Re:SGI is finally making some new products
on
New SGI Altix 3000
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It is new. Find me another 64-node shared memory I64 Linux system. I'd much rather develop for a shared memory system than a message passing system. And for a lot of supercomputing apps, a Beowulf cluster just won't cut it.
Sure 4 GB or more will be common place in a couple years, but that's not quite the same issue as to whether or not 64-bit processors will be on the desktop.
I'm sure even Pentium 5 or 6 or whatever computer will be able to use more than 4 GB, but it'll be using memory segments, like in the old days before full 32-bit registers. It's just more of a pain in the ass for an individual process to see more than 32-bits of memory.
A full 64-bit processor makes the programmers life easier, but it's not a requirement to have a system with more than 4 gig.
I've used GLUI for a simple modeling program, and I like it. It's simple and easy to use. It's great for grad student/research applications.
On the other hand, it's only really made for simple, toy-ish programs. You couldn't really use it for a complicated or professional program interface.
Also I don't know how much Paul Rademacher (the author) is doing as far as updating/maintaining the code these days. Don't ask him about sliders! (There ain't none)
I've got a NEC LT158 projector that I'm using as a monitor. The bulb is rated at 1500 hours. Sure it's pricey to replace, but what do I care? I ain't payin for it.
Sorry, but that ain't me. Take one of the most common Western first names and one of the most common Chinese last names, and you end up with a whole lotta Dave Chen's.
In my experience (I was born here, my parents are from Taiwan), Americans are just not as interested in graduate school. Asians seem to value higher degrees (especially Ph.D.'s) much more than Americans.
To be honest, unless you're interested in academia and research, there isn't much reason to get a CS Ph.D. From a job/financial standpoint, you might as well start working straight from college.
Heck, when I was in college it seemed like a lot of the CS majors were just there for the job prospects. Those aren't the type of people who go to grad school. You have to have a real passion for the subject to want to slog through N years of grad school. Or you have to really want the letters after your name. Otherwise it ain't worth it.
I can certainly understand your point of view. Linux has all the tools you need and it works for you. But there are still things about Linux that irritate or frighten the hell out of me that just work on Macs.
I've wasted days trying to get nice looking fonts in Mozilla. I have managed to get it to use TrueType fonts anti-aliased, but they still look ugly. It's like the sampled the fonts at a low resolution and then blurred it. Anti-aliased fonts on Macs just look sooooo much better.
And on Macs I can take random PC cards or USB devices, plug them in, and they just work. The memory card for my digital camera shows up as a disk drive. I just got a USB flash memory dongle. Plug it in and it works. I'm too frightened to even think about using USB on my Linux machine.
And getting Nvidia drivers for my GeForce 4 were a minor pain in the ass. I couldn't get them to compile with the kernel I was running (2.4.8-10), so I had to back down to 2.4.8-5.
All these little tweaky things that I just don't have to think about on a Mac.
Not another Mac OS on PC's story. Ain't gonna happen. Trying to emulate a PPC on a x86 would be painfully slow, so you wouldn't be able to run old software. And, I think it would kill software development on Macs. Developers would say, why should I support a Mac version of my app when they are using PC's anyways? Just boot into Windows.
Also, why bother to port to a 32-bit architecture? 64 is right around the corner, you might as well aim for the future, not the past.
Well, we'll see how big a deal backwards compatibility is soon. When folks start bitching about how slow their Windows apps are on Itaniums, Intel is gonna be in real trouble. Could be a real win for AMD.
Hey, I'm all for tossing out x86, but like Fred Brooks said in my computer archictecture class, processors come and go, but software lives forever (or something like that).
Sure you can. Get a stereo emitter and stereo LCD glasses (such as Crystal Eyes and a graphics card that supports it and off you go. Note that you'd like a CRT that goes 120 Hz, to reduce flickering, and that the graphics cards that support stereo are the pro cards, i.e. pretty expensive.
Re:GCC3.2 and GDB compatibility
on
GCC 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
I just want to know how to look at the contents of my STL vector in gdb.
Your mostly right, although I think at one point IBM was fabbing G4's when Motorola was having production problems.
On the other hand rumors are floating around that future Mac processors will come from IBM. Perhaps Apple bought out the Altivec rights from Motorola? Motorola is in such bad shape that maybe they wanted to money or wanted to get out of high end microprocessors.
Pixar has a nice FAQ for people interested in jobs in CG animation.
http://www.pixar.com/companyinfo/jobs/faq.html Included is a list of schools with good graphics and animations programs:
http://www.pixar.com/companyinfo/jobs/schools.ht ml
Texas A&M has a really good visualization that's kind of half way between the tech side and the art side. UNC (my alma mater) is really good for computer graphics, but they're more into interactive graphics as opposed to animation.
I think constricting anus 100 times and denting navel 100 times in succession everyday is effective to good-bye depression and take back youth. You can do so at a boring meeting or in a subway. I have known a 70-year-old man who has practiced it for 20 years. As a result, he has a good complexion and has grown 20 years younger. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness and joy. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance. Furthermore, he can make #### three times in succession without drawing out.
In addition, he also can have burned a strong, beautiful fire within his abdomen. It can burn out the dirty stickiness of his body, release his immaterial fiber or third attention, which has been confined to his stickiness. Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling through the success of concentration.
Heck with that. How about 40 years?
It all goes back to
Ivan Sutherland and the University of Utah.
When I got to grad school at UNC in 1988, our custom built machine, Pixel planes would draw 30,000 triangle a second! How about that? And it only took several thousand ASICs.
dave
I dunno about that graphics card. The website doesn't say anything about polygon rates, pixel fill rates or texel fill rates. Historically Sun graphics boards haven't been that great, especially when it comes to texturing. If they made halfway decent graphics they could have killed SGI years ago. But I guess they never figured 3-d graphics to big that big a market for them.
This is for Spec CFP 2000 (i.e. floating point). I picked the SGI Origin 3200, which has a similar processor (although I'm not sure if its identical or not).
The Spec CINT 2000 numbers look similar, I just didn't feel like cutting and pasting.
So, sure your average P4 or Athlon is faster, but its not as simple as a matter of Megahertz.
My concern about SGI is that these machines have the same graphics V10 and V12 that they've been using for years now. I heard that these were designed as the last hurrah of designers who have since gone on to Nvidia or ATI.
I wonder if SGI has the manpower left to design new, innovative graphics architectures, or will they be just slapping more texture and cranking the clock on old designs.
Well, SGI's stock hit a low of 31 cents last fall, so I'm guessing they desperately needed the money to stay alive. They sold off the only thing of any value that they had left. For the past couple of years its been a question of whether or not SGI could manage to stay alive. Even though the stock has rebounded to $2.61, I'm still not optimistic.
Slashdot Mirror
And he wrote vi. What more do you need?
It is new. Find me another 64-node shared memory I64 Linux system. I'd much rather develop for a shared memory system than a message passing system. And for a lot of supercomputing apps, a Beowulf cluster just won't cut it.
Sure 4 GB or more will be common place in a couple years, but that's not quite the same issue as to whether or not 64-bit processors will be on the desktop.
I'm sure even Pentium 5 or 6 or whatever computer will be able to use more than 4 GB, but it'll be using memory segments, like in the old days before full 32-bit registers. It's just more of a pain in the ass for an individual process to see more than 32-bits of memory.
A full 64-bit processor makes the programmers life easier, but it's not a requirement to have a system with more than 4 gig.
On the other hand, it's only really made for simple, toy-ish programs. You couldn't really use it for a complicated or professional program interface.
Also I don't know how much Paul Rademacher (the author) is doing as far as updating/maintaining the code these days. Don't ask him about sliders! (There ain't none)
Oops. Accidentally modded you down. This post should undo it.
Lord knows they've tried.
Nightfall (1988) or Nightfall (2000), anyone?
Not to be confused with Sybian.
It's kinda like this.
Sorry, but that ain't me. Take one of the most common Western first names and one of the most common Chinese last names, and you end up with a whole lotta Dave Chen's.
Well, you could always just run Xwindows and whatever window manager you choose.
In my experience (I was born here, my parents are from Taiwan), Americans are just not as interested in graduate school. Asians seem to value higher degrees (especially Ph.D.'s) much more than Americans.
To be honest, unless you're interested in academia and research, there isn't much reason to get a CS Ph.D. From a job/financial standpoint, you might as well start working straight from college.
Heck, when I was in college it seemed like a lot of the CS majors were just there for the job prospects. Those aren't the type of people who go to grad school. You have to have a real passion for the subject to want to slog through N years of grad school. Or you have to really want the letters after your name. Otherwise it ain't worth it.
I can certainly understand your point of view. Linux has all the tools you need and it works for you. But there are still things about Linux that irritate or frighten the hell out of me that just work on Macs.
I've wasted days trying to get nice looking fonts in Mozilla. I have managed to get it to use TrueType fonts anti-aliased, but they still look ugly. It's like the sampled the fonts at a low resolution and then blurred it. Anti-aliased fonts on Macs just look sooooo much better.
And on Macs I can take random PC cards or USB devices, plug them in, and they just work. The memory card for my digital camera shows up as a disk drive. I just got a USB flash memory dongle. Plug it in and it works. I'm too frightened to even think about using USB on my Linux machine.
And getting Nvidia drivers for my GeForce 4 were a minor pain in the ass. I couldn't get them to compile with the kernel I was running (2.4.8-10), so I had to back down to 2.4.8-5.
All these little tweaky things that I just don't have to think about on a Mac.
Also, why bother to port to a 32-bit architecture? 64 is right around the corner, you might as well aim for the future, not the past.
Anyways Apple is gonna use IBM's Power4 derivative, and it's gonna kick ass!
Well, we'll see how big a deal backwards compatibility is soon. When folks start bitching about how slow their Windows apps are on Itaniums, Intel is gonna be in real trouble. Could be a real win for AMD.
Hey, I'm all for tossing out x86, but like Fred Brooks said in my computer archictecture class, processors come and go, but software lives forever (or something like that).
Oh, gotcha. My mistake.
Sure you can. Get a stereo emitter and stereo LCD glasses (such as Crystal Eyes and a graphics card that supports it and off you go. Note that you'd like a CRT that goes 120 Hz, to reduce flickering, and that the graphics cards that support stereo are the pro cards, i.e. pretty expensive.
I just want to know how to look at the contents of my STL vector in gdb.
Your mostly right, although I think at one point IBM was fabbing G4's when Motorola was having production problems.
On the other hand rumors are floating around that future Mac processors will come from IBM. Perhaps Apple bought out the Altivec rights from Motorola? Motorola is in such bad shape that maybe they wanted to money or wanted to get out of high end microprocessors.
Pixar has a nice FAQ for people interested in jobs in CG animation.
t ml
http://www.pixar.com/companyinfo/jobs/faq.html
Included is a list of schools with good graphics and animations programs:
http://www.pixar.com/companyinfo/jobs/schools.h
Texas A&M has a really good visualization that's kind of half way between the tech side and the art side. UNC (my alma mater) is really good for computer graphics, but they're more into interactive graphics as opposed to animation.
When I got to grad school at UNC in 1988, our custom built machine, Pixel planes would draw 30,000 triangle a second! How about that? And it only took several thousand ASICs. dave
I dunno about that graphics card. The website doesn't say anything about polygon rates, pixel fill rates or texel fill rates. Historically Sun graphics boards haven't been that great, especially when it comes to texturing. If they made halfway decent graphics they could have killed SGI years ago. But I guess they never figured 3-d graphics to big that big a market for them.
dave
Correlation is NOT causality
Here are some numbers from Spec.org
This is for Spec CFP 2000 (i.e. floating point). I picked the SGI Origin 3200, which has a similar processor (although I'm not sure if its identical or not).
Advanced Micro Devic Epox 8KHA+ Motherboard, AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2000+ 1 596 642
Intel Corporation Intel D850MD motherboard (2.2 GHz, Pentium 4 pro 1 766 777
SGI SGI Origin 3200 1X 500MHz R14k 1 436 463
The Spec CINT 2000 numbers look similar, I just didn't feel like cutting and pasting.
So, sure your average P4 or Athlon is faster, but its not as simple as a matter of Megahertz.
My concern about SGI is that these machines have the same graphics V10 and V12 that they've been using for years now. I heard that these were designed as the last hurrah of designers who have since gone on to Nvidia or ATI.
I wonder if SGI has the manpower left to design new, innovative graphics architectures, or will they be just slapping more texture and cranking the clock on old designs.
dave
Well, SGI's stock hit a low of 31 cents last fall, so I'm guessing they desperately needed the money to stay alive. They sold off the only thing of any value that they had left. For the past couple of years its been a question of whether or not SGI could manage to stay alive. Even though the stock has rebounded to $2.61, I'm still not optimistic.
dave