Rendering operations can almost always be done via asynchronous parallel operations.
They're known for this.
So much so that the term "renderfarm" has been coined. So doubling the width of the CPU bus will allow for double the calculations (assuming you have ops to handle it that way - to make one 64 bit CPU act like 2 32 bit CPUs, or 4 16 bit CPUs).
Similarly, doubling the number of CPUs on one die will give the same advantages until you reach the harddrive bottleneck.
Also, a lot of operations (blurring, sharpening, scaling, rotating) can be done using convolution, and convolution can be done using dynamic programming techniques, reducing multiplications while also increasing memory usage. Since most frames are larger than the average cache while uncompressed, a larger cache will speed this up - especially if you can get one that's the size of the buffer. I think that most rendering engines don't consider this because to get the real significant improvements, you have to know low-level details of how memory is fetched.
On the other hand, the Ancient Maya had an incredibly strong class structure, so you pretty much knew what laws you had to live by from birth to death.
Ours is a more fluid world. The only measure of class is how much money you have, not how you were born.
Would you like combine our tax system with our legal system? What would you call the people who ran it? Demons? The Evil Ones? Children of the Corn?
My take is that the person who wrote the article probably didn't want to or couldn't explain much about how the system works, so he just said "It's an AI."
I can think of parts of such a satallite that could make use of almost all of the techniques currently considered part of AI.
But the article does say it's model based, not heuristic based, so I bet it's not an expert system - at least not in the classic sense. Still, with the complexity of such a model, there are probably some things explicitly covered by heuristics.
My guess would be it's a nonlinear feedback system of some kind, like a SVM or a neural network... However, I'd like to think they do like the article says: they have a model, and they use it to model each part, and when errors occur, they use a search algorithm with a simulator (many to choose from in the AI field) to figure out the most likely reason.
That would really be something valuable and new and innovative. Am I giving NASA too much credit?
Okay, CASE: $50 (great? who cares. FCC compliant. Your computer won't run faster with a better case, and it won't last longer) Cabling: comes with the other stuff. Mouse and Keyboard: $20 Power Supply: $30
I don't know...2 64bit CPUS?
You may have a point there...you can't get that easily. That probably does add an extra $500 to the cost.
It's money down the tubes for most people, though, since CPU is not usually a bottleneck.
Very good idea. Actually, it was a slashdot story a few years back, except they were going to put them in bookstores where books were made for you right there and sold to eliminate transport and unused book costs.
I believe that price was a limiting factor - you got a book that was lower quality than what the stores provided for roughly the same price (because people want $ for their copyrights). I don't see how this would be different now.
But someone who is less lazy could go look it up and confirm.:)
Sadly, while the apps are getting there (I especially like ardour), the hardware support isn't.
You've got a choice of about 4 cards if you want to buy a multichannel (more than two channels) sound card for ALSA, and even then it's a pain to configure.
It's happening...but only if you're willing to record everything in Windows first.:(
$120 DVD-+RW drive (one of the new dual layer capable ones) $180 Asus Mobo with built-in Optical audio, gigabit, a normal ethernet connection, AGP 8x PRO, pci express, firewire, and USB 2.0 and an Athlon XP 3200 installed $120 120 GB harddrive $250 Decent monitor - 19" or higher $100 512 MB RAM $20 Modem $80 video card
Your grand total comes to $890, and I can get almost all of these things at an average of $40 under the price I quoted. This is closer to the "go to CompUSA and pick all of this stuff up" price. I mentioned Asus because they're generally acknowledged as one of the better Mobo manufacturers, and they sell a model that has all of those things I mentioned on it.
So...what features do Macs have that you pay for? -Faster bus speed -OSX -Double the bandwidth of processor (of course, you can always add a few hundred to the price and buy the Athlon 64 equivalent stuff...)
I don't really care how much Dell charges, or about the Microsoft tax, since I use Linux. Apple doesn't have to compete with Dell to get my business, they have to compete with me, and I can build a system to your specs for $900 as an upper limit.
I guess they're more competitive than they used to be, though. They used to charge about three times retail for an equivalent x86 box.
Still, I think it's probably worth it because you get the twin benefits of being able to use esoteric hardware that won't work in linux (a great many of the 96Kbit capable soundcards won't work in linux, for example), while also not having to use Windows. But don't kid yourself into think it's because Apple isn't taking advantage of their market niche to increase prices.
I propose that we need a new standard - one that determines if other standards standard or not. I, of course, will write this standard, and for only 149.95 (that's mere pennies a day! Pennies, compared to almost universal wisdom!). I will benevolently bestow the list of all acceptable standards upon all who ask and can afford to continue to pay me.
I'm sure there are some people who might be worried I won't do a good job. Don't worry: I'm using the standard method of determining a standard method of determining which standards should be standard, so it's all good.
We have such a guideline: any company that lets someone die because the risks are unneccessarily high will be sued into oblivion.
Companies could go about their business entirely unregulated by the government, and consumers can feel safe - secure in the knowledge that if anything horrible happens someone's gonna pay dearly for it.
Out of self-interest alone companies will make sure their stuff is safe.
No, the main reason to switch to H2 is that natural gas is a nonrenewable resource. The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is only slightly taken into consideration.
I think people will welcome alternative hydrocarbon fuels, and in fact will get them when the price of gasoline goes above about $5 (there's already an industrial process to make hydrocarbons from corn).
Still, you do have a good alternative reason why hydrogen is a better idea.
One application often discussed with liquid computers is the ease of doing analog computing.
You could, for example, make a fuzzy neural network where "flow" was the feedback generated by checking conductivity, amplifying it and feeding it into a pump. For particularly massive networks, this may be faster than the digital equivalent.
This is an old idea. I myself heard about it in 1998, but they were having problems getting the liquid to hold it's state during delays (and trouble initializing it too, I believe).
It's a excellent opportunity to provide a considerable drain on the earth's resources for one's own benefit over a very brief period of time while at the same time producing absolutely nothing to benefit society.
Can you think of a better way of saying to your fellow humans, "I don't care about anyone but myself?"
You have a willing buyer and seller in all cases. There is someone who is willing to sell slaves, and someone willing to buy them.
I think you mean that there are no unwilling parties involved in the transaction. But is that enough? Children are forced to become prostitutes to eat (happening now in Asia) - and they're more than willing, despite the horrible emotional scars and high risk of death.
Drugs are usually sold to the young to start with because they lack the wisdom to make long-term decisions (like "if I get high now, I'll suffer a lot for it in a year"), and then they get hooked. Ask an addict if they would have liked to have been prevented a decade after they started.
So why do you think that Al Capone had to? Do you think that we should pacify those who do bad things to keep them from doing worse? Or, should doing a lesser crime be a mitigating circumstance for a greater one? I'd rather that crime is punished, not rewarded.
The partially restricted exchange of goods and services between consenting persons is also called capitalism?
It has always struck me that pure capitalism is nearly equivalent to pure anarchy. No restrictions on trade at all?
There are a lot of things that are at the moment illegal to sell...but I think I like having those things restricted though most else unrestricted.
I'm in favor of capitalism, except in the subcases of slavery, prostitution, murder, drug dealing, and blackmail to name a few. If that makes me a hypocrite, then I don't much care for the non-hypocritical capitalists.
It has lead me to believe that Microsoft should get out of the software business and make what they make best: low end consumer hardware.
Their router is among the most stable and secure I've tried (of consumer models), and their optical mouse just works, like it should (yeah...it doesn't have to do much, but I've tried a few that had jitter problems).
If Microsoft made an audio system such that there was a way to use it without DRM, I'd probably consider it.
And they'd probably do it, too, if they think it'll make more profit than guaranteeing that nothing pirated gets on their system. (Actually, for the corporate computer-illiterates they'd probably make a cryptosystem that does permutations or something that is as easy to decrypt - just to say they've got encryption).
The fact that there are people that actually think that Gentoo is made for newbies is a clue.
The approach from the beginning has been to have a huge support base. You want to install Gentoo?
The documentation is very, very good, and it will help you.
Have trouble? Go to the forums. Can't find an answer there? Ask in the forums. The IRC channel is also always packed with people who will answer questions. If it's a newbie problem, you'll get an answer in an hour or so.
They're designed to make the OS as customizable as possible. This is why it was originally referred to as a "metadistribution" - so customizable that you can even port it to cygwin and OSX.
Less hoops mean less more is done automatically, which means less is customizable.
Put up with the hoops and the users, developers, and documentation are more than willing to help you through them.
Slashdot Mirror
Rendering operations can almost always be done via asynchronous parallel operations.
They're known for this.
So much so that the term "renderfarm" has been coined. So doubling the width of the CPU bus will allow for double the calculations (assuming you have ops to handle it that way - to make one 64 bit CPU act like 2 32 bit CPUs, or 4 16 bit CPUs).
Similarly, doubling the number of CPUs on one die will give the same advantages until you reach the harddrive bottleneck.
Also, a lot of operations (blurring, sharpening, scaling, rotating) can be done using convolution, and convolution can be done using dynamic programming techniques, reducing multiplications while also increasing memory usage. Since most frames are larger than the average cache while uncompressed, a larger cache will speed this up - especially if you can get one that's the size of the buffer. I think that most rendering engines don't consider this because to get the real significant improvements, you have to know low-level details of how memory is fetched.
Alec: We've just had a correction from our judges...
the correct question was, "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"
Apparently I need to reread Hitchhikers Guide so I don't misquote it.
On the other hand, the Ancient Maya had an incredibly strong class structure, so you pretty much knew what laws you had to live by from birth to death.
Ours is a more fluid world. The only measure of class is how much money you have, not how you were born.
Would you like combine our tax system with our legal system? What would you call the people who ran it? Demons? The Evil Ones? Children of the Corn?
It's also unnatural to use _ when perfectly valid markups are available.
Or did you mean something else? Are "_natural_" and "_unnatural_" actually completely different from "natural" and "unnatural?"
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are. But what could they mean? I'll attempt to derive it from context. Got it!
_natural_: having a tendency to kill off anything that moves, usually with large weapons
_unnatural_: wanting unusual species to stay alive
My take is that the person who wrote the article probably didn't want to or couldn't explain much about how the system works, so he just said "It's an AI."
I can think of parts of such a satallite that could make use of almost all of the techniques currently considered part of AI.
But the article does say it's model based, not heuristic based, so I bet it's not an expert system - at least not in the classic sense. Still, with the complexity of such a model, there are probably some things explicitly covered by heuristics.
My guess would be it's a nonlinear feedback system of some kind, like a SVM or a neural network...
However, I'd like to think they do like the article says: they have a model, and they use it to model each part, and when errors occur, they use a search algorithm with a simulator (many to choose from in the AI field) to figure out the most likely reason.
That would really be something valuable and new and innovative. Am I giving NASA too much credit?
Okay,
CASE: $50 (great? who cares. FCC compliant. Your computer won't run faster with a better case, and it won't last longer)
Cabling: comes with the other stuff.
Mouse and Keyboard: $20
Power Supply: $30
I don't know...2 64bit CPUS?
You may have a point there...you can't get that easily. That probably does add an extra $500 to the cost.
It's money down the tubes for most people, though, since CPU is not usually a bottleneck.
Eh...I never considered an LCD monitor that great.
But...if you must get that, then you add an extra $300 to the price of the monitor.
You're saying that OSX is worth about $800? Forget about my time. I'm going to spend as much time fiddling with OSX for fun as I would with Linux.
Very good idea. Actually, it was a slashdot story a few years back, except they were going to put them in bookstores where books were made for you right there and sold to eliminate transport and unused book costs.
:)
I believe that price was a limiting factor - you got a book that was lower quality than what the stores provided for roughly the same price (because people want $ for their copyrights). I don't see how this would be different now.
But someone who is less lazy could go look it up and confirm.
Sadly, while the apps are getting there (I especially like ardour), the hardware support isn't.
:(
You've got a choice of about 4 cards if you want to buy a multichannel (more than two channels) sound card for ALSA, and even then it's a pain to configure.
It's happening...but only if you're willing to record everything in Windows first.
$120 DVD-+RW drive (one of the new dual layer capable ones)
$180 Asus Mobo with built-in Optical audio, gigabit, a normal ethernet connection, AGP 8x PRO, pci express, firewire, and USB 2.0 and an Athlon XP 3200 installed
$120 120 GB harddrive
$250 Decent monitor - 19" or higher
$100 512 MB RAM
$20 Modem
$80 video card
Your grand total comes to $890, and I can get almost all of these things at an average of $40 under the price I quoted. This is closer to the "go to CompUSA and pick all of this stuff up" price. I mentioned Asus because they're generally acknowledged as one of the better Mobo manufacturers, and they sell a model that has all of those things I mentioned on it.
So...what features do Macs have that you pay for?
-Faster bus speed
-OSX
-Double the bandwidth of processor (of course, you can always add a few hundred to the price and buy the Athlon 64 equivalent stuff...)
I don't really care how much Dell charges, or about the Microsoft tax, since I use Linux. Apple doesn't have to compete with Dell to get my business, they have to compete with me, and I can build a system to your specs for $900 as an upper limit.
I guess they're more competitive than they used to be, though. They used to charge about three times retail for an equivalent x86 box.
Still, I think it's probably worth it because you get the twin benefits of being able to use esoteric hardware that won't work in linux (a great many of the 96Kbit capable soundcards won't work in linux, for example), while also not having to use Windows. But don't kid yourself into think it's because Apple isn't taking advantage of their market niche to increase prices.
RTFA. It's more like saying that USA has 27,000 nuclear weapons and Russia has 13,000, but they've all been disarmed.
Not only do the Mozilla vulnerabilities not actually allow much of an attack, but they've all been fixed in the latest versions of the browser.
This is not true on the Windows side, as Secunia recommends disabling or switching browsers to deal with a lot of the bugs.
I think there might be.
I propose that we need a new standard - one that determines if other standards standard or not. I, of course, will write this standard, and for only 149.95 (that's mere pennies a day! Pennies, compared to almost universal wisdom!). I will benevolently bestow the list of all acceptable standards upon all who ask and can afford to continue to pay me.
I'm sure there are some people who might be worried I won't do a good job. Don't worry: I'm using the standard method of determining a standard method of determining which standards should be standard, so it's all good.
We have such a guideline: any company that lets someone die because the risks are unneccessarily high will be sued into oblivion.
Companies could go about their business entirely unregulated by the government, and consumers can feel safe - secure in the knowledge that if anything horrible happens someone's gonna pay dearly for it.
Out of self-interest alone companies will make sure their stuff is safe.
No, the main reason to switch to H2 is that natural gas is a nonrenewable resource. The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is only slightly taken into consideration.
I think people will welcome alternative hydrocarbon fuels, and in fact will get them when the price of gasoline goes above about $5 (there's already an industrial process to make hydrocarbons from corn).
Still, you do have a good alternative reason why hydrogen is a better idea.
One application often discussed with liquid computers is the ease of doing analog computing.
You could, for example, make a fuzzy neural network where "flow" was the feedback generated by checking conductivity, amplifying it and feeding it into a pump. For particularly massive networks, this may be faster than the digital equivalent.
This is an old idea. I myself heard about it in 1998, but they were having problems getting the liquid to hold it's state during delays (and trouble initializing it too, I believe).
It's a excellent opportunity to provide a considerable drain on the earth's resources for one's own benefit over a very brief period of time while at the same time producing absolutely nothing to benefit society.
Can you think of a better way of saying to your fellow humans, "I don't care about anyone but myself?"
Actually, what you say is untrue.
You have a willing buyer and seller in all cases. There is someone who is willing to sell slaves, and someone willing to buy them.
I think you mean that there are no unwilling parties involved in the transaction. But is that enough? Children are forced to become prostitutes to eat (happening now in Asia) - and they're more than willing, despite the horrible emotional scars and high risk of death.
Drugs are usually sold to the young to start with because they lack the wisdom to make long-term decisions (like "if I get high now, I'll suffer a lot for it in a year"), and then they get hooked. Ask an addict if they would have liked to have been prevented a decade after they started.
So why do you think that Al Capone had to?
Do you think that we should pacify those who do bad things to keep them from doing worse? Or, should doing a lesser crime be a mitigating circumstance for a greater one? I'd rather that crime is punished, not rewarded.
The partially restricted exchange of goods and services between consenting persons is also called capitalism?
It has always struck me that pure capitalism is nearly equivalent to pure anarchy. No restrictions on trade at all?
There are a lot of things that are at the moment illegal to sell...but I think I like having those things restricted though most else unrestricted.
I'm in favor of capitalism, except in the subcases of slavery, prostitution, murder, drug dealing, and blackmail to name a few. If that makes me a hypocrite, then I don't much care for the non-hypocritical capitalists.
Have you tried Microsoft peripherals?
It has lead me to believe that Microsoft should get out of the software business and make what they make best: low end consumer hardware.
Their router is among the most stable and secure I've tried (of consumer models), and their optical mouse just works, like it should (yeah...it doesn't have to do much, but I've tried a few that had jitter problems).
If Microsoft made an audio system such that there was a way to use it without DRM, I'd probably consider it.
And they'd probably do it, too, if they think it'll make more profit than guaranteeing that nothing pirated gets on their system. (Actually, for the corporate computer-illiterates they'd probably make a cryptosystem that does permutations or something that is as easy to decrypt - just to say they've got encryption).
I'm sure that Gentoo will get there eventually.
The fact that there are people that actually think that Gentoo is made for newbies is a clue.
The approach from the beginning has been to have a huge support base. You want to install Gentoo?
The documentation is very, very good, and it will help you.
Have trouble? Go to the forums. Can't find an answer there? Ask in the forums. The IRC channel is also always packed with people who will answer questions. If it's a newbie problem, you'll get an answer in an hour or so.
You don't want the hoops, don't use it.
The hoops are a feature.
They're designed to make the OS as customizable as possible. This is why it was originally referred to as a "metadistribution" - so customizable that you can even port it to cygwin and OSX.
Less hoops mean less more is done automatically, which means less is customizable.
Put up with the hoops and the users, developers, and documentation are more than willing to help you through them.
That's only true if you've got a gigabit connection.
Sure, you can use nomachine, which isn't free, but otherwise the lag is terrible, and bandwidth usage is worse.
But I'm with you on the apps being the thing that carries an OS.
Word.
There is one in Florida. You've got the name of the nearest park a bit wrong, though.
It's called "Six Flags Over Georgia." (GA is pronounced "Jor Jah," not 'Gee Ay").
And it's not a paintball field nearby. It's a water park.
Yeah, I realized it right after I hit submit.
:)
It just didn't seem worth making a correction.