I was born with conjenital dislocation of the hips, which successively degraded over the years so that I had to have both hips replaced with artificial ones in 1995 at the age of 31. Although these artificial hips have been very good, I have to be careful about my weight and that I don't do jarring kinds of sports or lift heavy weights. I would have given a lot for this kind of implant to replace my degraded hips.
I'm really proud that a fellow South African is doing something constructive for the country. I would be even more proud if Thabo and co realised the dangers of relying on Microsoft and the plus points and ease of Linux in schools, where porting the software to whatever language you want is a real possibility.
I am so glad that you are taking time off your busy schedule of raping the public's personal freedoms to further the cause of rapacious corporate greed while 14% of the nation lives under the poverty line.
One. The IOC not allowing athletes to post to blogs during competition is, IMO, not such a bad idea. Take the Greek sprinter duo who may well have faked a motorcycle accident in order to avoid doping. Their case has caused outrage amongst both Greek supporters and people who believe they should be banned and will probably go on for a long time (The Greeks, in typical fashion believe themselves to be the victims of an American lead conspiracy). Can you imagine the sheer amount of verbiage flying around if each and every athlete that didn't make Gold started accusing other athletes and the IOC etc for their own failures.
Two. The IOC making rules about posting athletes private images and videos after the events is a strange one and I'm not too sure that it would in fact hold up in court, especially in countries with freedom of speech laws. If the images and videos are not sold commercially, I'm not too sure that there is much the IOC can do about it (Athletes signatures on IOC contracts however, may hold precedence however). On a side note, I was trying to purchase a Sydney Olympic swimming video last night as a motivational aid for my own swimming, only to discover that not only is the video not available on a DVD, but's it's also out of stock and only available in NTSC, which sucks here in Europe. Fine coverage there, commercial companies, eh?
Three. The tickets not selling well this year probably has a lot to do with the fear of terrorism and the general global recession going on. The Madrid attacks were in March this year, and the Greeks are not known for their organisational strengths. I am not surprised that not all that mayn tickets have been sold. You can OBL, GW, the war in Iraq and all those wonderful companies sending jobs to India and China for that.
I am fluent in German, Swiss-German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans and speak good French and I've lived in Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and Holland and I can utterly attest to the fact that a language affects your personality. I know that when I speak Swiss-German, I feel "less mentally supple", than when I speak German, for instance, and I remember having a number of conversations with Germans in Holland about how different one felt when speaking Dutch.
That the numerous incompatibilities and bugs that cropped up with XP, such as the piss poor performance with Netware, were in fact sanctioned by managment?
Ahmen, I really don't know why no one sees this. And although everyone gets upset when his or her nation doesn't suddenly win gold, I personally do enjoy it when once in a while the Americans don't clean out the whole circus.
I know a lot of Americans are disappointed that Team USA(TM) is not doing its usual thing of clearing up most of the medals at the olympic games, as has happened in most of the olympics in past decades, but I fail to see the reason why. The Americans are doing very well nonetheless and will probably move up in medal listings as the games progress, although I suspect that China will be the overall winner this year.
I think a lot of comments about how boring the olympics are has to do with that dented national pride as well as the fact that Americans are somewhat less sporty than average (pure speculation based on hamburger consumption) although women's beach volleyball certainly has done wonders for viewing quotas;)
Another problem is that Americans, IMO, tend to overhype anything they see as a potential winner. The NYTimes had an article last week "Built To Swim" on Michael Phelps, heaping praise onto the young man in a manner similar to the way that MacDonalds visitors heap extra dressing onto their food in no less than four pages. If that wasn't building the man up for a fall then I don't know what was. Michael Phelps is an amazing swimmer, make no mistake, but so are Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband and both have the advantage of experience in coping with olympic nerves.
I also suspect that Americans, who invested large sums in sport during the cold war in the war of national prestige over the east block, and cruised along in the post cold war years after their former competitors fell apart, are now suffering from a lack of focus and the fact that other emerging nations such as Australia have a better focus in winning at the games.
But cheer up. If China does emerge as an international competitor to the US, I'm sure that the US will once again knuckle down and get that sweat pouring for some national prestige.
I can see the reason why GW does not often do interviews:Bushisms. The man is so obviously unable to articulate himself in his own language, and very probably think in it (His latest one on Tribal sovreignty was really painful) that I'm am pretty sure his campaign advisors such as Karl "Goebbels" Rove almost crap themselves every time GW has to answer impromptu questions in public. A good deal of the USA might be unable to use their own language properly and appreciate the fact that their president is as dumb as they are, but I think the majority are probably more than a little worried now that GW "The Chimp" Bush is really an utter idiot acting as puppet for a group of far right fanatics.
I often aks myself a number of questions related to discovering civilisations via radio waves.
Firstly, the strength of radio signals decreases proportionally to the inverse cube of the distance from the planet. That means that a signal is extremely weak over the many light years where another listening civilisation might be. Normal radio signals, even those shaped via a satellite dish, are not coherent, such as a laser is, and the spread should easily make that signal almost undeciferable over the cosmic background noise at multi-light year distances.
Secondly, even if the signal is extremely strong and/or coherent, where exactly do you aim it? In oder to reach a possible civilisation, one would probably aim the signal within a star's habitable zone, but which star? Alpha Centauri? Sigma Draconis? And for how long?
Thirdly, how do we know that a civilisation even uses radio signals. Granted, light signals are obvious in view of the natural light and radio of the sun, but what about a civilsation that discovers and uses charged particles as a communication medium before they use radio waves, or what about a signal technology in a civilisation that is far ahead of us and that we have no way of recognising.
Although the idea of licencing its OS or harware would be impossible today (OSX on x86 would have no software), and Apple's foray into clones in the mid-90s almost killed them, they could possibly have created a large market for clones if they had done so earlier.
The question is more that they would have had to charge high prices for the licences of the MacROM (prior to the neworld machines that had the ROM in software) and/or the motherboard design in order to offset the loss in marketshare of their hardware.
If Apple had stuck to three basic designs - one desktop, one laptop, one tower - plus perhaps reserving special stuff like the iMac as Apple only and made sure that the quality of their machines were absolutely the best, I'm pretty sure that sales would have been high enough in the professional Mac sector in order to let the clones live and hopefully raise overall MacOS marketshare. I refer to the quality as important because Macs used to be the most qualitative computers around, but over the years have dropped slightly in order to reduce costs. I mean, IBM's Thinkpads sell extremely well despite their high price chiefly because of their quality, and this in the cut throat PC market where most stuff is dirt cheap and dirt crap, quality wise.
Apple invests a large amount in R&D and would need to basically finance that in order to grow and survive. If Apple had continued on their way, iMac and iBooks (both with looks copyrighted or patented), iPod, OSX (free on Apple's machines, discounted as OEM to clones but still with a price), excellent software division (FCP, shake etc) they would have possibly less hassle today than they do, and a higher marketshare to boot.
Not only that but a higher marketshare would bring CPU prices down.
I think that John Howard's government has been one of the worst things that has ever happened to Australian sovreignty. Even senior former diplomats and military personel have signed a petition accusing him of selling out Australia's independence to the USA, something which he consistently denies, but which is plenty obvious to a lot of people both in and outside of Australia.
First his undying support for the USA in Iraq against all advice, then his signing of the FTA, which will probably not improve Australia's economic position as much as it improves the USA's economic position, and which is one step of the way to making Australia economically dependent on the USA.
I hope the little bastard gets his arse kicked in the coming elections, whereupon he can go visit his former cronies Bush and Blair and reminisce about their glorious pasts as nation builders and great leaders in an old age home for the mentally unstable.
Although the original auther didn't bother, here is a basic list of what some of the patents are: Tabbed browsing... Reading fees for web based applications... Web shopping basket.... 60 Firewall patents.... Jpeg compression... Windowing systems... Document creation via macros... Multitasking... SMB/CIFS... Web based deployment...
These patents are literally criminal. Why bother to use a computer at all. Why bother to even consider working in IT since, due to patents, you're fucked the moment you write your first line of code. Christ alfuckingmighty, Microsoft and these fucking patents make one feel like being back in the fucking dark ages when you were forced by law to pay taxes to the fucking church just because they were there.
I'm going to work in a fucking restaurant as a waiter. At least there I know why the customers and the boss treat me like shit.
I am surprised that everybody and his mother read the words convergence and phone without reading to the end of the article. The guy is making less of a point that Apple wants to sell iTunes on phones than he is about Apple selling music and video over computers, phones and other nifty little gadgets such as Airport express. He is making the case for Apple controlling the DRM content through convergence of devices such as phones, Airport express and computers.
. The lawsuits were quite nasty, and DEC decided not to press for triple damages on every copy of NT sold in return for NT always being supported on the new Alpha chips from DEC.
If DEC had been as good in court as they were in chip and OS making, they would have stuck to the royalties on NT, from which they would have been able to comfortably live for the rest of their lives without ever having to do a single thing about it.
No doubt, if that had happened, BillG would have shat himself and set about doing a complete rewrite of NT, possibly using someone else's bought up code.
Hi, if you google around, you'll find two free short AR stories on the web, "Spirey and the Queen" and "A spy in Europa". Both of them are excellent, short, to the point have none of the Problems his longer books have. That, I think is AR's problem. He loses sight of where he's going and where he's coming from and where he wants to be in his longer books.
I've read his entire Revelation Space series. His stories have an incredible problem with pacing and his characters are about as believable as cardboard puppets and have similar personalities. Most of the personalities of his characters can be interchanged with one another without any problem.
His vision of technology is what is interesting in his books but that's it.
I suppose it is natural that a lot of people from Europe and the US think of South Africa as being some semi-backward bush country where the majority of the people have no access to running water, let alone a telephone, given that the majority of the news coming out of Africa is from such places as Rwanda, Nigeria or Liberia. But I must shake my head in wonder sometimes, given that a simple google search on South Africa will reveal that not only is it a major tourist destination of many millions of Europeans each year, but that it has a first world infrastructure, including the ability to use a GSM cellphone non stop all the way from Cape Town, in the very South, across the desert to Johannesburg and the very North of the country.
South Africa is by far the most developed country in Africa. That part of that is a legacy of Apartheid is true, but it hasn't exactly fallen apart since then, and its economy is doing very well.
The problems in South Africa have mainly to do with lack of educational material, HIV, crime und unemployment, four things that can arguably be tackled by better access to information and an indigenous IT industry (which does exist but lacks R &D funds to really take off) which would help both employment and knowledge about issues.
As in most of the world, the vast majority of PC's are running Windows, most often an OEM version, but piracy is rampant as running around checking on Windows versions is not a priority. While English is the Lingua Franca of SA, there is of course almost no Windows software that is written in one of the other 10 official languages, and the cost of supporting Windows makes it unlikely that that will ever happen.
This is where Linux really shines. The fact that computers are really good for other things than just Word, Powerpoint and Excell may not be apparent, but imagine the effect of a simple school computer, such as this HP one, in a poor school in a rural area, which will have a simple dial-up modem, but four monitors, keyboards and mice, running Linux:
It allows the children to learn the very inner workings of an OS
A Wiki, or any one of dozens of OSS CMS solutions, allow the children to accumulate, synchronise and most importantly, add to information, in their own language as well as help them learn to use English better than they do
If used correctly, through an educational support network, administration can be done remotely, and with time by staff as they learn the workings of the system - a simple backup solution to CD can save lots of hassle
Linux makes the application of security much less of a headache than windows does
With a large enough HD, web content can be cached locally
Those children who show interest and aptitude can easily learn the basics of coding and system administration, enabling them to move on to careers in it
Licence costs fall away. There is no chance of vendor lock in in the future
I imagine it's a volcano. I think that would account for the large amounts of Methane in the atmosphere. Have there been any Thermal images of Titan's surface yet? The gravitational tides of saturn could account for the volcanic activity, I think.
1950's Kodacolor, trolls and new techniques
on
Photon Soup Update
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Firstly, I'm kind of irritated that the usual slashdot troll crowd expends so much hatred and ignorance on a truly creative project. The technique might not be using OpenGL, DirectX or ATi or NVidia's newest cards, but that is no reason to trash talk a technique that, in a few years time, might revolutionise CGI work in movies.
And in movie production is where this technique will most probably eventually find use. Movie studios have the budget and the server farm equipment to make good use of a time and resource expensive technique such as this.
And they certainly would want to. The images have almost exactly the same quality as grainy 1950's kodacolor or poor images from my 1970's vintage Kodak instamatic. While adding grain to a movie is no problem, most rendering techniques used today produce surfaces that are simply too clean and glass effects that are too clear, and this immediately gets picked up by the human eye, which is very good at subliminally noticing differences in image quality. Tracing the paths of photons and their interaction through and with materials produces images that mimic reality in an excellent way, IMO.
I'm pretty sure that a large cluster, such as the one using Apple's G5s at Virginia tech, running optimised C or C++ code would be able to produce usable footage for movies. And what's more, I'm pretty sure that sooner or later, there will be tools to make this technique more accessable.
I think that once this gains traction, very much like the new music did in the 90's after everyone had gotten verilly sick of hair farming rock and roll excesses, there will be nothing to stop it. Imagine, you walk into a Linux store and your Linux DJ guru behind the bench cooks you up your own custom distro with tools to suit your particular addiction.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned John Titor when they read this: The site (Disclaimer: I personally think the guy is an incredibly good internet hoaxer, but a lot of what he said is extremely chilling)
Slashdot Mirror
I was born with conjenital dislocation of the hips, which successively degraded over the years so that I had to have both hips replaced with artificial ones in 1995 at the age of 31. Although these artificial hips have been very good, I have to be careful about my weight and that I don't do jarring kinds of sports or lift heavy weights. I would have given a lot for this kind of implant to replace my degraded hips.
Perhaps in the future...
I'm really proud that a fellow South African is doing something constructive for the country. I would be even more proud if Thabo and co realised the dangers of relying on Microsoft and the plus points and ease of Linux in schools, where porting the software to whatever language you want is a real possibility.
I am so glad that you are taking time off your busy schedule of raping the public's personal freedoms to further the cause of rapacious corporate greed while 14% of the nation lives under the poverty line.
Yours Truly
The RIAA and the MPAA
One. The IOC not allowing athletes to post to blogs during competition is, IMO, not such a bad idea. Take the Greek sprinter duo who may well have faked a motorcycle accident in order to avoid doping. Their case has caused outrage amongst both Greek supporters and people who believe they should be banned and will probably go on for a long time (The Greeks, in typical fashion believe themselves to be the victims of an American lead conspiracy). Can you imagine the sheer amount of verbiage flying around if each and every athlete that didn't make Gold started accusing other athletes and the IOC etc for their own failures.
Two. The IOC making rules about posting athletes private images and videos after the events is a strange one and I'm not too sure that it would in fact hold up in court, especially in countries with freedom of speech laws. If the images and videos are not sold commercially, I'm not too sure that there is much the IOC can do about it (Athletes signatures on IOC contracts however, may hold precedence however). On a side note, I was trying to purchase a Sydney Olympic swimming video last night as a motivational aid for my own swimming, only to discover that not only is the video not available on a DVD, but's it's also out of stock and only available in NTSC, which sucks here in Europe. Fine coverage there, commercial companies, eh?
Three. The tickets not selling well this year probably has a lot to do with the fear of terrorism and the general global recession going on. The Madrid attacks were in March this year, and the Greeks are not known for their organisational strengths. I am not surprised that not all that mayn tickets have been sold. You can OBL, GW, the war in Iraq and all those wonderful companies sending jobs to India and China for that.
I am fluent in German, Swiss-German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans and speak good French and I've lived in Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and Holland and I can utterly attest to the fact that a language affects your personality. I know that when I speak Swiss-German, I feel "less mentally supple", than when I speak German, for instance, and I remember having a number of conversations with Germans in Holland about how different one felt when speaking Dutch.
That the numerous incompatibilities and bugs that cropped up with XP, such as the piss poor performance with Netware, were in fact sanctioned by managment?
Interesting.
Ahmen, I really don't know why no one sees this. And although everyone gets upset when his or her nation doesn't suddenly win gold, I personally do enjoy it when once in a while the Americans don't clean out the whole circus.
Did I meantion Americans in that sentence about McDonalds, you fucking oversensitive fat pig.
I know a lot of Americans are disappointed that Team USA(TM) is not doing its usual thing of clearing up most of the medals at the olympic games, as has happened in most of the olympics in past decades, but I fail to see the reason why. The Americans are doing very well nonetheless and will probably move up in medal listings as the games progress, although I suspect that China will be the overall winner this year.
;)
I think a lot of comments about how boring the olympics are has to do with that dented national pride as well as the fact that Americans are somewhat less sporty than average (pure speculation based on hamburger consumption) although women's beach volleyball certainly has done wonders for viewing quotas
Another problem is that Americans, IMO, tend to overhype anything they see as a potential winner. The NYTimes had an article last week "Built To Swim" on Michael Phelps, heaping praise onto the young man in a manner similar to the way that MacDonalds visitors heap extra dressing onto their food in no less than four pages. If that wasn't building the man up for a fall then I don't know what was. Michael Phelps is an amazing swimmer, make no mistake, but so are Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband and both have the advantage of experience in coping with olympic nerves.
I also suspect that Americans, who invested large sums in sport during the cold war in the war of national prestige over the east block, and cruised along in the post cold war years after their former competitors fell apart, are now suffering from a lack of focus and the fact that other emerging nations such as Australia have a better focus in winning at the games.
But cheer up. If China does emerge as an international competitor to the US, I'm sure that the US will once again knuckle down and get that sweat pouring for some national prestige.
When he wrote this:
"As clearly demonstrated, other than the toy OS Mac OS X, Windows has the lowest TC0 on the market."
My Mac started making funny noises sort of like a baby sobbing. I had to spend about an hour reassuring it that the article was only a joke.
I can see the reason why GW does not often do interviews:Bushisms. The man is so obviously unable to articulate himself in his own language, and very probably think in it (His latest one on Tribal sovreignty was really painful) that I'm am pretty sure his campaign advisors such as Karl "Goebbels" Rove almost crap themselves every time GW has to answer impromptu questions in public. A good deal of the USA might be unable to use their own language properly and appreciate the fact that their president is as dumb as they are, but I think the majority are probably more than a little worried now that GW "The Chimp" Bush is really an utter idiot acting as puppet for a group of far right fanatics.
I often aks myself a number of questions related to discovering civilisations via radio waves.
Firstly, the strength of radio signals decreases proportionally to the inverse cube of the distance from the planet. That means that a signal is extremely weak over the many light years where another listening civilisation might be. Normal radio signals, even those shaped via a satellite dish, are not coherent, such as a laser is, and the spread should easily make that signal almost undeciferable over the cosmic background noise at multi-light year distances.
Secondly, even if the signal is extremely strong and/or coherent, where exactly do you aim it? In oder to reach a possible civilisation, one would probably aim the signal within a star's habitable zone, but which star? Alpha Centauri? Sigma Draconis? And for how long?
Thirdly, how do we know that a civilisation even uses radio signals. Granted, light signals are obvious in view of the natural light and radio of the sun, but what about a civilsation that discovers and uses charged particles as a communication medium before they use radio waves, or what about a signal technology in a civilisation that is far ahead of us and that we have no way of recognising.
Although the idea of licencing its OS or harware would be impossible today (OSX on x86 would have no software), and Apple's foray into clones in the mid-90s almost killed them, they could possibly have created a large market for clones if they had done so earlier.
The question is more that they would have had to charge high prices for the licences of the MacROM (prior to the neworld machines that had the ROM in software) and/or the motherboard design in order to offset the loss in marketshare of their hardware.
If Apple had stuck to three basic designs - one desktop, one laptop, one tower - plus perhaps reserving special stuff like the iMac as Apple only and made sure that the quality of their machines were absolutely the best, I'm pretty sure that sales would have been high enough in the professional Mac sector in order to let the clones live and hopefully raise overall MacOS marketshare. I refer to the quality as important because Macs used to be the most qualitative computers around, but over the years have dropped slightly in order to reduce costs. I mean, IBM's Thinkpads sell extremely well despite their high price chiefly because of their quality, and this in the cut throat PC market where most stuff is dirt cheap and dirt crap, quality wise.
Apple invests a large amount in R&D and would need to basically finance that in order to grow and survive. If Apple had continued on their way, iMac and iBooks (both with looks copyrighted or patented), iPod, OSX (free on Apple's machines, discounted as OEM to clones but still with a price), excellent software division (FCP, shake etc) they would have possibly less hassle today than they do, and a higher marketshare to boot.
Not only that but a higher marketshare would bring CPU prices down.
I think that John Howard's government has been one of the worst things that has ever happened to Australian sovreignty. Even senior former diplomats and military personel have signed a petition accusing him of selling out Australia's independence to the USA, something which he consistently denies, but which is plenty obvious to a lot of people both in and outside of Australia.
First his undying support for the USA in Iraq against all advice, then his signing of the FTA, which will probably not improve Australia's economic position as much as it improves the USA's economic position, and which is one step of the way to making Australia economically dependent on the USA.
I hope the little bastard gets his arse kicked in the coming elections, whereupon he can go visit his former cronies Bush and Blair and reminisce about their glorious pasts as nation builders and great leaders in an old age home for the mentally unstable.
Although the original auther didn't bother, here is a basic list of what some of the patents are:
Tabbed browsing...
Reading fees for web based applications...
Web shopping basket....
60 Firewall patents....
Jpeg compression...
Windowing systems...
Document creation via macros...
Multitasking...
SMB/CIFS...
Web based deployment...
These patents are literally criminal. Why bother to use a computer at all. Why bother to even consider working in IT since, due to patents, you're fucked the moment you write your first line of code. Christ alfuckingmighty, Microsoft and these fucking patents make one feel like being back in the fucking dark ages when you were forced by law to pay taxes to the fucking church just because they were there.
I'm going to work in a fucking restaurant as a waiter. At least there I know why the customers and the boss treat me like shit.
I am surprised that everybody and his mother read the words convergence and phone without reading to the end of the article. The guy is making less of a point that Apple wants to sell iTunes on phones than he is about Apple selling music and video over computers, phones and other nifty little gadgets such as Airport express. He is making the case for Apple controlling the DRM content through convergence of devices such as phones, Airport express and computers.
It's a fine but important difference.
. The lawsuits were quite nasty, and DEC decided not to press for triple damages on every copy of NT sold in return for NT always being supported on the new Alpha chips from DEC.
If DEC had been as good in court as they were in chip and OS making, they would have stuck to the royalties on NT, from which they would have been able to comfortably live for the rest of their lives without ever having to do a single thing about it.
No doubt, if that had happened, BillG would have shat himself and set about doing a complete rewrite of NT, possibly using someone else's bought up code.
Hi, if you google around, you'll find two free short AR stories on the web, "Spirey and the Queen" and "A spy in Europa". Both of them are excellent, short, to the point have none of the Problems his longer books have. That, I think is AR's problem. He loses sight of where he's going and where he's coming from and where he wants to be in his longer books.
I've read his entire Revelation Space series. His stories have an incredible problem with pacing and his characters are about as believable as cardboard puppets and have similar personalities. Most of the personalities of his characters can be interchanged with one another without any problem.
His vision of technology is what is interesting in his books but that's it.
South Africa is by far the most developed country in Africa. That part of that is a legacy of Apartheid is true, but it hasn't exactly fallen apart since then, and its economy is doing very well.
The problems in South Africa have mainly to do with lack of educational material, HIV, crime und unemployment, four things that can arguably be tackled by better access to information and an indigenous IT industry (which does exist but lacks R &D funds to really take off) which would help both employment and knowledge about issues.
As in most of the world, the vast majority of PC's are running Windows, most often an OEM version, but piracy is rampant as running around checking on Windows versions is not a priority. While English is the Lingua Franca of SA, there is of course almost no Windows software that is written in one of the other 10 official languages, and the cost of supporting Windows makes it unlikely that that will ever happen.
This is where Linux really shines. The fact that computers are really good for other things than just Word, Powerpoint and Excell may not be apparent, but imagine the effect of a simple school computer, such as this HP one, in a poor school in a rural area, which will have a simple dial-up modem, but four monitors, keyboards and mice, running Linux:
I think this is a wonderful solution.
It was his mom and dad!
Oh, you meant Linux. Oops.
I imagine it's a volcano. I think that would account for the large amounts of Methane in the atmosphere. Have there been any Thermal images of Titan's surface yet? The gravitational tides of saturn could account for the volcanic activity, I think.
Firstly, I'm kind of irritated that the usual slashdot troll crowd expends so much hatred and ignorance on a truly creative project. The technique might not be using OpenGL, DirectX or ATi or NVidia's newest cards, but that is no reason to trash talk a technique that, in a few years time, might revolutionise CGI work in movies.
And in movie production is where this technique will most probably eventually find use. Movie studios have the budget and the server farm equipment to make good use of a time and resource expensive technique such as this.
And they certainly would want to. The images have almost exactly the same quality as grainy 1950's kodacolor or poor images from my 1970's vintage Kodak instamatic. While adding grain to a movie is no problem, most rendering techniques used today produce surfaces that are simply too clean and glass effects that are too clear, and this immediately gets picked up by the human eye, which is very good at subliminally noticing differences in image quality. Tracing the paths of photons and their interaction through and with materials produces images that mimic reality in an excellent way, IMO.
I'm pretty sure that a large cluster, such as the one using Apple's G5s at Virginia tech, running optimised C or C++ code would be able to produce usable footage for movies. And what's more, I'm pretty sure that sooner or later, there will be tools to make this technique more accessable.
I think that once this gains traction, very much like the new music did in the 90's after everyone had gotten verilly sick of hair farming rock and roll excesses, there will be nothing to stop it. Imagine, you walk into a Linux store and your Linux DJ guru behind the bench cooks you up your own custom distro with tools to suit your particular addiction.
Yo.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned John Titor when they read this: The site (Disclaimer: I personally think the guy is an incredibly good internet hoaxer, but a lot of what he said is extremely chilling)