I don't agree with the Massachusetts decision to attempt to stifle the presentation. This was foolish on a number of levels, not the least of which was it will probably help draw far more attention to the hack than it otherwise would have obtained.
That being said, it is perfectly reasonable to not "fix" a system if the cost of the fix is more than the cost of fare evasion. Look - in many cities "evading the fare" is as simple as getting on the bus and choosing not to pay. These systems depend on users for the most part obeying an honor system with periodic random enforcement by transit personnel checking for passes / ticket validation. This is done across Europe and in a number of cities in Canada (not sure about the USA). Why do this? For starters most people aren't jerks, and pay their fares. Second, there will ALWAYS be a way to evade a fare system without massive (expensive) enforcement that would cost far more than the added fare revenue. You would not get on one of the systems where there is no ticket check on entry and then crow about how you evaded the system (or you wouldn't without looking like a complete dork).
It's worth noting that this injunction is not analogous to software companies hiding known exploits in their systems where their customers may suffer the consequences. Boston IS the end user.
Moving people from place to place should always be the highest priority of transit authorities. In general most people are good about paying their fares. Dealing with smalltime one-off thieves is a waste of their resources.
If you use the system without paying, you are a thief and you are doing a tremendous disservice to your fellow citizens.
Sexual predators hang out around target population. News @ 11.
Children are still far more likely to be abused by someone they know (family, friend of the family) than by an anonymous stranger on the internet. But when has evidence stopped the media from whipping people into a state of hysteria?
A better question is: how the hell do we take back our hijacked mainstream media?
Yikes. You need to do some reading about coal and respiratory illnesses, and spend some time in a big city on a hot summer day and tell me again that burning fossil fuels and coal don't make our environment "toxic".
Having implemented GPFS I feel qualified to say it kicks butt. As the poster mentions, its not cheap but if you want reliability and support it may be well worth it. Thats where you need to decide the level of risk you are willing to expose your data to. One limitation of GPFS is that it does (or did last I looked) only run on IBM hardware, either Pseries or Xseries with FastT fiber channel at the back end.
From what I've heard, definitely give GFS a thorough shakedown before you decide to implement it, I've heard some horror stories.
Except completing quests doesn't MEAN anything because "badguy X" just respawns. Completing quests has no impact on the game world, and therefore, the game is far LESS immersive than even very old RPG's like the original Ultima's.
There is this supposed "war" going on but do battle lines ever shift? Can individual player actions affect the larger game? Nope.
This is not an RPG... it's Diablo II, 3D and MMO'd. Not saying it can't be fun, but it's NOT an RPG.
Aside question: what happened to the themes of forgiveness and redemption in our society?
When something terrible has happened, we are bombarded with images of victims demanding terrible punishments. In the theater the hero always kills the villain. Meanwhile, sentences continue to go up and up even for crimes of a nonviolent nature. This sentence inflation is a general result of the politics of fear.
The Christian Right, meantime, seems to have declined to a state of "two issue morality": abortion and gay marriage. Oppose both? You're a good person.
There are values being undermined here; and they are values I think Christians, Muslims and even secular humanists can agree on. The idea that a life is precious. That people can change. That we live in a world of hope.
You have a right to liberty, the sacrifice of a relatively small amount of safety (yes, you really are pretty much as safe as anyone has been in human history) to preserve freedom and the possibility redemption seems worth it to me.
OK... how the heck does promiscuous sexual behavior increase the risk of cancer?? I can see it increasing the risk of other things (STD's...) but... cancer?!?
I made the switch 2 weeks ago to a Powerbook 15" - so far, I love it. I use Desktop Manager for desktop management, works great haven't noticed any of the glitches mentioned here. I suppose I should mention I'm running OS X Tiger. No problems with sleep. Haven't run many Java apps yet, so no comment.
With respect to the Dock, I don't have a big issue with it but I have seen several forum howto's on how to remove the dock completely if you don't like it. For launching programs I like to use Quicksilver, its better than the integrated Spotlight in Tiger. Basically use a configurable shortcut and start typing the first few characters of the program name and bam. This might not be great for some people who prefer mouse/menu traversal but as someone who prefers to touch the mouse as little as possible I think its fantastic, Linux needs something like this.
Use iTerm for terminal client, it works well and supports tabbed terminals.
I find safari is fine for me right now, but Firefox is always there if it fails to meet my needs. I use Fire as an IM client, I think its fantastic (AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN/other stuff).
Driver stuff - can't speak to it since its a laptop obviously it supports all the hardware integrated into the powerbook. I can see this being an issue on a desktop. I would guess having linux drivers for the device would be a big help if you know how to write drivers.
For video I use VLC which seems to be working out well for me so far. Only issues is with WM9 encoded files, for which you can either a) download Microsoft's WMP for Mac, or b) Pay $5 for Flip4mac's Quicktime WM9 plugin.
With respect to open source on OS X, I find fink is fantastic.
Overall my experience has been a good one... YMMV.
Not for long if the US currency continues to slide the way it has in the past year...
(As a note for Americans, a weak US dollar is actually GOOD for US exporters and may help to balance the US's trade deficits by making foreign goods more expensive and domestic goods cheaper).
This is a good point - I think there should be a 'window' that you can see the receipt paper as it scrolls through giving you a chance to verify your vote was printed correctly on paper before leaving the booth. You would need to have this on a timer or have a way of making sure it scrolled out of view before the next voter entered.
Something to consider - at several larger firms I've worked for we had legal licenses to software, but still ended up using an invalid license key because it was just plain too much work to figure out where the proper license key was. I'm not saying this is "best practice" - and there's a hint of irony in that clearly the BSA expects companies to maintain an auditable repository of this information... but there you have it, this does not "prove" to me that they didn't own legal rights to the software, just that they employ a lazy developer.
If we only funded sciences that gave immediate results, we wouldn't have much of... well, anything, right now.
Many scientists feel there is potential in embryonic stem cell research. Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong... but one thing I guarantee, they know more about their field than you do. Scientists get credibility and reputation for working in areas that produce results. Those results may come in baby steps, and wrong turns may be taken along the way. But I think those scientists are in a better position to know whether its worth investing in embryonic stem cell research than we are.
(And lest you feel there may be some kind of conspiracy to 'get funding'... labs & institutions that don't produce interesting research lose credibility in the community and funding. It isn't in their best interest to pursue a field if they truly think its a doomed project, they would just be tarnishing their own reputation.)
As a Canadian... don't be too happy about thing's going south, er, down south. Canada has had a trade surplus for many years now, for precisely one reason: the US buys lots, and lots of our stuff. (Particularly automobiles, our largest single export to the US.)
If their economy tanks, ours will follow shortly after. Without exports to the US we would have a VERY hefty export deficit. We're doing ok presently because the current state of the economy is "stall" not "plummet" and relatively responsible fiscal stewardship here (we're the only G7 nation with a budget surplus) has created a good environment for economic growth. That could change in a hurry if the primary buyer of our goods ends up mostly bankrupt.
You don't have the machine for it...
on
Rendering Shrek@Home?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Only the most high end of machines could even consider attempting to render even one layer of a frame for this kind of animation. We're talking systems with 2-4GB of RAM as a minimum (preferably 4+) and the scene files/textures would weigh in the tens to thousands of megabytes that must be downloaded for each scene. Think uncompressed TIFF or TARGA texture files that might be 5000x5000 at 40 bits/pixel.
Even on high end machines they often do not render a full frame, but a layer of a frame which is then composited with other layers into the full frame. Why? Many reasons but one of them is that even the high end machines don't have enough RAM and the render would take too long (the machine would need to swap).
So aside from the issues of fans returning bogus data, or extracting highly proprietary information out of the client as other threads have mentioned, this would be a real show stopper. Breaking the problem into small enough pieces to be handled by joe-blow's computer would be prohibitive and require tons of calculations to figure out which pieces of textures are actually required for a given piece of rendering etc. It would probably require a compute farm just to manage it!
Rendering is also a lot more complex than you might think, there are render wranglers who manage the rendering queues and look at the outputs... many renders may require specific versions of the rendering software, so a frame that rendered with 2.7.2.1 won't render anymore without errors with 2.7.2.2... so many copies of the software are managed in parallel with the wranglers helping to clean up the errors. How would you manage this in a distributed client environment?
Furthermore most of the proprietary rendering apps are certified against VERY specific platforms, eg. one specific kernel version and build level, specific versions of shared libraries etc.
Long and short is there's a reason why movies cost millions.:)
I still would like to know who the lunatics were who funded the godawful script of the Wing Commander motion picture to the tune of $30M as I recall.
I went to see that in the theater with friends knowing full well it would be bad. When we arrived there was a sign on the box office that said ( I am not kidding ) : "NO REFUNDS FOR WING COMMANDER". At this point we knew what we were going into.
We had a very good time... we (and a number of other people in the theater) were mocking it out loud and you know what, NOBODY CARED. Our own live MST3k.
That which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger...:P
Heh... joking aside, Troy really wasn't well written or directed (and Brad Pitt's performance was especially wooden and unspectacular) -however- I will contend that he can in fact act when given a halfway good script and director.
I cite as examples: 12 Monkeys Snatch Fight club
I know there are at least a few more where he gave a pretty good performance but thats off the top of my head.:)
I completely agree - the first was far and away the best of the three. But I tend to think it was because there was time for... dialog, and character development. There just seemed to be too much running around and head bashing in the following two to allow for either of these things. Plus Legolas's lines got infinitely more cheesy throughout the series.:P
Agreed. I work for a major international IT company. At least in the country where I work (Canada) most senior technical people start hitting their cap at $85k. Even a/mid/ level salesman can easily be up to $120k. High level sales goes up to and over $200k. Of course, pay is for performance, especially in sales. You sell, you get paid. Learn this skill and learn it well and not only will you have money, you'll have a skill you can arguably transfer to almost any business. Of course, you'll also have to find some way to sleep at night...:P
Actually, rendering is fairly light on network requirements and very heavy on memory/cpu. (Download scene files & textures then crunch numbers for 10-40 minutes depending on layer complexity.)
But the bladecenter chassis also does in fact support a Myrinet interconnect if you so desire.
Having done a fair bit of linpack benchmarking on 'real' clusters I have to say I think their chances are very slim. The interconnect makes a huge difference particularly when you have so little RAM per node. I doubt they will have a nonblocking switch architecture which makes a significant difference in Linpack (even setting aside it not being gigabit.) Also, MPI applications (Linpack included) often run into bottlenecks with wait conditions, some of the slower nodes will probably end up choking the entire cluster. A few problem laptops with bad RAM modules, and they can spend more time than they have pulling their hair out troubleshooting.
That being said, it doesn't seem like all that serious an enterprise. Good luck to them, and if they have fun, hey all the better.:)
Slashdot Mirror
... or Expedition 18?
I don't agree with the Massachusetts decision to attempt to stifle the presentation. This was foolish on a number of levels, not the least of which was it will probably help draw far more attention to the hack than it otherwise would have obtained.
That being said, it is perfectly reasonable to not "fix" a system if the cost of the fix is more than the cost of fare evasion. Look - in many cities "evading the fare" is as simple as getting on the bus and choosing not to pay. These systems depend on users for the most part obeying an honor system with periodic random enforcement by transit personnel checking for passes / ticket validation. This is done across Europe and in a number of cities in Canada (not sure about the USA). Why do this? For starters most people aren't jerks, and pay their fares. Second, there will ALWAYS be a way to evade a fare system without massive (expensive) enforcement that would cost far more than the added fare revenue. You would not get on one of the systems where there is no ticket check on entry and then crow about how you evaded the system (or you wouldn't without looking like a complete dork).
It's worth noting that this injunction is not analogous to software companies hiding known exploits in their systems where their customers may suffer the consequences. Boston IS the end user.
Moving people from place to place should always be the highest priority of transit authorities. In general most people are good about paying their fares. Dealing with smalltime one-off thieves is a waste of their resources.
If you use the system without paying, you are a thief and you are doing a tremendous disservice to your fellow citizens.
Sexual predators hang out around target population. News @ 11.
Children are still far more likely to be abused by someone they know (family, friend of the family) than by an anonymous stranger on the internet. But when has evidence stopped the media from whipping people into a state of hysteria?
A better question is: how the hell do we take back our hijacked mainstream media?
Yikes. You need to do some reading about coal and respiratory illnesses, and spend some time in a big city on a hot summer day and tell me again that burning fossil fuels and coal don't make our environment "toxic".
Having implemented GPFS I feel qualified to say it kicks butt. As the poster mentions, its not cheap but if you want reliability and support it may be well worth it. Thats where you need to decide the level of risk you are willing to expose your data to. One limitation of GPFS is that it does (or did last I looked) only run on IBM hardware, either Pseries or Xseries with FastT fiber channel at the back end.
From what I've heard, definitely give GFS a thorough shakedown before you decide to implement it, I've heard some horror stories.
Except completing quests doesn't MEAN anything because "badguy X" just respawns. Completing quests has no impact on the game world, and therefore, the game is far LESS immersive than even very old RPG's like the original Ultima's.
There is this supposed "war" going on but do battle lines ever shift? Can individual player actions affect the larger game? Nope.
This is not an RPG... it's Diablo II, 3D and MMO'd. Not saying it can't be fun, but it's NOT an RPG.
Aside question: what happened to the themes of forgiveness and redemption in our society?
When something terrible has happened, we are bombarded with images of victims demanding terrible punishments. In the theater the hero always kills the villain. Meanwhile, sentences continue to go up and up even for crimes of a nonviolent nature. This sentence inflation is a general result of the politics of fear.
The Christian Right, meantime, seems to have declined to a state of "two issue morality": abortion and gay marriage. Oppose both? You're a good person.
There are values being undermined here; and they are values I think Christians, Muslims and even secular humanists can agree on. The idea that a life is precious. That people can change. That we live in a world of hope.
You have a right to liberty, the sacrifice of a relatively small amount of safety (yes, you really are pretty much as safe as anyone has been in human history) to preserve freedom and the possibility redemption seems worth it to me.
OK... how the heck does promiscuous sexual behavior increase the risk of cancer?? I can see it increasing the risk of other things (STD's...) but... cancer?!?
I made the switch 2 weeks ago to a Powerbook 15" - so far, I love it. I use Desktop Manager for desktop management, works great haven't noticed any of the glitches mentioned here. I suppose I should mention I'm running OS X Tiger. No problems with sleep. Haven't run many Java apps yet, so no comment.
With respect to the Dock, I don't have a big issue with it but I have seen several forum howto's on how to remove the dock completely if you don't like it. For launching programs I like to use Quicksilver, its better than the integrated Spotlight in Tiger. Basically use a configurable shortcut and start typing the first few characters of the program name and bam. This might not be great for some people who prefer mouse/menu traversal but as someone who prefers to touch the mouse as little as possible I think its fantastic, Linux needs something like this.
Use iTerm for terminal client, it works well and supports tabbed terminals.
I find safari is fine for me right now, but Firefox is always there if it fails to meet my needs. I use Fire as an IM client, I think its fantastic (AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN/other stuff).
Driver stuff - can't speak to it since its a laptop obviously it supports all the hardware integrated into the powerbook. I can see this being an issue on a desktop. I would guess having linux drivers for the device would be a big help if you know how to write drivers.
For video I use VLC which seems to be working out well for me so far. Only issues is with WM9 encoded files, for which you can either a) download Microsoft's WMP for Mac, or b) Pay $5 for Flip4mac's Quicktime WM9 plugin.
With respect to open source on OS X, I find fink is fantastic.
Overall my experience has been a good one... YMMV.
Cheers!
Peter
"You know, it's things like this that make me want to move to Canada."
"Oh, they've got one too, but half of theirs is French!"
- Sam & Max
Not for long if the US currency continues to slide the way it has in the past year...
(As a note for Americans, a weak US dollar is actually GOOD for US exporters and may help to balance the US's trade deficits by making foreign goods more expensive and domestic goods cheaper).
Suddenly the dungeon collapses.
You die.
This is a good point - I think there should be a 'window' that you can see the receipt paper as it scrolls through giving you a chance to verify your vote was printed correctly on paper before leaving the booth. You would need to have this on a timer or have a way of making sure it scrolled out of view before the next voter entered.
How about the Union of Concerned Scientists including many Nobel Laureates and Phd's in environmental sciences?
Or the Bush administration itself which accepted it is likely the case in 2002?
The general scientific position is that it exists. The potential consequences of doing nothing seem to suggest its prudent to take action.
Something to consider - at several larger firms I've worked for we had legal licenses to software, but still ended up using an invalid license key because it was just plain too much work to figure out where the proper license key was. I'm not saying this is "best practice" - and there's a hint of irony in that clearly the BSA expects companies to maintain an auditable repository of this information... but there you have it, this does not "prove" to me that they didn't own legal rights to the software, just that they employ a lazy developer.
If we only funded sciences that gave immediate results, we wouldn't have much of ... well, anything, right now.
Many scientists feel there is potential in embryonic stem cell research. Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong... but one thing I guarantee, they know more about their field than you do. Scientists get credibility and reputation for working in areas that produce results. Those results may come in baby steps, and wrong turns may be taken along the way. But I think those scientists are in a better position to know whether its worth investing in embryonic stem cell research than we are.
(And lest you feel there may be some kind of conspiracy to 'get funding'... labs & institutions that don't produce interesting research lose credibility in the community and funding. It isn't in their best interest to pursue a field if they truly think its a doomed project, they would just be tarnishing their own reputation.)
As a Canadian... don't be too happy about thing's going south, er, down south. Canada has had a trade surplus for many years now, for precisely one reason: the US buys lots, and lots of our stuff. (Particularly automobiles, our largest single export to the US.)
If their economy tanks, ours will follow shortly after. Without exports to the US we would have a VERY hefty export deficit. We're doing ok presently because the current state of the economy is "stall" not "plummet" and relatively responsible fiscal stewardship here (we're the only G7 nation with a budget surplus) has created a good environment for economic growth. That could change in a hurry if the primary buyer of our goods ends up mostly bankrupt.
Only the most high end of machines could even consider attempting to render even one layer of a frame for this kind of animation. We're talking systems with 2-4GB of RAM as a minimum (preferably 4+) and the scene files/textures would weigh in the tens to thousands of megabytes that must be downloaded for each scene. Think uncompressed TIFF or TARGA texture files that might be 5000x5000 at 40 bits/pixel.
:)
Even on high end machines they often do not render a full frame, but a layer of a frame which is then composited with other layers into the full frame. Why? Many reasons but one of them is that even the high end machines don't have enough RAM and the render would take too long (the machine would need to swap).
So aside from the issues of fans returning bogus data, or extracting highly proprietary information out of the client as other threads have mentioned, this would be a real show stopper. Breaking the problem into small enough pieces to be handled by joe-blow's computer would be prohibitive and require tons of calculations to figure out which pieces of textures are actually required for a given piece of rendering etc. It would probably require a compute farm just to manage it!
Rendering is also a lot more complex than you might think, there are render wranglers who manage the rendering queues and look at the outputs... many renders may require specific versions of the rendering software, so a frame that rendered with 2.7.2.1 won't render anymore without errors with 2.7.2.2... so many copies of the software are managed in parallel with the wranglers helping to clean up the errors. How would you manage this in a distributed client environment?
Furthermore most of the proprietary rendering apps are certified against VERY specific platforms, eg. one specific kernel version and build level, specific versions of shared libraries etc.
Long and short is there's a reason why movies cost millions.
I still would like to know who the lunatics were who funded the godawful script of the Wing Commander motion picture to the tune of $30M as I recall.
:P
I went to see that in the theater with friends knowing full well it would be bad. When we arrived there was a sign on the box office that said ( I am not kidding ) : "NO REFUNDS FOR WING COMMANDER". At this point we knew what we were going into.
We had a very good time... we (and a number of other people in the theater) were mocking it out loud and you know what, NOBODY CARED. Our own live MST3k.
That which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger...
Heh... joking aside, Troy really wasn't well written or directed (and Brad Pitt's performance was especially wooden and unspectacular) -however- I will contend that he can in fact act when given a halfway good script and director.
:)
I cite as examples:
12 Monkeys
Snatch
Fight club
I know there are at least a few more where he gave a pretty good performance but thats off the top of my head.
I completely agree - the first was far and away the best of the three. But I tend to think it was because there was time for... dialog, and character development. There just seemed to be too much running around and head bashing in the following two to allow for either of these things. Plus Legolas's lines got infinitely more cheesy throughout the series. :P
Agreed. I work for a major international IT company. At least in the country where I work (Canada) most senior technical people start hitting their cap at $85k. Even a /mid/ level salesman can easily be up to $120k. High level sales goes up to and over $200k. Of course, pay is for performance, especially in sales. You sell, you get paid. Learn this skill and learn it well and not only will you have money, you'll have a skill you can arguably transfer to almost any business. Of course, you'll also have to find some way to sleep at night... :P
> I think the message is clear - Mother Earth is trying to get rid of us.
Nah, too much effort. We're getting rid of ourselves nicely.
Actually, rendering is fairly light on network requirements and very heavy on memory/cpu. (Download scene files & textures then crunch numbers for 10-40 minutes depending on layer complexity.)
But the bladecenter chassis also does in fact support a Myrinet interconnect if you so desire.
Having done a fair bit of linpack benchmarking on 'real' clusters I have to say I think their chances are very slim. The interconnect makes a huge difference particularly when you have so little RAM per node. I doubt they will have a nonblocking switch architecture which makes a significant difference in Linpack (even setting aside it not being gigabit.) Also, MPI applications (Linpack included) often run into bottlenecks with wait conditions, some of the slower nodes will probably end up choking the entire cluster. A few problem laptops with bad RAM modules, and they can spend more time than they have pulling their hair out troubleshooting.
:)
That being said, it doesn't seem like all that serious an enterprise. Good luck to them, and if they have fun, hey all the better.