The whole basis of good UI design is that there is not one way to do things. Forcing the use of keys instead of drop-down menus is bad design. Period. You can use keyboard shortcuts in Lightwave. You can even customize them. You can even assign keys to custom scripts you've written. This customization should be considered a necessity in 3D animation, not an option that takes 10 freakin' years to implement. I'm still using LW5.6. It's in there.
But again in LW, anything you can do using keyboard shortcuts you can also accomplish using drop-down menus. [sarcasm]And check this out! They even list the actual keyboard shortcuts in the list of options in those very menus! Imagine that, pointers to the shortcuts within the very UI instead of buried somewhere in cryptic man pages! Brilliant![/sarcasm]
We shouldn't confuse the conceptual "vocabulary" in 3D animation (the domain) with the process constraints from the interfaces of the programs. I agree that learning 3D animation is hard, but having a painfully autistic UI doesn't make it easier. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing what you want to accomplish, knowing that it is certainly possible, knowing that it should be ridiculously easy, and yet can't figure out the voodoo mouse-twitch keyboard hack to make it happen. And then all the documentation you can find assumes you already know that part and glosses over that step.
It's like banging your head against a brick wall. Eventually, the pains goes away when you stop. 3DS Max has a horrible UI. But, Blender has a monumentally stoopid UI. Now that I think about it, Blender really is a fitting name. Though, maybe they should call it Frog in a Blender.
dubious claims of technological advances (always a very short list, usually stuff that was being worked on already)
The first reason the list is usually so short, is that most of us here are not avionics experts. There are hundreds of components (possibly thousands) used in current jets that were developed by NASA.
The second reason that the list is short is that most of us are too lazy to do some honest research when posting a reply here on/. As you can probably tell, I'm including myself in this...
especially to a cynic like me
You're a movie critic, aren't you? Kidding. Honestly though, either help or shut up and get out of the way. Like adam(1231), I am also a filmmaker (albeit, still amateur). One of the pipe dreams I've had for years is to film Robert Heinlein's "The Menace from Earth". There's only one place that can be acheived: the moon. Practical? Hell no. Worth it? Hell yes.
There are plenty segments of the human population that wouldn't pain me to disappear in a cloud of radioactive particles *cough* red states *cough*, but I certainly believe that what we have acheived as human beings is important, beautiful and good. Those 'others' are just the bottom end of the bell curve. I, personally, would rather be at the other end of said bell curve.
Actually, if I recall correctly, the designs for the Saturn V's are lost. For some reason or another, the paper simply never got saved. The 'fives' would have to be completely reengineered.
I just gotta wonder whether or not Micron is licensing the CMOS technology from http://foveon.com/. Granted, Foveon is marketing toward the high-end market, but it wouldn't suprise me if Micron is licensed the IP for the low-end.
I've gotta friend that has the Sigma SD10 (a DLSR) that uses the X3 chip. He giggles like a school girl when he talks about it. It's kind of disturbing. Of course, the pics he takes with it are phenomenal.
Now, granted they wouldn't sound like a band busy blowing the lids off of people in the sixties, but more like a band doing the very same thing in the 90's and 00's. They would probably sound more like Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, The Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, DJ Shadow, Thievery Corporation, Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, Marilyn Manson, Angelo Badlamenti, Danny Elfman (Boingo and beyond), etc and ad nauseum. And those are just the guys (well, mostly)! There are a lot of male and female "Mozart's" and "Beethoven's" running around today.
And as for popular music, well, even in Mozart's day, only a small percentage of people went to Symphony concerts and Operas. Most spent their time hanging out in pubs singing baudy tunes at the top of their lungs. Which, admittedly, also has its own personal attraction and charm.
Both really drive home the complexity of creating AI. The human brain isn't merely a "database engine that applies statistical rules to the queries it processes". It's a carefully networked collection of highly specialized modules, of which one could be called the Bayesian Statistical Module. Bayesian statistical analysis is quite important to AI, but as Eliezer Yudkowsky (the author of the two listed papers) states, "It is necessary, but not sufficient."
No! Photons have momentum. This does not imply that they have mass.
Actually, it more than simply implies that they have mass. You cannot have momentum without mass. You can have velocity without mass (in the case of neutrinos, I think), but not momentum. In fact, this is how you calculate momentum:
Yes, many organizations that "do this seriously" will use blade servers and ridiculous amounts of power.
However, if I were doing this seriously, I would be shopping here.
DS-96
96 CPU's (Efficeon)
230 GFlops
1500W Max Power
Is the hardware cheaper? No. But once you factor in the power and cooling infrastructure and costs, it's definitely the way to go. Especially when you consider that 22 of the above machines will give you 2112 CPU's cranking away with a max power draw of 33,000 Watts, instead of 750,000 Watts.
Granted, with WTSI's setup, there's still the consideration of power and cooling requirements for the storage arrays. Not an insignificant issue.
Ah, yes. The venerable Anonymous Coward. Doesn't know his/her ass from a hole in the ground but is prepared to argue that if it came out of a hole, it must be shit.
I know that it's not a good idea to feed the trolls, but...
The characters in BSG are not stereotypical. They are archetypal. You are stereotyping them. There is a hell of a lot more going on with (taking your example) Starbuck than being "a hot-shot cop/pilot who cant keep his/her mouth shut & is constantly fighting with the chief/C-O". Just watch her face. This girl has issues. Baggage, failures, occasional successes. She's human. I think it interesting that you can't see past the stereotype that you've defined the character with.
All of the characters are "human" in BSG. Including the cylons. They may act odd and have mysterious motivations, and simply be "biological machines" (think about that for a sec), but they are human. But, then again, my personal definition of human is much broader than most.
You keep expecting to see John Wayne? In BSG? WTF? When? At what part of the story did you think that was an appropriate thing to happen within the frame of the plot?
Really. So... what's the weather like your planet?
For a fan production I'd officially say "not bad."
Not bad. Just not bad. Wow, I would really like to see some of the stuff that amateurs and fans are churning out on the planet you live on! This project, "for a fan production", is down right phenomenal. Trust me, I've seen Caribou Moving Pictures' Planet of the Killer Robots.
Yes, the lighting could have been better (and how much of it was the conversion? You can have problems just going from miniDV to VHS). And yes, the audio needs work. And yes, the woman in the red dress is an unconvincing actress. It happens. The trick is not to make the same mistakes again. For every local independent production I'm involved with (whether I'm directing or just crew), I learn more about what works and what doesn't. I know a hell of a lot more about filmmaking now than when I started. And I'm learning more each day.
As a fellow indie filmmaker, I think that everyone at Panic Struck Productions should be damn proud of what they have accomplished.
Render farms are extremely valuable, I agree. Hell, I technically have one in my apartment. When I have a Lightwave 3D project that needs them it saves me days of rendering time. But I'm also not using 20 year old CPU's, either. I have a friend with an Amiga4000 with Video Toaster. It was (and still is) a fantastic editing system. But it literally would take that machine months to render scenes what just one of my current machines can do in minutes. When my boxen aren't rendering, they're running SETI@Home. Which is, really, just a very large, distributed, voluntary render farm.
If you check out these benchmarks you'll see that even the Cray Y-MP could only crunch 67 MFLOPS.
My point was that it would take 75,000 20 year-old PC's (sure, it would take less Y-MP's, but they have their own power and size issues) to equal the processing power (in FP) of a single current technology CPU. And there are more powerful processors than the Opteron x48 out there. The 2.0Ghz G5 can crank 6.0 GFLOPS. That's a 100,000 PC XT/AT's.
Many moons ago, we had a 10 MegaWatt transformer just outside of Phoenix blow. And I do mean blow. People over ten miles away heard the explosion! It is simply not practical to run 75,000 20 year-old computers. 5MW is a practically insane amount of power.
Also my new computer which cost over 100 times what it would cost to build a 20 year old computer can do 5 things at once. Hmm why not spend that money on 100 older computers and do 100 things at once?
Because my computers are running SETI@Home. To get the same performance out of, say IBM PC XT's (or even the Compaq Portable I that I still own and was originally released in 1984), I would need a hell of a lot more than 100 of them. Check this out:
A Zenith Z-100 using 8088/8087 chip(s) running at 10.67 Mhz will do 0.0596 MFLOPS (Millions of Floating Point Operations a Second). That's almost 60 thousand FLOPS.
An Opteron x48 cranks about 4.5 GFLOPS. That's 4.5 Billion FLOPS. That's 75,000 times more work.
Let's do the math, shall we?
75,000 Compaq Portable I's (even tho running at only 4.7Mhz and no 8087 co-proc)
X
70W Power Supplies (IIRC)
=
5.25 MegaWatts! Which is just about 4/10 of 1 percent of the total output of the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant.
Hmmmm... 5.25 Million Watts or 400? I think I'll take the smaller of those two numbers, thank you very much. And I'm sure my neighbors and SETI@Home would agree.
Orion Multisystems makes "cluster workstations" using the Transmeta Efficeon CPU's. You can get them in 12 CPU and 96 CPU flavors.
The 96 CPU C/W draws a maximum of 1500W of power and you can cram three of these things into a 42U rack, for a maximum of 4500W power draw and 288 CPU's.
The 1.4Ghz Efficion can crunch a theoretical 3GFlops.
288 CPU's x 3 GFlops = 864 GFlops(theo/max)
A 2.0Ghz G5 can cruch a theoretical 6GFlops.
A dual 2.0Ghz 1U XServer draws a maximum of 400W. You can cram 42 of them into a 42U rack for a total of 84 CPU's.
84 CPU's x 6 GFlops = 504 GFlops(theo/max)
Except that you're sucking 16,800W, more than three times the power consumption for 2/3 of the processing power. To get the same amount of crunch power, you would need another 60 CPU's and 12,000W.
4500W, hell, I can run that in my apartment! Assuming, of course, that I unplug my washer and dryer.
But it's not like the rebuttal is coming from a totally neutral voice, either.
Um, dude... Why whould a neutral voice respond to anything? Neutral just want to sit on his ass, pick his nose and watch TV.
The instant another's behavior surpasses your level of tolerance, you are no longer neutral. Neutrality is not really a good thing. Neutrality is why people will simply stand by and watch someone get mugged.
Balance? Yes. Ambivalence? Whatever, I guess. Neutrality? Bad Joojoo.
Just this past weekend I spent a more than a few frustrating hours trying to use Cinepaint on a video project.
Okay now, I'd already managed to figure out how to load a sequence of images/frames, but I've got some comments about it before I move to this weekend's stumbling block.
Okay, so it's got the usual drive/dir/file dialogs to select one image. Then, you have to go into another location to load any additional images. Annoying, but not a big deal, really. Now the interface for managing images is quite simple. You can just tell it how many frames (either forward or backward) from your reference frame you want to add. The problem, is that this entire procedure assumes that you know precisely which frames you want to load before you begin.
Well, you sure as hell don't want to use Cinepaint to browse through images. Sure, you can pull up the first frame in a sequence and then page to the next one, so on, until you find your starting and ending frames. But consider that it takes about two seconds to load each frame. If your starting point is one second into the clip, that's one minute of time wasted. The place in the sequence of frames that I wanted to edit just happened to be from frame 114 to 158. Since I already knew just how impractical it was to find this essential bit of info with Cinepaint, I pulled up a whole damn 'nother program (in this case ACDSEE) to decide which frames I needed. That's bad UI design. Period.
Now onto this weekend's nightmare. The Clone tool. I still haven't figured out how to use the damn thing. You can click on the Clone button and you can click on the image, but how the hell do you assign the selected area to a brush? Right click is no help and "Help" tells me all about the parameters of the Clone tool, but doesn't tell me how to use it!
I know it's gotta be something simple, yet also esoteric and non-intuitive. AKA, bad UI design.
But that's okay, it could be worse...
Blender. OMFG! A weekend playing around with that oh-so-aptly named program taught just how much I am willing to pay for a good UI. $790.00 That's the cost of upgrading my current version of Lightwave 3D to the newest and acquiring Napalm for the particle effects that I want to use on another project. It is simply not worth it to spend any more time fighting the UI to try to get something done.
Cinepaint has features that are unique and useful, which is why it is being used in production environments. Blender? Nope.
If you actually pay attention to what Smith says, this is perfectly clear.
Dude, that's like asking the village idiot where babies come from. Smith may not be aware of all the details of what happened previously, and more importantly doesn't care. Smith is bugfuck crazy. He will filter out any data that doesn't agree with his psychosis.
I find it interesting that you insist that the movie "makes no fucking sense" and then tell me to look at the pretty pictures on the Animatrix DVD. You could almost call it... crazy. And yes, I have seen The Animatrix. More than once.
The story wasn't meant to be an avant-garde college film project filled with nonesense for nonesense sake and bitchin' F/X. It has a tight, cohesive plot and important themes. Just because you didn't get it (and refuse understand it further) doesn't mean it ain't there. Calculus looks like garbage if all you know is Algebra.
I always thought that the failsafe was Zion itself. By allowing it to exist, they could basically ensure that humans who made it out of the Matrix would go there and not somewhere/anywhere else. Although we do find out that that is not necessarily the case in the Animatrix.
Besides, why would it be so important to send a hundred thousand sentinels to wipe Zion off the map if it were just another Matrix? It seems harsh in design in a way that the Matrix is not.
As for Smith/Bane, I always thought of it as a mass reprogramming on Bane's brain. Kind of an intense 30 second brainwashing over the phone. It's not a good fit, of course, but I figured that was why the Bane/Smith combo was crazier than either of the two by themselves.
I think that the point of the story (two warring factions coming to peace), is stronger if there wasn't a multiple matrix buffer zone for the machines. It makes it makes the stakes higher for the machines.
Stephen King in On Writing states that every writer has an "Ideal Reader", that person that follows all the plot twists, gets the in-jokes, and has the expected emotional reactions in each scene. He says that he is fortunate enough to be married to his Ideal Reader, Tabitha. It became clear to me after Revolutions that I am pretty damn close to the Wachowski Brothers' Ideal Viewer.
That implication was at the very end of Reloaded, when Neo discovered he could use magic powers "outside" the Matrix.
Wi-Fi.
Really, it's hard to say what was occurring in that scene because it had never happened before. The previous "Ones" never made it past the Architect and the Smith/virus. Somehow with his interaction with either the Keymaker, the Architect, or Smith, Neo gained access past the "firewall" between the Matrix and the rest of the machine world. I would say probably not Smith, just because that was something he desperately wanted as well. I personally had been waiting for Neo to pull something like that since the first movie came out, but then that's mostly because of my own personal world view.
The whole concept of "each time, One creates a virus that will destroy everything unless he stops it an we reboot" is totally silly and unjustified.
Neo/One didn't create the Smith/Virus. Neo and Smith are the anomaly that the Architect speaks about. They are two halves of the same whole. The Architect, at the behest of the machines, used it as a bargaining chip and a chance to update the algorithm of the Matrix programming. The anomaly is a bug in that programming. With a system that complex, it is possible that a virus or other odd phenomena will spontaneously generate and threaten the entire system.
What I believe is that the flaw in the Matrix that caused it to create the anomaly was not a syntax error, but procedural. The algorithm itself was flawed. Mostly because, on some level, humans will reject a controlled environment.
The plan that the Oracle put in place (using Morpheus, Trinity and Neo as pawns for the most part) was extremely risky for the Machines. There was a very real possibility of extinction. But it also had the potential to change the machine/human relationship so they could remove the flaw in the Matrix programming.
Why is it so difficult for people to accept, "Can't we all just get along?" as a valid ending to a story? Why is it that we are not satisfied unless the "bad guy" dies? Do you have any idea how close we were to nuclear war during the Cuban Missle Crisis?
An Evercrack ending? Come on, the ending to Evercrack is that you get bored and you stop playing the game. Because nothing ever changes.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole basis of good UI design is that there is not one way to do things. Forcing the use of keys instead of drop-down menus is bad design. Period. You can use keyboard shortcuts in Lightwave. You can even customize them. You can even assign keys to custom scripts you've written. This customization should be considered a necessity in 3D animation, not an option that takes 10 freakin' years to implement. I'm still using LW5.6. It's in there.
But again in LW, anything you can do using keyboard shortcuts you can also accomplish using drop-down menus. [sarcasm]And check this out! They even list the actual keyboard shortcuts in the list of options in those very menus! Imagine that, pointers to the shortcuts within the very UI instead of buried somewhere in cryptic man pages! Brilliant![/sarcasm]
We shouldn't confuse the conceptual "vocabulary" in 3D animation (the domain) with the process constraints from the interfaces of the programs. I agree that learning 3D animation is hard, but having a painfully autistic UI doesn't make it easier. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing what you want to accomplish, knowing that it is certainly possible, knowing that it should be ridiculously easy, and yet can't figure out the voodoo mouse-twitch keyboard hack to make it happen. And then all the documentation you can find assumes you already know that part and glosses over that step.
It's like banging your head against a brick wall. Eventually, the pains goes away when you stop. 3DS Max has a horrible UI. But, Blender has a monumentally stoopid UI. Now that I think about it, Blender really is a fitting name. Though, maybe they should call it Frog in a Blender.
http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/4.html/
LANDO
But that wasn't our agreement!
DARTH VADER
I have altered our agreement. Pray I don't alter it again.
Tell me about it.
Although, I'm starting to think that our District Attorneys here in AZ need a gift subscription to Playboy...
Man, lemme tell you, it's tempting!
I would say that it's twenty bucks cool, not $179.99 cool.
Maybe ten. Blow money's a bit tight this paycheck.
That's not my primary reason for preferring OGG over MP3. It's the sound quality for the same sized file. That's it.
The sound quality is the reason I'm slowly re-ripping my entire music collection and converting to OGG instead of the original MP3.
The fact that it's non-proprietary and free is just a bonus.
The first reason the list is usually so short, is that most of us here are not avionics experts. There are hundreds of components (possibly thousands) used in current jets that were developed by NASA.
The second reason that the list is short is that most of us are too lazy to do some honest research when posting a reply here on /. As you can probably tell, I'm including myself in this...
You're a movie critic, aren't you? Kidding. Honestly though, either help or shut up and get out of the way. Like adam(1231), I am also a filmmaker (albeit, still amateur). One of the pipe dreams I've had for years is to film Robert Heinlein's "The Menace from Earth". There's only one place that can be acheived: the moon. Practical? Hell no. Worth it? Hell yes.
There are plenty segments of the human population that wouldn't pain me to disappear in a cloud of radioactive particles *cough* red states *cough*, but I certainly believe that what we have acheived as human beings is important, beautiful and good. Those 'others' are just the bottom end of the bell curve. I, personally, would rather be at the other end of said bell curve.
Actually, if I recall correctly, the designs for the Saturn V's are lost. For some reason or another, the paper simply never got saved. The 'fives' would have to be completely reengineered.
That way I don't have to have a barcode scanner stuffed down my pants when I go shopping.
I've gotta friend that has the Sigma SD10 (a DLSR) that uses the X3 chip. He giggles like a school girl when he talks about it. It's kind of disturbing. Of course, the pics he takes with it are phenomenal.
Yes. The Beatles would be able to make it today.
Now, granted they wouldn't sound like a band busy blowing the lids off of people in the sixties, but more like a band doing the very same thing in the 90's and 00's. They would probably sound more like Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, The Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, DJ Shadow, Thievery Corporation, Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, Marilyn Manson, Angelo Badlamenti, Danny Elfman (Boingo and beyond), etc and ad nauseum. And those are just the guys (well, mostly)! There are a lot of male and female "Mozart's" and "Beethoven's" running around today.
And as for popular music, well, even in Mozart's day, only a small percentage of people went to Symphony concerts and Operas. Most spent their time hanging out in pubs singing baudy tunes at the top of their lungs. Which, admittedly, also has its own personal attraction and charm.
http://www.singinst.org/GISAI/index.html/ General Intelligence and Seed AI.
and
http://www.singinst.org/CFAI/index.html/ Creating Friendly AI.
Both really drive home the complexity of creating AI. The human brain isn't merely a "database engine that applies statistical rules to the queries it processes" . It's a carefully networked collection of highly specialized modules, of which one could be called the Bayesian Statistical Module. Bayesian statistical analysis is quite important to AI, but as Eliezer Yudkowsky (the author of the two listed papers) states, "It is necessary, but not sufficient."
Actually, it more than simply implies that they have mass. You cannot have momentum without mass. You can have velocity without mass (in the case of neutrinos, I think), but not momentum. In fact, this is how you calculate momentum:
p = mv
p = momentum
m = mass
v = velocity
However, if I were doing this seriously, I would be shopping here.
DS-96
96 CPU's (Efficeon)
230 GFlops
1500W Max Power
Is the hardware cheaper? No. But once you factor in the power and cooling infrastructure and costs, it's definitely the way to go. Especially when you consider that 22 of the above machines will give you 2112 CPU's cranking away with a max power draw of 33,000 Watts, instead of 750,000 Watts.
Granted, with WTSI's setup, there's still the consideration of power and cooling requirements for the storage arrays. Not an insignificant issue.
I know that it's not a good idea to feed the trolls, but...
The characters in BSG are not stereotypical. They are archetypal. You are stereotyping them. There is a hell of a lot more going on with (taking your example) Starbuck than being "a hot-shot cop/pilot who cant keep his/her mouth shut & is constantly fighting with the chief/C-O". Just watch her face. This girl has issues. Baggage, failures, occasional successes. She's human. I think it interesting that you can't see past the stereotype that you've defined the character with.
All of the characters are "human" in BSG. Including the cylons. They may act odd and have mysterious motivations, and simply be "biological machines" (think about that for a sec), but they are human. But, then again, my personal definition of human is much broader than most.
You keep expecting to see John Wayne? In BSG? WTF? When? At what part of the story did you think that was an appropriate thing to happen within the frame of the plot?
It's time to upgrade your eyes.
...the sale of baseball bats has hit an all time high!
Talk about planned obsolescence...
Really. So... what's the weather like your planet?
Not bad. Just not bad. Wow, I would really like to see some of the stuff that amateurs and fans are churning out on the planet you live on! This project, "for a fan production", is down right phenomenal. Trust me, I've seen Caribou Moving Pictures' Planet of the Killer Robots.
Yes, the lighting could have been better (and how much of it was the conversion? You can have problems just going from miniDV to VHS). And yes, the audio needs work. And yes, the woman in the red dress is an unconvincing actress. It happens. The trick is not to make the same mistakes again. For every local independent production I'm involved with (whether I'm directing or just crew), I learn more about what works and what doesn't. I know a hell of a lot more about filmmaking now than when I started. And I'm learning more each day.
As a fellow indie filmmaker, I think that everyone at Panic Struck Productions should be damn proud of what they have accomplished.
If you check out these benchmarks you'll see that even the Cray Y-MP could only crunch 67 MFLOPS.
My point was that it would take 75,000 20 year-old PC's (sure, it would take less Y-MP's, but they have their own power and size issues) to equal the processing power (in FP) of a single current technology CPU. And there are more powerful processors than the Opteron x48 out there. The 2.0Ghz G5 can crank 6.0 GFLOPS. That's a 100,000 PC XT/AT's.
Many moons ago, we had a 10 MegaWatt transformer just outside of Phoenix blow. And I do mean blow. People over ten miles away heard the explosion! It is simply not practical to run 75,000 20 year-old computers. 5MW is a practically insane amount of power.
Because my computers are running SETI@Home. To get the same performance out of, say IBM PC XT's (or even the Compaq Portable I that I still own and was originally released in 1984), I would need a hell of a lot more than 100 of them. Check this out:
A Zenith Z-100 using 8088/8087 chip(s) running at 10.67 Mhz will do 0.0596 MFLOPS (Millions of Floating Point Operations a Second). That's almost 60 thousand FLOPS.
An Opteron x48 cranks about 4.5 GFLOPS. That's 4.5 Billion FLOPS. That's 75,000 times more work.
Let's do the math, shall we?
75,000 Compaq Portable I's (even tho running at only 4.7Mhz and no 8087 co-proc)
X
70W Power Supplies (IIRC)
=
5.25 MegaWatts! Which is just about 4/10 of 1 percent of the total output of the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant.
Hmmmm... 5.25 Million Watts or 400? I think I'll take the smaller of those two numbers, thank you very much. And I'm sure my neighbors and SETI@Home would agree.
The 96 CPU C/W draws a maximum of 1500W of power and you can cram three of these things into a 42U rack, for a maximum of 4500W power draw and 288 CPU's.
The 1.4Ghz Efficion can crunch a theoretical 3GFlops.
288 CPU's x 3 GFlops = 864 GFlops(theo/max)
A 2.0Ghz G5 can cruch a theoretical 6GFlops.
A dual 2.0Ghz 1U XServer draws a maximum of 400W. You can cram 42 of them into a 42U rack for a total of 84 CPU's.
84 CPU's x 6 GFlops = 504 GFlops(theo/max)
Except that you're sucking 16,800W, more than three times the power consumption for 2/3 of the processing power. To get the same amount of crunch power, you would need another 60 CPU's and 12,000W.
4500W, hell, I can run that in my apartment! Assuming, of course, that I unplug my washer and dryer.
28.8KW? Fuhgeddaboutit.
This is why Transmeta kicks ass.
Um, dude... Why whould a neutral voice respond to anything? Neutral just want to sit on his ass, pick his nose and watch TV.
The instant another's behavior surpasses your level of tolerance, you are no longer neutral. Neutrality is not really a good thing. Neutrality is why people will simply stand by and watch someone get mugged.
Balance? Yes. Ambivalence? Whatever, I guess. Neutrality? Bad Joojoo.
Okay now, I'd already managed to figure out how to load a sequence of images/frames, but I've got some comments about it before I move to this weekend's stumbling block.
Okay, so it's got the usual drive/dir/file dialogs to select one image. Then, you have to go into another location to load any additional images. Annoying, but not a big deal, really. Now the interface for managing images is quite simple. You can just tell it how many frames (either forward or backward) from your reference frame you want to add. The problem, is that this entire procedure assumes that you know precisely which frames you want to load before you begin.
Well, you sure as hell don't want to use Cinepaint to browse through images. Sure, you can pull up the first frame in a sequence and then page to the next one, so on, until you find your starting and ending frames. But consider that it takes about two seconds to load each frame. If your starting point is one second into the clip, that's one minute of time wasted. The place in the sequence of frames that I wanted to edit just happened to be from frame 114 to 158. Since I already knew just how impractical it was to find this essential bit of info with Cinepaint, I pulled up a whole damn 'nother program (in this case ACDSEE) to decide which frames I needed. That's bad UI design. Period.
Now onto this weekend's nightmare. The Clone tool. I still haven't figured out how to use the damn thing. You can click on the Clone button and you can click on the image, but how the hell do you assign the selected area to a brush? Right click is no help and "Help" tells me all about the parameters of the Clone tool, but doesn't tell me how to use it!
I know it's gotta be something simple, yet also esoteric and non-intuitive. AKA, bad UI design.
But that's okay, it could be worse...
Blender. OMFG! A weekend playing around with that oh-so-aptly named program taught just how much I am willing to pay for a good UI. $790.00 That's the cost of upgrading my current version of Lightwave 3D to the newest and acquiring Napalm for the particle effects that I want to use on another project. It is simply not worth it to spend any more time fighting the UI to try to get something done.
Cinepaint has features that are unique and useful, which is why it is being used in production environments. Blender? Nope.
Naw, even better:
gelginite grits!
Is that an explosion in your pants or are you just happy to see me?
Dude, that's like asking the village idiot where babies come from. Smith may not be aware of all the details of what happened previously, and more importantly doesn't care. Smith is bugfuck crazy. He will filter out any data that doesn't agree with his psychosis.
I find it interesting that you insist that the movie "makes no fucking sense" and then tell me to look at the pretty pictures on the Animatrix DVD. You could almost call it... crazy. And yes, I have seen The Animatrix. More than once.
The story wasn't meant to be an avant-garde college film project filled with nonesense for nonesense sake and bitchin' F/X. It has a tight, cohesive plot and important themes. Just because you didn't get it (and refuse understand it further) doesn't mean it ain't there. Calculus looks like garbage if all you know is Algebra.
Besides, why would it be so important to send a hundred thousand sentinels to wipe Zion off the map if it were just another Matrix? It seems harsh in design in a way that the Matrix is not.
As for Smith/Bane, I always thought of it as a mass reprogramming on Bane's brain. Kind of an intense 30 second brainwashing over the phone. It's not a good fit, of course, but I figured that was why the Bane/Smith combo was crazier than either of the two by themselves.
I think that the point of the story (two warring factions coming to peace), is stronger if there wasn't a multiple matrix buffer zone for the machines. It makes it makes the stakes higher for the machines.
Stephen King in On Writing states that every writer has an "Ideal Reader", that person that follows all the plot twists, gets the in-jokes, and has the expected emotional reactions in each scene. He says that he is fortunate enough to be married to his Ideal Reader, Tabitha. It became clear to me after Revolutions that I am pretty damn close to the Wachowski Brothers' Ideal Viewer.
Wi-Fi.
Really, it's hard to say what was occurring in that scene because it had never happened before. The previous "Ones" never made it past the Architect and the Smith/virus. Somehow with his interaction with either the Keymaker, the Architect, or Smith, Neo gained access past the "firewall" between the Matrix and the rest of the machine world. I would say probably not Smith, just because that was something he desperately wanted as well. I personally had been waiting for Neo to pull something like that since the first movie came out, but then that's mostly because of my own personal world view.
The whole concept of "each time, One creates a virus that will destroy everything unless he stops it an we reboot" is totally silly and unjustified.
Neo/One didn't create the Smith/Virus. Neo and Smith are the anomaly that the Architect speaks about. They are two halves of the same whole. The Architect, at the behest of the machines, used it as a bargaining chip and a chance to update the algorithm of the Matrix programming. The anomaly is a bug in that programming. With a system that complex, it is possible that a virus or other odd phenomena will spontaneously generate and threaten the entire system.
What I believe is that the flaw in the Matrix that caused it to create the anomaly was not a syntax error, but procedural. The algorithm itself was flawed. Mostly because, on some level, humans will reject a controlled environment.
The plan that the Oracle put in place (using Morpheus, Trinity and Neo as pawns for the most part) was extremely risky for the Machines. There was a very real possibility of extinction. But it also had the potential to change the machine/human relationship so they could remove the flaw in the Matrix programming.
Why is it so difficult for people to accept, "Can't we all just get along?" as a valid ending to a story? Why is it that we are not satisfied unless the "bad guy" dies? Do you have any idea how close we were to nuclear war during the Cuban Missle Crisis?
An Evercrack ending? Come on, the ending to Evercrack is that you get bored and you stop playing the game. Because nothing ever changes.