that have bit me:
1. When the keypad is locked, certain combinations of buttons still work. This seems to be the cause of a number of dud entries into my phonebook.
2. If you press the lock/unlock combination at the wrong time, the phone will fail to lock. This can be cleared by rebooting the phone.
If phone providers would just fix their software, there wouldn't be so many problems. Unfortunately, the break-neck pace of phone development tends to significantly impact quality control.
Why would bcattwoo run a web browser on his abacus when he has no idea what the Internet is? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a slashdotter defending a major browser vendor, and I'm talkin' about an abacus! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If bcattwoo run a web browser on his abacus, you must acquit!
The defense rests.
single-handedly (I infer from your post) keeping the project alive
:)
You inferred incorrectly. I was merely a user of Mozilla who wanted an alternative to Netscape 4 and IE for Solaris. (The latter of which didn't work, but DID screw up my CDE profile.) I wanted to contribute back the binaries from my nightly build (since the project didn't have anyone doing it at the time), but my machine was owned by my work. I simply didn't feel comfortable donating resources that weren't mine to give.
(raises eyebrow) Getting an Alpha takes you back? Pff. I used to have a cron job that would download and compile Mozilla Nightlies every night on my Solaris box. It would automatically back up the current version just in case the new version didn't work in the morning. Every morning it was a new and wonderful experience to see how stable Mozilla would be today, if it would even run, and if there were any new features.
;)
Back then we didn't have no "Alphas". We had semi-stable code snapshots called "Milestones" and we liked it that way!
???
You might find this useful:
"Jealousy is an ugly and self-destructive attitude"
You aren't doing yourself any favors with your anger and envy. I think you'll find that in trying to hurt others, you are primarily hurting yourself. You may also find that you'll be a much happier person in life if you try to work with others rather than tearing them down.
Masers (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) predate the invention of the laser. When the laser was invented, it was mostly ignored as nothing more than a special case of the maser.
OpenLaszlo ... Supports Flash
:-P
Flash is evil.
Seriously, I am highly disappointed in Lazlo. It could have been a great platform if it had compiled all its widgets in AJAX. (And yes, that is possible.) Instead, it copped out and used Flash. Given the number of people who block flash or otherwise hate its guts, that's simply not an option.
I would have though it *impossible* to run software compiled for another platform
FreeBSD runs Linux and SCO.
Just saying...
it will be really tough since AJAX is not a standard, and it wasn't intended for that purpose.
:-)
AJAX is certainly standardized. There's even a W3C standard being worked on that would make XMLHttpRequest official. The rest of the DHTML stuff is all part of the DOM Level 2 standard. (A standard that is several years old.) Even Microsoft supports the standard, with the exception of DOM Events. (I always have to patch their $@#$! browser on the fly to make it fully standards compliant.)
AJAX may be overhyped, but it is a real technology that can work across all browsers. Just code to the standards, and you'll do just fine.
No, I was bashing Microsoft because I thought I was looking at the Atlas page. Got a problem with that? Yes? Too damn bad.
The information presented was WRONG. Thankfully, I managed to provoke someone into posting a reply that set me on the right track. Now this thread records that I was wrong, and I'm happy to be wrong.
Feel free to scream and yell about all the Anti-Microsoft trolls all you want. You won't find any listeners here.
Niiicccce. I'm going to have to look into this one. The "next page" part in the email app means there might be a lot of room for improvement (Rico, for example, has a live data grid), but it looks like an otherwise excellent start! Thanks for the tip!
More likely, the summary is screwed up. It takes you here when you need to go here. I discussed this a bit more in my response to someone else.
This is one of those times that I am actually happy to be wrong. With all the nonsense surrounding AJAX as it is, all we needed was Microsoft throwing fuel on the fire.
I was hoping someone would prove me wrong. I just couldn't believe that Microsoft would call it AJAX without it being AJAX! Your mention of "UpdatePanel" did the trick. I couldn't find it in the API anywhere.
:-)
Microsoft needs to be modded -5 bad site design. So if you go to atlas.asp.net (from the summary), does it take you to atlas? No. I was looking at the standard ASP controls that you can get to through the "Tutorials" link. No wonder I was confused! Atlas is actually located here.
The "real" atlas looks more interesting. Half the documentation is broken (e.g. all the "controls" point to the System.UI.Button docs), and I've already managed to find at least one IE-only example, but this is a bit more of what I had in mind.
The whole documentation is so rushed at the moment that it's hard to make a reasonable evaluation. But from what I can tell, Microsoftt is a lot closer, but not quite there yet. We'll have to keep an eye on this one.
As someone else pointed out, you test the function or member to see if it exists. If not, you patch the browser on the fly. The only IE specific code I have is code to patch it for DOM Events and up-to-date String functions. This is possible because you can do something like this in Javascript:These sorts of patches are only necessary for IE (Opera, Safari, and Mozilla all seem to follow standards), and will automatically deactivate if Microsoft ever fixes their out-of-date-and-can't-even-support-a-ten-year-old
2: Most AJAX applications break accessibility rules, which are law in many countries (including the UK, where I am).
If by "most" you mean "Google", then I agree with you. It's not necesary to break accessibility rules, though many text-to-speech browsers are so far behind that it's nearly impossible to support them with anything newer than Netscape 3.0 code.
3: AJAX provides another attack vector on websites. Look at the myspace worm. I know that comes down to bad programming, but still it's another chance to miss something.
JavaScript exploits are nothing new. You might be vulnerable even if your site doesn't use a shred of JavaScript itself. i.e. It's entirely a problem with the browser -> site communication, and what your site allows/disallows.
4: A number of companies block javascript at the firewall - trust me, it's true. Imagine how well an AJAX site will work there!
Say, wha? That's the first I've ever heard of such draconian restrictions. Such firewall rules would break a large chunk of the internet for their users. I sincerely doubt that this will be a major problem.
5: Javascript is not available in all UA's (e.g. Lynx) - I firmly believe that no website should ever NEED javascript - in fact in my sites I avoid it all together.
I hate to break it to you, but apps designed to use AJAX are too complex for Lynx to render effectively anyway. When you make an AJAX app, you make a thin-client application that's intended for delivery over the Internet. The 0.001% of the net that refuses to surf with anything other than Lynx will simply have to not use your site. The rest of the world will be reaping the benefits of thin client applications.
Yes. The only problem is that these toolkits are still highly incomplete. They define a few cool widgets and APIs, but certainly nothing on the level of a full GUI toolkit. Progress is being made, though. :)