Well, you're missing one thing. LCDs envolve ZERO eyestrain, as they don't have the 'glimmer and flux' of a CRT. Sure, that's only REALLY bad on a CRT at 60hz, but I've found that over long sessions (say 6 hours+) I'm noticeably less fatigued from using an LCD. That said, my main machine still has a CRT, as I do a fair bit of graphics work on it.
Once we approach the phyisical limits, we can simply expand in a different way. Just start adding CPU cores to the machine. SMP boxes are becoming fairly common already, even the in the PC market, and I definatly see that trend continuing. Once things get cheap enough, why not stick 16 or 32 chips in a machine? Heat and power issues can be minimized by greatly UNDERclocking the chips. In another few years, chips will be at insane frequecys, and instead of pushing them the limit by running that at super high power levels, just back things off a bit.
Well, to my ears, through a decent stereo, Ogg's at -q 6 (~160kbs) stomp all over MP3 at 192kbs. In fact, I have a very hard time telling them apart from the original CDs. I've never really found that to be true with MP3, at any bitrate, except 312 or something crazy like that, at which point you might as well just use FLAC or Shorten and be done with the quality debate.
No, 2D only. Still, that suits my needs. What few GL apps I need once in a blew moon aren't too horrible with Mesa. I don't use this machine for games at all, so it works for me, but it's not really a gaming solution. Of course, one could question wether ANY *nix is much of a gaming platform. I'd rather play on a console hooked to my big screen anyways...
Is your graphics card a 9x00 Radeon by any chance? If so, you're in luck, sorta. You'll need to pull XFree from CVS and build it by hand (no big deal), and then use the "radeon" driver. That supports all currently released radeon cards. I'm running a 9600 in FreeBSD with zero problems.
interesting stuff. Must admit, I run at secure level zero, and haven't really dug into the security stuff. I figure I've got a reasonably secure system (NATed, firewalled, only ports 22 and 80 allowed through, no remote root logins), which frankly is all I need. I make regular backups, so even if I got rooted, worst case I just grap my install CD, wipe the drives, and I'm back up and running inside an hour. Never happened, thankfully, but I am prepared just in case.
Newsflash: Artists have to buy the cds they sell "directly" from the label, with bairly a discount. The artist usually makes very little on the deal, no more than if you bought it at Best Buy or Amazon or whatever.
Does it lock it down to the point of not being able to install a new kernel? I can't find the information on the site. In any case, with root, something like LIDS may make life harder, but I still don't think it'd be THAT hard.
Your're thinking in terms of CD quality. Let's shoot higher.
Right now 44.1Khz, 16bit streo cd audio is roughly 9MB per minute of audio.
Let's go with the way many things are actually recorded now, 24 bits @ 96Khz. There's a 50% increase due to the change from 16 to 24 bit. Now we're at ~15MB/minute. That goes to more like 30MB/min @ 96Khz. Or, in other words, about 2.1GB for the 72 minutes a standard CD holds.
I don't think Blender's biggest learning curve issue ISN'T the interface. It's the last of a proper UNDO function, which makes it very hard to 'play with' parameters, as you have to go through a save / load cycle. Plus, it can be really frustrating for a errant key press to really fudge things up, and have to revert to an older save.
You do know that for every XMMS plugin, there are probably 10 for Winamp 2 don't you?
My biggest beef with XMMS is the playlist handlings, and more specifically the fact that there is no way to have a 'tree' type structure. I've got my entire collection (~450 cds) ripped, and finding a specific track is a pain as a single pixel in the scroll bar is like 1.5 screens in the playlist. Compare to iTunes, where it's all broken down by genre / artist / album, and thus finding what I want, or, for instance, random play out of only a single artist / genre is trivial.
XMMS works ok if all you want is random play over all your files and pretty pictures to gaze at, but it is no where near as useful as iTunes. Zinf is actually closer to the feature set I'm after, but it's...crashey.
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That's chaning the sixe of the screen, not the desktop. It's a big differeence.
Make sure you're running it at it's native resolution. Anything else will be dithered either up or down.
Well, you're missing one thing. LCDs envolve ZERO eyestrain, as they don't have the 'glimmer and flux' of a CRT. Sure, that's only REALLY bad on a CRT at 60hz, but I've found that over long sessions (say 6 hours+) I'm noticeably less fatigued from using an LCD. That said, my main machine still has a CRT, as I do a fair bit of graphics work on it.
Once we approach the phyisical limits, we can simply expand in a different way. Just start adding CPU cores to the machine. SMP boxes are becoming fairly common already, even the in the PC market, and I definatly see that trend continuing. Once things get cheap enough, why not stick 16 or 32 chips in a machine? Heat and power issues can be minimized by greatly UNDERclocking the chips. In another few years, chips will be at insane frequecys, and instead of pushing them the limit by running that at super high power levels, just back things off a bit.
Sure it can be. My CD collection is pushing 30GB as is, with 160kbs or so Vorbis files. At 256 You'd be looking at more like 50GB
Well, to my ears, through a decent stereo, Ogg's at -q 6 (~160kbs) stomp all over MP3 at 192kbs. In fact, I have a very hard time telling them apart from the original CDs. I've never really found that to be true with MP3, at any bitrate, except 312 or something crazy like that, at which point you might as well just use FLAC or Shorten and be done with the quality debate.
Well, that depends.
Are we trying to create pure mathematicians? If the answer is no (As I think it should be...) time is better spent elsewhere.
Actually, in 4.3.0 it isn't. 2D isn't supported on the 9600 or 9800. Those are supported in CVS though.
No, 2D only. Still, that suits my needs. What few GL apps I need once in a blew moon aren't too horrible with Mesa. I don't use this machine for games at all, so it works for me, but it's not really a gaming solution. Of course, one could question wether ANY *nix is much of a gaming platform. I'd rather play on a console hooked to my big screen anyways...
Is your graphics card a 9x00 Radeon by any chance? If so, you're in luck, sorta. You'll need to pull XFree from CVS and build it by hand (no big deal), and then use the "radeon" driver. That supports all currently released radeon cards. I'm running a 9600 in FreeBSD with zero problems.
interesting stuff. Must admit, I run at secure level zero, and haven't really dug into the security stuff. I figure I've got a reasonably secure system (NATed, firewalled, only ports 22 and 80 allowed through, no remote root logins), which frankly is all I need. I make regular backups, so even if I got rooted, worst case I just grap my install CD, wipe the drives, and I'm back up and running inside an hour. Never happened, thankfully, but I am prepared just in case.
But wouldn't that result in a machine that would be very hard to A: Do anything really useful with and B: Be hard as hell to fix if it breaks?
Newsflash: Artists have to buy the cds they sell "directly" from the label, with bairly a discount. The artist usually makes very little on the deal, no more than if you bought it at Best Buy or Amazon or whatever.
I actually don't have a linux system...
FreeBSD on the desktop and OS X on the iBook
Does it lock it down to the point of not being able to install a new kernel? I can't find the information on the site. In any case, with root, something like LIDS may make life harder, but I still don't think it'd be THAT hard.
Uh, as soon as you're r00ted any sort of local access controls are null and void.
Random passphrase?
Repeat after me: The best password is the one that isn't stikie'd to the monitor and/or keyboard.
Uh, did you guys miss the Sci Fi channel miniseries? It's out on DVD, quite good.
Because they didn't need to.
...
They just messages to:
User 1000
User 1001
User 1002
User 1000000000
Your're thinking in terms of CD quality. Let's shoot higher.
Right now 44.1Khz, 16bit streo cd audio is roughly 9MB per minute of audio.
Let's go with the way many things are actually recorded now, 24 bits @ 96Khz. There's a 50% increase due to the change from 16 to 24 bit. Now we're at ~15MB/minute. That goes to more like 30MB/min @ 96Khz. Or, in other words, about 2.1GB for the 72 minutes a standard CD holds.
Yes, yes, yes... preview, preview, preview...
You know what I find pretty damn interesting? That my Radeon 9600 operates with NO active cooling at all, only a simple heat conductor. Quite is good.
I don't think Blender's biggest learning curve issue ISN'T the interface. It's the last of a proper UNDO function, which makes it very hard to 'play with' parameters, as you have to go through a save / load cycle. Plus, it can be really frustrating for a errant key press to really fudge things up, and have to revert to an older save.
You do know that for every XMMS plugin, there are probably 10 for Winamp 2 don't you?
My biggest beef with XMMS is the playlist handlings, and more specifically the fact that there is no way to have a 'tree' type structure. I've got my entire collection (~450 cds) ripped, and finding a specific track is a pain as a single pixel in the scroll bar is like 1.5 screens in the playlist. Compare to iTunes, where it's all broken down by genre / artist / album, and thus finding what I want, or, for instance, random play out of only a single artist / genre is trivial.
XMMS works ok if all you want is random play over all your files and pretty pictures to gaze at, but it is no where near as useful as iTunes. Zinf is actually closer to the feature set I'm after, but it's...crashey.