Being able to run the app on the handheld, but manipulate it on the desktop, would be very handy.
Or the other way around. I know many a time where I've been out of my office, wanted to access something sitting on my desk, and all I have in my hand is my PDA. If I were running X and VNC, and my PDA had wireless capabilities, I could access my desktop from anywhere I liked.
(Course, X doesn't really need to be in the picture here. It's VNC that does the magic. But you get the point...)
Ever try using it to debug a program with more than two threads? Every try to figure out synchronization issues when printf has to serialize everything anyway? Printf has its places, but it's not a panacea. There are plenty of problems that cannot be debugged using it.
those images are raytraced, and this is not something that anyone is claiming to do in realtime yet.
I beg to differ.
I would have claimed the same before last week's Siggraph conference. But at that conference, I went to a panel discussion entitled something like "When will ray tracing replace rasterization?" The answer was "we'll do a hybrid approach instead". The first presenter showed an app (which was also running at RackSavers on the show floor) that was actually doing real time raytracing. It was rendering a conference room scene. You could dynamically change the viewpoint anywhere you like, move the furniture around, and it would even recompute a diffuse reflection solution progressively. Very impressive! He also showed another app that rendered the reflections of a car headlight at something like 5 fps.
I would also suggest that you check out the paper that someone pointed out from Stanford. They have written a raytracer that uses the pixel shader of the nVidia hardware to render triangle-based scenes at interactive rates. Very impressive.
I wouldn't discount those images as forgeries quite yet. With the new pixel shaders and vertex programs, the GPUs are rapidly becoming very versatile stream processors.
what digital format will still be readable in 25 years?
I would argue that all of them will. My argument is based on the fact that almost every image format known to man, including those that were invented 20 years ago, are still readable by some form of shareware.
The reason this is the case is that image data is very, very simple. It's a regularly-spaced rectangular array of color values. The most complicated part of the data model is the fact that color can be represented in different ways. It's nowhere near as complicated to write a reader for an old image format as it is for, say, scientific data.
I think that we're going to be able to read JPGs for many decades to come.
The reason for my confusion was the fact that he made as many references to OS X as he did. The first one was talking about the speed with formatting the drive as HFS+. I assumed that he was advocating OS X as the primary operating system. Then later he talked about running Debian as the primary. Hence the confusion.
I assume you mean dual-boot
No, I actually meant multi-boot. No reason to restrict him to only two OSes. Especially considering that OS X and OS 9 can be booted separately on most machines.
Of course Apple obsoletes hardware to sell new stuff. They don't wait until a piece of hardware is no longer functional before they don't sell it any more. Heck, I find it hard to think of a hardware manufacturer (in any industry) that doesn't do that.
I never claimed that you have to play "graphics games" to use a computer. All I was saying was that Apple chose to make their OS require some graphics processing power, either in hardware or with the CPU. That immediately disqualifies certain (somewhat older) hardware. If you're just going for utilitarian, you aren't gonna buy a Windows box or a Mac. You generally run some Free flavor of UNIX and disable X11.
Good point about the free UNIXes. That's pretty much when I meant when I said "Linux". My mistake - thanks for keeping me honest.
Distributed processing is only really good when the subproblems are separate enough that they can be calculated separately.
Um...that's not really true. Certainly, distributed processing works like gangbusters when the problem is what's called "embarrassingly parallel". Things like Seti, or distributed ray tracing of a static scene scale perfectly on a distributed system.
But there are lots of groups (the DOE national labs being some) that do distributed work on problems that are not embarrassingly parallel. The trick is making sure that you have a fast interconnect between the boxes, and can make use of that interconnect efficiently.
In general, a simulation (including particle simulations) will break up a region of space into pieces, and each piece is calculated for a "time step" on a processor. Then they each determine if they need information from another processor, or if their information could be used by another. A collective communication then takes place to exchange what's needed. Rinse and repeat.
If you do your work right, you get a scalable system, one where you can add processors and get a proportional increase in performance (or maximum problem size). If you don't do you work right, the system will not scale well.
Distributed computing is being used for more and more things these days.
You *are* kidding, right? You must be a troll. Ah well, I'll bite.
There have been two times (count `em), when Apple had to stop supporting old hardware. First, when they went from 68K to PPC. Even with emulation, Apple had to cut the cord some time. Mac OS 8.1 was the last that ran on 68K hardware. And that wasn't too long ago. Then we had the Mac OS 9 version. Apple released Mac OS X, which runs on hardware that's 3 years old. They did the best they could, but you need a bit of power to play the graphics games that OS X does.
Except for Linux, I can't think of many OSes that have as good of sustainability on older hardware than Mac OS.
As an experiment, I went and deleted all of the amazon.com cookies from my browser. I then headed over to www.amazon.com and searched for "C programming language". The "obidos" thing still appears.
My guess is that these links have nothing to do with the guy who posted it, but have more to do with how amazon.com implemented their web site and searching.
Yes, I am. That's what government labs do to "scrub" classified media. If it works to safeguard classified information, I figure it'd probably work well to erase an audio tape.
Anyone can make a program work given a compiler and sufficient time. If you can do it with just pen and paper, and remember the syntax without having other code in front of you, then you know your shit.
Then give them a compiler and sufficient time. That's what you'd do if you hired them and set them to work. You don't hire someone to code without providing them the tools of the trade. Why would you test a skill that is not asked for in the job?
I would suggest that the job "interview" gather information that's pertinent to the job being posted. Gathering performance data (like being able to code without reference material, a compiler, and an editor) that has nothing to do with the job is going to give you information of questionable usefulness.
It would be very educational to take a recording of the original performance, on the first Disklavier, and also take a recording of the replayed performance, on the second Disklavier. If the recordings are digitized and subtracted, that should give a very good understanding of:
The differences between the two physical pianos
The portions of the performance that are not captured by the Disklavier's sensors.
I have yet to be convinced that Apple is "serious about security" as I hear the pundits say. Here at LLNL, we've had any number of Apple representatives give OS X talks. They all mention how important security is to Apple. But things like "nidump passwd." and the fact that Classic runs as setuid root tell me otherwise.
(For verification of that last one, do "ls -l/System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources/TruBlueEnvironment" .
My wife and I are pretty much in the same situation. SF Bay Area, she's staying home to take care of our son. I bring home the bacon, and she does our finances. We just bought our first house a couple months ago, and things are looking just fine.
If you watch their little video, they talk about some positions that normal keyboards force your hands to be in. It's those positions that cause all of the problems that are associated with typing. Their keyboard purports to remove the problems by putting your hands in a more natural and neutral position.
A little over a year ago, slashdot posted an article about the Evolution Keyboard, now by Kinesis. I have had one of those for several years, and would recommend that anyone interested in the SafeType keyboard also check out the Evolution keyboard. (You can the review I posted to slashdot here.)
The SafeType keyboard is fixed in position, and they consider that to be one of its major features. While I can see that preventing users from futzing with the keyboard keeps them from moving it to a position where it can hurt them, I happen to really like the ability of the Evolution keyboard to move to whatever position I like. In fact, I can make it go completely vertical if I want, gaining all the advantages of the SafeType keyboard. I can even drop it to the sides of my chair, removing even one more "unnatural" position of my arms.
To me, having lots of choices in how I configure my work space is a good thing. And having a keyboard that fits this mindset is one of the most important parts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I know I'm in the minority here, but as an employee of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose security rules come from the U.S. Department of Energy I can say that all of our janitors have a background check.
Being able to run the app on the handheld, but manipulate it on the desktop, would be very handy.
Or the other way around. I know many a time where I've been out of my office, wanted to access something sitting on my desk, and all I have in my hand is my PDA. If I were running X and VNC, and my PDA had wireless capabilities, I could access my desktop from anywhere I liked.
(Course, X doesn't really need to be in the picture here. It's VNC that does the magic. But you get the point...)
Ever try using it to debug a program with more than two threads? Every try to figure out synchronization issues when printf has to serialize everything anyway? Printf has its places, but it's not a panacea. There are plenty of problems that cannot be debugged using it.
those images are raytraced, and this is not something that anyone is claiming to do in realtime yet.
I beg to differ.
I would have claimed the same before last week's Siggraph conference. But at that conference, I went to a panel discussion entitled something like "When will ray tracing replace rasterization?" The answer was "we'll do a hybrid approach instead". The first presenter showed an app (which was also running at RackSavers on the show floor) that was actually doing real time raytracing. It was rendering a conference room scene. You could dynamically change the viewpoint anywhere you like, move the furniture around, and it would even recompute a diffuse reflection solution progressively. Very impressive! He also showed another app that rendered the reflections of a car headlight at something like 5 fps.
I would also suggest that you check out the paper that someone pointed out from Stanford. They have written a raytracer that uses the pixel shader of the nVidia hardware to render triangle-based scenes at interactive rates. Very impressive.
I wouldn't discount those images as forgeries quite yet. With the new pixel shaders and vertex programs, the GPUs are rapidly becoming very versatile stream processors.
I think you might run into some trouble with prior use...
what digital format will still be readable in 25 years?
I would argue that all of them will. My argument is based on the fact that almost every image format known to man, including those that were invented 20 years ago, are still readable by some form of shareware.
Take the program Graphic Converter, for example. It imports about 160 different image formats. I don't think I can name more than 20 formats off the top of my head.
The reason this is the case is that image data is very, very simple. It's a regularly-spaced rectangular array of color values. The most complicated part of the data model is the fact that color can be represented in different ways. It's nowhere near as complicated to write a reader for an old image format as it is for, say, scientific data.
I think that we're going to be able to read JPGs for many decades to come.
Thanks for the details...
Fairly simple, eh?
Oh, go ahead and patronize me.
The reason for my confusion was the fact that he made as many references to OS X as he did. The first one was talking about the speed with formatting the drive as HFS+. I assumed that he was advocating OS X as the primary operating system. Then later he talked about running Debian as the primary. Hence the confusion.
I assume you mean dual-boot
No, I actually meant multi-boot. No reason to restrict him to only two OSes. Especially considering that OS X and OS 9 can be booted separately on most machines.
What do you mean you "use Debian Linux" on it? Do you have it in a multiboot configuration?
Of course Apple obsoletes hardware to sell new stuff. They don't wait until a piece of hardware is no longer functional before they don't sell it any more. Heck, I find it hard to think of a hardware manufacturer (in any industry) that doesn't do that.
I never claimed that you have to play "graphics games" to use a computer. All I was saying was that Apple chose to make their OS require some graphics processing power, either in hardware or with the CPU. That immediately disqualifies certain (somewhat older) hardware. If you're just going for utilitarian, you aren't gonna buy a Windows box or a Mac. You generally run some Free flavor of UNIX and disable X11.
Good point about the free UNIXes. That's pretty much when I meant when I said "Linux". My mistake - thanks for keeping me honest.
Distributed processing is only really good when the subproblems are separate enough that they can be calculated separately.
Um...that's not really true. Certainly, distributed processing works like gangbusters when the problem is what's called "embarrassingly parallel". Things like Seti, or distributed ray tracing of a static scene scale perfectly on a distributed system.
But there are lots of groups (the DOE national labs being some) that do distributed work on problems that are not embarrassingly parallel. The trick is making sure that you have a fast interconnect between the boxes, and can make use of that interconnect efficiently.
In general, a simulation (including particle simulations) will break up a region of space into pieces, and each piece is calculated for a "time step" on a processor. Then they each determine if they need information from another processor, or if their information could be used by another. A collective communication then takes place to exchange what's needed. Rinse and repeat.
If you do your work right, you get a scalable system, one where you can add processors and get a proportional increase in performance (or maximum problem size). If you don't do you work right, the system will not scale well.
Distributed computing is being used for more and more things these days.
Odd. I had a 68LC040-based laptop (540c) that ran Mac OS 8.1. 8.5 would not work. I wonder if there were differences among the 68K family.
You *are* kidding, right? You must be a troll. Ah well, I'll bite.
There have been two times (count `em), when Apple had to stop supporting old hardware. First, when they went from 68K to PPC. Even with emulation, Apple had to cut the cord some time. Mac OS 8.1 was the last that ran on 68K hardware. And that wasn't too long ago. Then we had the Mac OS 9 version. Apple released Mac OS X, which runs on hardware that's 3 years old. They did the best they could, but you need a bit of power to play the graphics games that OS X does.
Except for Linux, I can't think of many OSes that have as good of sustainability on older hardware than Mac OS.
As an experiment, I went and deleted all of the amazon.com cookies from my browser. I then headed over to www.amazon.com and searched for "C programming language". The "obidos" thing still appears.
My guess is that these links have nothing to do with the guy who posted it, but have more to do with how amazon.com implemented their web site and searching.
Yes, I am. That's what government labs do to "scrub" classified media. If it works to safeguard classified information, I figure it'd probably work well to erase an audio tape.
Why don't you degauss them?
I would suggest that the job "interview" gather information that's pertinent to the job being posted. Gathering performance data (like being able to code without reference material, a compiler, and an editor) that has nothing to do with the job is going to give you information of questionable usefulness.
Would be interesting...
Well, it's a unshadowed passwd database. It's exactly what you need to run a password cracking program.
The first line of defense, making the encrypted passwords unavailable to ordinary users, is already breached by the system itself.
I have yet to be convinced that Apple is "serious about security" as I hear the pundits say. Here at LLNL, we've had any number of Apple representatives give OS X talks. They all mention how important security is to Apple. But things like "nidump passwd ." and the fact that Classic runs as setuid root tell me otherwise.
/System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources/TruBlueEnvironment" .
(For verification of that last one, do "ls -l
I'm not completely positive, but I don't believe that OS X supports shadow passwords currently.
/etc/passwd file, any user can get a clean passwd database by running "nidump passwd ."
In fact, even if you somehow lock down the
That's scary to me.
But what do I know...
How about the source code to one of LLNL/LANL's nuclear weapons codes? One of those things is simply beyond price.
Um...the images for 100 light years on down to 1 trillion kilometers (sequence of 4 images) are all the same image!
I suppose not much was lost, as there really isn't much IN this range, but I was at least expecting to see some representation of the Oort cloud.
Oh well.
Thanks for taking the time to write it.
My wife and I are pretty much in the same situation. SF Bay Area, she's staying home to take care of our son. I bring home the bacon, and she does our finances. We just bought our first house a couple months ago, and things are looking just fine.
And it's all because we live below our means.
Thanks again for the well-written article!
If you watch their little video, they talk about some positions that normal keyboards force your hands to be in. It's those positions that cause all of the problems that are associated with typing. Their keyboard purports to remove the problems by putting your hands in a more natural and neutral position.
A little over a year ago, slashdot posted an article about the Evolution Keyboard, now by Kinesis. I have had one of those for several years, and would recommend that anyone interested in the SafeType keyboard also check out the Evolution keyboard. (You can the review I posted to slashdot here.)
The SafeType keyboard is fixed in position, and they consider that to be one of its major features. While I can see that preventing users from futzing with the keyboard keeps them from moving it to a position where it can hurt them, I happen to really like the ability of the Evolution keyboard to move to whatever position I like. In fact, I can make it go completely vertical if I want, gaining all the advantages of the SafeType keyboard. I can even drop it to the sides of my chair, removing even one more "unnatural" position of my arms.
To me, having lots of choices in how I configure my work space is a good thing. And having a keyboard that fits this mindset is one of the most important parts.