But I still don't quite get why the guy didn't just take a whole bunch of normal pictures and warp/stich them together. This technology has been around for a while, and it can be automated so his throughput could be much higher than 5-8 per year. The article mentions "seaming multiple photos" together, but doesn't say why that wasn't an option. I wonder if it's a matter of the photographer's technical expertise.
For proof that stitching multiple photos works well, especially for outdoor nature scenes, check out this web site that describes the work of a guy who took many pictures of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. After stitching together 196 pictures, he ended up with one digital image that measures 40,784 x 26,800, with 1.09 billion pixels. In a raw format at 24 bit, that's way over the 2.6 gigabytes from the parent article.
Hang on...this is a guy who is a "top earner," having just signed a deal for $160,000 a year for the next 3 years. His livelihood is dependent on his fingers working very quickly, so he insures them to cover the loss of income. And the insurance he gets is.... $60,000?! Sounds like this guy may be good at directing Ghosts and such, but a little short on math skills.
jar-jar is absolutely necessary to the story as it exists
As someone said back when Ep II came out, I understand why Jar-Jar was necessary to the story. What I don't understand is why he had to be so fricking annoying!
I wasn't clear in my post. I'll attempt to be more clear here.
Running a display wall (which is what this was all about) doesn't require any "merging". It requires partitioning the scene before rasterization into a set of bins based on projected screen space. Each bin of geometry is sent to a separate graphics card for rendering. And that's about it. That's the essence of sort-first rendering.
If you do want to merge the output of multiple graphics cards to a single video stream, this is a different class of problem. This requires readback from the framebuffer (which not only stalls the pipe but is also very slow with current AGP cards), some type of composite (depth comparison is very popular), and a final transfer to a frame buffer. This is the essence of sort-last rendering.
The problems both involve parallel rendering. But they are very different problems that each have their own set of challenges and constraints.
Not really. Chromium contains a binary-swap compositor that allows you to depth-merge the output of several cards. But that's not what a display wall (tiled display) is about.
This is the distinction between sort-first and sort-last rendering. Chromium can do either and both.
Intercepting the OpenGL calls from non-modified OpenGL applications and rendering them to walls and CAVEs is a nice trick.
If this interests you at all, you also need to check out the open source Chromium project, which can do that, and much, much more. While it doesn't have the event tracking that VRiser appears to have, it has the ability to render to tiled displays, stereo displays, CAVES, do distributed sort-last compositing, OpenGL stream modification on the fly, parallel OpenGL submission, and a heck of a lot more. It supports high-speed cluster interconnects such as Myrinet, Quadrics, and Infiniband. It's also pretty easy to add your own OpenGL modification if you want to do something special.
But the actual letter asks the user to "remove works from the [Comcast] Server"; it's about files on Comcast's machine, not files the user has downloaded.
You quoted the letter incorrectly. Word for word from the letter:
In accordance with the DMCA and Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy, Comcast request [sic] that you
immediately remove the allegedly infringing works from the Service or Comcast will be forced to remove or block access to the works.
The key word is "Service" not "Servers". It means that your computer is connected to Comcast, and the allegedly infringing work is on your computer. Remove said file from their connection.
No mention at all is made of any fines, termination of service, or in act any consequences to the Comcast customer.
This is partially true. No mention of fines is made. However, termination of service could be inferred from the line "Comcast will be forced to remove or block access to the works." Granted, they could block access through other means. But termination is a pretty easy solution for them. Plus, the "Terms of Service" referenced by the letter state:
Comcast reserves the right to immediately terminate the Service and the Subscriber Agreement if you engage in any of the prohibited activities listed in this AUP or if you use the Comcast Equipment or Service in a way which is contrary to any Comcast policies or any of Comcast's suppliers' policies.
Consequently, Comcast could immediately terminate service for this. In fact, the Terms of Service specifically have a section regarding copyright infringement. In part, it says:
It is Comcast's policy in accordance with the DMCA and other applicable laws to reserve the right to terminate the Service provided to any customer or user who is either found to infringe third party copyright or other intellectual property rights, including repeat infringers, or who Comcast believes in its sole discretion is infringing these rights. Comcast may terminate the Service at any time with or without notice for any affected customer or user.
If you're a Comcast customer, don't believe that this letter is without teeth.
Hm. I don't recall foeing (is that a word?) you before, but I could easily be wrong. I'll unfoe you.
However, I'm not so sure we have the same views. I happen to enjoy reading twirlip and bmetzler, for instance. I'm also firmly planning on voting for Bush this fall, though I have plenty of friends who are on the other side. So you'll have to decide what you think about me.
I also have a tendency to foe people who are overly boorish in their style, no matter what their views, just to make slashdot more enjoyable for me to read. Increase the signal/noise ratio, as it were. (I know, I know... "On slashdot, man?! You're insane!" I'm probably gonna hit the friend/foe limit soon.)
But I'm gonna give you another chance, since you ask.
The passage with a bit more context is "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it."
I find it hard to believe that an order to "fill the earth" could be given to only two people. How could two people fill the earth? I think it's more probable that this was an order given to humanity as a whole.
(I don't know if someone else posted this. I haven't seen it yet. Forgive me if this is a dupe.)
For anyone who has gone through the headache of dependency hell using RPMs, I would like to point you to apt for rpm. It's the same type of package management system that Debian uses, except that it uses the rpm system for the backend.
This means that, when you want to install a package, apt figures out all the dependencies for you, downloads, and installs them. It will upgrade things for you on a regular basis if new ones are released. It knows how to do the dependency traversal to upgrade (or remove) packages if they become out of date. I have found it to be the best way of keeping my system happy. And I'm not chasing down dependencies manually any more. Bleah.
For those who also install things from source, there is an ability to ignore package dependencies and just install. Plus, you always have access to the rpm system itself, so you can do things manually if you desire. You can then use apt-get's --fix-broken and --fix-missing options to "clean" things up if need be.
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" Seymour Cray
And history has placed this quote firmly into the company of other "forward thinking" quotes such as the one about the world only needing 5 computers, or 640K being all the RAM you need.
by far, thats my biggest complaint with handhelds (palms, etc). The screens are so hard to read in the daylight.
Check out the Sony Clie. They are visible in all light conditions. The angle issue is still a problem, but much less than the light issue. Sony seems to have gotten it right. I've never had a problem with one.
Re:I think this is actually a shrewd move by SCO.
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 1
My statement is more influenced by my experience with a large Fed agency and information security. It was odd to watch how big a deal someone would make when some random host was compromised somewhere within the agency. I knew darned well that these were easy targets - that the agency just didn't put the resources behind properly managing and securing these hosts. Whats more, the major effort in "security" tended to be towards prosecuring after the fact. Not anywhere near the leader in infosec; but darned handy with the law.
Actually, I'll tend to agree with you here. When it comes to security, we didn't get serious about it (IMHO) until the Wen Ho Lee disaster.
Now we're pretty decent, but it took that to make us sit up and take notice.
Re:I think this is actually a shrewd move by SCO.
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Fed agencies may not always be on the forefront of IT.
This is probably a bit OT, but...
I wouldn't think that federal agencies would be necessarily ahead or behind the forefront of IT. It depends on what area of IT you're talking about.
The work that LLNL does, for instance, is very different from the business-oriented work that other companies do. However, there are similarities: extremely large networks with real-time demands by a large user base, the needs of integrating multi-platform environments together, etc.
In other areas, LLNL is ahead. They have petabytes of storage that have to be shared, managed, and backed up. This is a much larger requirement than most IT shops. Not all, but most, I'd guess.
As if we have any other choice. What good is all of his worrying gonna do? "Greatest threat ever to face humanity," fine. But if there's nothing we can do about it for a while, he's not exactly affecting the situation much by moaning about it, is he?
Sorry, some people just don't have enough "real world" problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't matter. In all cases, time is relative. And if there is motion, then time changes as well and it's probably not "one second per second."
As long as you aren't in motion, that is...
Okay, this is all very impressive and all.
But I still don't quite get why the guy didn't just take a whole bunch of normal pictures and warp/stich them together. This technology has been around for a while, and it can be automated so his throughput could be much higher than 5-8 per year. The article mentions "seaming multiple photos" together, but doesn't say why that wasn't an option. I wonder if it's a matter of the photographer's technical expertise.
For proof that stitching multiple photos works well, especially for outdoor nature scenes, check out this web site that describes the work of a guy who took many pictures of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. After stitching together 196 pictures, he ended up with one digital image that measures 40,784 x 26,800, with 1.09 billion pixels. In a raw format at 24 bit, that's way over the 2.6 gigabytes from the parent article.
If it's gonna be like that, maybe we should send this whole thing to the United Nations.
whose fingers are insured for $60,000
Hang on...this is a guy who is a "top earner," having just signed a deal for $160,000 a year for the next 3 years. His livelihood is dependent on his fingers working very quickly, so he insures them to cover the loss of income. And the insurance he gets is.... $60,000?! Sounds like this guy may be good at directing Ghosts and such, but a little short on math skills.
jar-jar is absolutely necessary to the story as it exists
As someone said back when Ep II came out, I understand why Jar-Jar was necessary to the story. What I don't understand is why he had to be so fricking annoying!
I wasn't clear in my post. I'll attempt to be more clear here.
Running a display wall (which is what this was all about) doesn't require any "merging". It requires partitioning the scene before rasterization into a set of bins based on projected screen space. Each bin of geometry is sent to a separate graphics card for rendering. And that's about it. That's the essence of sort-first rendering.
If you do want to merge the output of multiple graphics cards to a single video stream, this is a different class of problem. This requires readback from the framebuffer (which not only stalls the pipe but is also very slow with current AGP cards), some type of composite (depth comparison is very popular), and a final transfer to a frame buffer. This is the essence of sort-last rendering.
The problems both involve parallel rendering. But they are very different problems that each have their own set of challenges and constraints.
Here we go again. This is almost as bad as the SCO mess, except with even less evidence (at least so far).
I'm reminded of the famous quote from Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Give me the facts before you expect me to give credence to your allegations.
Not really. Chromium contains a binary-swap compositor that allows you to depth-merge the output of several cards. But that's not what a display wall (tiled display) is about.
This is the distinction between sort-first and sort-last rendering. Chromium can do either and both.
[T]here are VERY few people who care about you or your data.
Probably true for most people. However, in the corporate world, this is less likely to be true.
I'll give an extreme case. I work at a DOE weapons lab. There are a lot of people who are interested in our data.
gif doesn't have fricking transparency
I'm not sure about the "fricking" type of transparency. But GIF89s have had transparency for a while.
Intercepting the OpenGL calls from non-modified OpenGL applications and rendering them to walls and CAVEs is a nice trick.
If this interests you at all, you also need to check out the open source Chromium project, which can do that, and much, much more. While it doesn't have the event tracking that VRiser appears to have, it has the ability to render to tiled displays, stereo displays, CAVES, do distributed sort-last compositing, OpenGL stream modification on the fly, parallel OpenGL submission, and a heck of a lot more. It supports high-speed cluster interconnects such as Myrinet, Quadrics, and Infiniband. It's also pretty easy to add your own OpenGL modification if you want to do something special.
As an example, check out this project that uses Chromium to split up live Quake games into an external isometric view.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the Chromium developers, and my Lab helps pay the external developers to write this open source tool.)
So just copy it to your laptop/burn it to CD.
Boom. Request complied.
Correct.
You quoted the letter incorrectly. Word for word from the letter:The key word is "Service" not "Servers". It means that your computer is connected to Comcast, and the allegedly infringing work is on your computer. Remove said file from their connection.
No mention at all is made of any fines, termination of service, or in act any consequences to the Comcast customer.
This is partially true. No mention of fines is made. However, termination of service could be inferred from the line "Comcast will be forced to remove or block access to the works." Granted, they could block access through other means. But termination is a pretty easy solution for them. Plus, the "Terms of Service" referenced by the letter state:Consequently, Comcast could immediately terminate service for this. In fact, the Terms of Service specifically have a section regarding copyright infringement. In part, it says:If you're a Comcast customer, don't believe that this letter is without teeth.
Hm. I don't recall foeing (is that a word?) you before, but I could easily be wrong. I'll unfoe you.
However, I'm not so sure we have the same views. I happen to enjoy reading twirlip and bmetzler, for instance. I'm also firmly planning on voting for Bush this fall, though I have plenty of friends who are on the other side. So you'll have to decide what you think about me.
I also have a tendency to foe people who are overly boorish in their style, no matter what their views, just to make slashdot more enjoyable for me to read. Increase the signal/noise ratio, as it were. (I know, I know... "On slashdot, man?! You're insane!" I'm probably gonna hit the friend/foe limit soon.)
But I'm gonna give you another chance, since you ask.
Nope, no literal Bible translation for me. I'm just playing along with the thread of the argument, for argument's sake.
The passage with a bit more context is "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it."
I find it hard to believe that an order to "fill the earth" could be given to only two people. How could two people fill the earth? I think it's more probable that this was an order given to humanity as a whole.
never-before-heard lyrics
Really?
Different perspective:
Compare a "near" miss with a "far" miss.
(I don't know if someone else posted this. I haven't seen it yet. Forgive me if this is a dupe.)
For anyone who has gone through the headache of dependency hell using RPMs, I would like to point you to apt for rpm. It's the same type of package management system that Debian uses, except that it uses the rpm system for the backend.
This means that, when you want to install a package, apt figures out all the dependencies for you, downloads, and installs them. It will upgrade things for you on a regular basis if new ones are released. It knows how to do the dependency traversal to upgrade (or remove) packages if they become out of date. I have found it to be the best way of keeping my system happy. And I'm not chasing down dependencies manually any more. Bleah.
For those who also install things from source, there is an ability to ignore package dependencies and just install. Plus, you always have access to the rpm system itself, so you can do things manually if you desire. You can then use apt-get's --fix-broken and --fix-missing options to "clean" things up if need be.
Check it out!
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
Seymour Cray
And history has placed this quote firmly into the company of other "forward thinking" quotes such as the one about the world only needing 5 computers, or 640K being all the RAM you need.
MPP computers are doing rather well, actually.
by far, thats my biggest complaint with handhelds (palms, etc). The screens are so hard to read in the daylight.
Check out the Sony Clie. They are visible in all light conditions. The angle issue is still a problem, but much less than the light issue. Sony seems to have gotten it right. I've never had a problem with one.
My statement is more influenced by my experience with a large Fed agency and information security. It was odd to watch how big a deal someone would make when some random host was compromised somewhere within the agency. I knew darned well that these were easy targets - that the agency just didn't put the resources behind properly managing and securing these hosts. Whats more, the major effort in "security" tended to be towards prosecuring after the fact. Not anywhere near the leader in infosec; but darned handy with the law.
Actually, I'll tend to agree with you here. When it comes to security, we didn't get serious about it (IMHO) until the Wen Ho Lee disaster.
Now we're pretty decent, but it took that to make us sit up and take notice.
Fed agencies may not always be on the forefront of IT.
This is probably a bit OT, but...
I wouldn't think that federal agencies would be necessarily ahead or behind the forefront of IT. It depends on what area of IT you're talking about.
The work that LLNL does, for instance, is very different from the business-oriented work that other companies do. However, there are similarities: extremely large networks with real-time demands by a large user base, the needs of integrating multi-platform environments together, etc.
In other areas, LLNL is ahead. They have petabytes of storage that have to be shared, managed, and backed up. This is a much larger requirement than most IT shops. Not all, but most, I'd guess.
(Disclaimer: I work for LLNL.)
I was comfortable playing the odds
As if we have any other choice. What good is all of his worrying gonna do? "Greatest threat ever to face humanity," fine. But if there's nothing we can do about it for a while, he's not exactly affecting the situation much by moaning about it, is he?
Sorry, some people just don't have enough "real world" problems.