You keep using that word - I do not think it mean.. oh forget... the point is this... that one is blatantly obvious. Nobody is going to read that and go "*GASP* He's a fascist!? Let's oust him!"
But the whole (D) vs (R) thing in U.S. TV is subtle. They don't refer to it, it's not blatantly obvious if you haven't heard of the person they're talking about, so your initial reaction may be (if you're part of Fox's target viewership anyway): "damn democrats"
And maybe I live in a distorted world, but I find -that- to be much worse than some idiot proclaiming Bush a professional fascist.
There -are- ways to go over the top with this, though...
Take for example Star Trek, which I think is probably a very good example.
I loved the shows - all of them, to varying degrees, but loved them. I watched TNG because I watched the originals, DS9 because I watched TNG, and voyager because I watched TNG as well (Darn them for running two series at about the same time).
I also watched Enterprise, but quite frankly that was a 'prequel' that just ruined a bunch of it.
Now shock & horror... there are fanfics. And there are official Star Trek books. There's whole storylines after the Voyager TV series' ending. And quite frankly, I cannot possibly get into all of them. It's just *too much*. I'm sure there are those superdevoted fans out there who will read / watch every single work on star trek in existence, but for me I just can't stand it anymore. To me things should come to an end eventually - happily ever after, or with the Earth scorched, I don't care - but drop it and create something at least remotely new so that I don't feel like I'm still stuck in the same story long after the main story had supposedly ended.
so yes, I'll play the Half Life episodes, but please let there be an end to it within the next 10 years, otherwise what happens is the same thing that happens to TV series... they get old, get canceled, and get the most f'ed up endings in TV. ( Like I can only imagine is what will happen with 'Lost'. ) I, for one, hope all game writers who write games with a 'story' have the ending of that story already in their mind, and are only working towards that ending in their sequels, without dragging things on and on./incoherent rant.. not sure how to word what I'm feeling, but I guess a lot of you will know what I'm talking about.
Read more closely and you'll note that several specs are actually missing in the article. The single paragraph summarizing talk time/etc. isn't complete. Anyway:)
Read the article, and it hardly has any further information, other than a picture (welcome) and dimensions (also welcome - and not too bad).
But a bit more info is in the actual Press Release from D-Link; http://www.dlink.com/press/pr/?prid=299 -- Talk time - up to 5 hours GSM, 2 hours 802.11 wireless mode Messages - up to 30 messages can be stored at 459 characters each -- Can't say I'm impressed with that - but it explains why it's a bit lighter, smaller battery. The number of messages stored however is just pathetic.
..for that price, it would have to deliver a significantly better bang.
Dual-mode WiFi - what is that? B/G? cool, but nothing new. GSM/GPRS - where's EDGE? Where's UMTS? Where's HSDPA? 24 MB of memory - okay - for storage - not okay. 24 MB? That's expandable by SD/MiniSD/MicroSD, right? And how much working memory is there? Or is this the same memory and do you lose everything when you power down? (a la pre Windows Mobile 5) 2" screen - not too bad on that 176 x 220-pixel - wtf is that? Where's 240x320 or even 480x640? color display - 4096? 16k? Opera browser - pre-installed, they mean, I hope. Can you replace it? (not that I can think of a reason to) 3.4 ounces (95 grams) - that *is* nice, however. Tri-band - quad band, please?
Now to RTFA because the summary was silly in listing features without detail. Be better if it had been a more generic blurb.
hate to reply to self, but.. nevermind; just read that latest story about Wibree and BlueTooth is a seriously f*cked up bunch of 'stacks' with different functionalities and whatnot. In other words - they didn't make a low-power short-range piece of communications hardware + small protocol, they made a monstrosity that should just have been avoided at all costs because now everybody seems to have problems with it. Sucks. Glad I don't own any bluetooth crap.
BlueTooth is only a hardware spec+protocol?
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but BlueTooth is only a hardware spec+protocol, right?
I.e. you could set up a LAN using BlueTooth if you were really bored, you can stream your phone's audio to a bluetooth headset if you want, you can use BlueTooth to let your carkit work without a wired hookup (Even if that's stupid)... but these are only things you -can- do, and aren't things that are specifically part of the BlueTooth standard?
I guess there might be something of a standard related to broadcasting incoming call details, so that e.g. your car stereo will show them - and it would be nice if this watch would adhere to that standard... but that isn't a BlueTooth thing per se; if your phone wouldn't support that standard anyway, even if it has BlueTooth, it doesn't matter whether the watch supports it or not?
So true - it would be different if it was iPodcaster or somesuch because that clearly has iPod in it. Furthermore, it is a tangential market to the iPod, not a competing product. If I made an mp3 player and called it myPod, I'm sure Apple would have a case. If I'm making an audio-distribution platform (if one can call podcasting that) and call it myPod, they would already have a much harder time. As it is, it's "podcasting" and they shouldn't have a leg to stand on. Sadly, they have a lot of money to stand on.
Program uninstallers. Users access uninstallers through the Software Explorer control panel.
Oh dear lord I hope they sped that thing up, then! How many programs do you have installed? Have you tried going to Add/Remove Programs lately? How speedy is that thing for you? Now try and find the application in the list. Or a user could use go to the start menu where they find the program, and click the uninstaller shortcut there. Hmm.. tough choice! I'm not saying that the Add/Remove Programs information shouldn't be set - I'm saying that you should use/both/.
Help files. Users access Help topics directly from your program.
Why would I force the user to -run- my application when all they may need to do is look up a quick item on it? I know car analogies suck, but would you want to start your car before you can grab the owner's manual to see when it was again that you need your brakes checked?
Control panels. Users access control panels from the Control Panel home page.
Not sure how this one differs from...
Program options. Users access program options from the Options command, usually found on the Tools menu.
This one. Maybe a 'Control Panel' is like AVG's quick overview of services and which ones are active, and the 'Options' are when you open the actual service. Well, in the case of AVG there's no shortcuts to the individual little services, so the 'Control Panel' or dashboard or whatever people want to call it rather needs that shortcut there. I'd be damned if I had to go all the way through Windows' own Control Panel stuff just to get there - like QuickTime does. wtf. That said - I do believe these -both- just need to be under the program, or -be- the program (a la AVG)
Readme files. Reconsider the need for a Readme file because most users rarely look at them. If you do need a Readme file, let users access it from your setup program.
I'll agree on this one - last-minute changes should simply be noted either after installation (offer the user a choice to view it), or from the Help file; updating a help-file with last-minute information isn't exactly rocket science.
Web sites. Users access Web sites through appropriate links in your program. Exceptions are Microsoft Update and Windows Catalog.
And here's a disagree; again, why would I force my users to start up the app just in order to get to the webpage about it?
So let's say I implement all these... Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\The Program Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Uninstall Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Help Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Go to the web and optionally Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Configure the program if there's something inane happening that's preventing The Program from running - say, a wrong choice of video resolution that's just blanking the screen - allow a Configuration app to change this without the user having to muck around in configuration files / the registry.
That' 4, 5 shortcuts tops. Is that really too many if it's all neatly in a single 'subfolder'?
Let's say these discs become ubiquitous... and so would dual or even triple drives... as in, the vast majority of the market would have a dual (Blu-Ray / HD-DVD) or even triple (Blu-Ray / HD-DVD / DVD) drive. Wouldn't it make sense for a producer to think "instead of putting the same content on it in 3 different forms, why don't I put the movie on the Blu-Ray layer, the extras on the HD-DVD layer, and whatever else I can think of like a computer game or something on the DVD layer?"
Then again, I hardly ever see double-sided DVDs (I just saw one, which had a pan&scan version on one side, and the widescreen version on the other side *cringe*) - even though that would help tons with picture quality if they'd keep the extras off the movie side (can use a higher bitrate encoding then).
But only because I'm not well-informed on the subject of point 1, which I fully admit. How could I be as a student anyway, when those companies tend to be less than forthcoming about how they do things (presumably because if they were, it could be worked around easily)?
My reluctance with step 1 is with regards to false positives due to chance, and due to quotations.
I'm sure you've heard about the million monkeys with a million typewriters and eventually one of them typing a work of shakespeare - which is based purely on random chance. I.e. a random string generator will eventually produce a work of shakespeare as well. So if we know that that is going to happen, then what are the odds that among a population of millions of students + millions and millions of students before them, somebody is going to write something that is similar if not exactly the same as another student - even those before them? I'd say it's pretty high.. so wouldn't that mean the chances of a false positive by chance is already high?
Then there's the issue of quotes - say you're quoting a source, just a brief bit of course, not a whole paper/dissertation/whatever. Won't that raise the qualifier for those automatic programs' notion of a cheater?
I do realize that flagged papers will still need review by the teacher, and as such it is only an additinal tool - but what if the teacher is wrongly pursuaded by the flagging that the student is indeed cheating, when truth is that they didn't and were just unlucky enough to have written sections similar to another student's?
...but I know it says that you can find the answer in minutes online; so why would you pay that $250/year support contract, again? So much for the "give the software away, charge for support" meme;)
( yes, yes.. I know 'support' is a broad term and could include making special extensions to the code for just that company blabla. )
Say you have a 3D graphics outfit with a renderfarm, and you use both 3dsMax and maya. Let's say you submit a network rendering job from both.
Now the 3dsMax renderer of choice - say, mental ray - sucks up 99% of the CPU on the render job, leaving the maya render job to do crap all until the 3dsMax render job is done. So you switch the 3dsMax process to Low Priority... but now the maya render job sucks up nearly all the CPU, and the 3dsMax render job does next-to-zilch until the maya render job is done.
You could fiddle with higher/lower priorities and see if it ever balances out, but truth is that it never does. Some of these products are coded specifically to be very agressive with regards to CPU usage because most studios want their renders done yesterday.
If you could actually monitor processes and limit their CPU usage so that you could specify 3dsmax.exe to use roughly 50%, and maya.exe to use roughly 50% as well, both render jobs will progress nicely.
Not that I recommend it, as each process still eats time and more importantly the render job itself eats RAM/etc. that the other render job won't have access to. Splitting the farm up into whatever proportion and assigning the render job only to the segment of the renderfarm of interest is much more efficient even if it's a little more work to manage.
If your renderer doesn't have a Low Priority option already (e.g. Brazil r/s does), then Auto-It and similar methods (watching for the process) is your best bet. For those suggesting the command line options, please keep in mind that I think he is alluding to the 3dsmax process being started by a network rendering application such as the default BackBurner. There's a ton of information that gets passed back and forth that would make a command line option very difficult to write up.
I also see Auto-It in use at several larger studios when they're not using their in-house solutions, so I'll second the Auto-It suggestion specifically.
One thing to keep in mind with all this, though, is that Low Priority means exactly that - Low Priority. If anything else starts happening on your machine, your render will halt dead in its tracks. E.g. if you submit a 3dsmax job at low priority and a maya job at a higher priority, the max one will do zilch until the maya one finishes. In effect, you would have been -better off- submitting the two in succession because now the maya one will be rendering while the 3dsmax job is stuck doing nothing... but still owns a chunk of the RAM/etc. now not available to maya. So if you really want to do something like this, I would suggest reading the comment and its follow-ups here instead: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195694&cid =16044826 That way you can actually say "max, you use 33% and maya, you go use 66%". I still wouldn't recommend it, but I know it's a solution one studio in Australia went for.
And, apparently, can be disabled remotely somehow? Just curious, as the infoworld article mentions that he has disabled 'the software' - it doesn't exactly say whether that's on the phone or at the Flickr end, but if it's on the phone.. then wtf?
Which makes me wonder... would there be any such thing as a rolling RAID setup? I.e. it's live with one drive on Day 1, then live with the next on Day 2, live with another on Day 3 and so forth and so on until you run out of the number of drives?
That way you would always have rolling backup as old as numDrives * interval, as well as a live RAID in case just the main drive fails?
Everybody should have a choice - humans beings and animals alike. Because animals are incapable of indicating their choice, they fight for the right of those animals. You could argue that early-state/non-viable fetuses are incapable of indicating their choice as well - but I'm sure they would argue that aforemention fetuses are not yet classified as being human beings.
If looked at that way, I don't find it all that strikingly odd/interesting:)
Which leads me to believe that the manufacturer has some very false claims, as one of the claims is that it checks whether the finger actually has a pulse; which is something Jamie pondered how to replicate at one point. I suppose this would be for those cases where they chop a dead guy's finger off, or drag the whole body to the thing, etc. But they managed to open that lock with a b/w laserjet (I think) print-out that was wetted a bit. No pulse.
Even funnier is that they had more trouble bypassing the cheapo USB fingertip reader.. it only finally gave in to the most sophisticated of their duplications.
I have no experience with Xara or Inkscape, but...
It sounds like if it Xara is -scaling- the vector, then it very well should be scaling the rounding as well. If it is -redimensioning- the vector's width/height/whatever-property, then it's a different matter altogether.
You'll see this in something like CAD applications where changing the dimensions of a rect is a whole different thing from scaling the rect.
- you can already get moistened TP dispensers. There's one problem with these - they're expensive. I'd rather see that more places (restaurants, etc.) start using the toilet seat cover dispensers as found in any airport (well, not Schiphol - where they want you to wet some toilet paper and scrub.. arguably better) and airplane
- armrests? aren't you supposed to hold part of your body, at least if you're male, to make sure you're not just going to flop all over the place with that thing? And what when you want to wipe your ass? Just for kicks, try making that motion while seater in your chair with armrests. And a leather backrest? Would that be built into the toilet lid? If so - how do you handle flushing with the lid closed? ( presuming you flush with the lid closed - unless you love the spray of course )
- klingons / dingleberries? if you miss one of those, you probably didn't wipe well enough - do you really need a webcam to see where you need to wipe some more? Scary. You're never going to get it 100% clean.. if you could, you wouldn't have a particular need change underwear every day. Fact is, you're going to leak more pee than you'll have to worry about with poo.
- penile/scrotal cupholder just sounds like an STD-spreading device. The solution to not having your penis or scrotum hit the porcelain is to get a decent bowl - sounds like the one you've dealt with/are dealing with is far too shallow. Either that or you're just very, very well-endowed; congratulations;)
- seat angle and elevation.. now this one I can get into, but mostly due to the fact that the elderly can't sit all the way down on typical toilet seats easily - so you can get taller ones for them. While at the same time, what parent hasn't had to hoist their kid up onto the toilet? Now if you could make it alter elevation, that would indeed be cool. It'd also be a bit more difficult to manage with regards to flushing-as-we-know-it, though
- you don't have to smell the toilet, typically.. unless you live in Europe and still have an older style bowl where your faecal matter just rests in a small puddle before getting flushed ('observation deck' bowls), you'll have one where all that stuff goes into a deep body of water where no odor can escape. Presumably you'd also have some manner of perfumed flush block thingy in there to keep whatever diluted smell of urine covered.
the remainder of the list is just getting silly.. why no HD TV? fold-out laptop with broadband internet? make the seat double as a massage chair and shoepolish station! Let's leave it at it being a restroom, please:)
That said, there have been advances even in recent decades as far as the toilet seat goes. e.g. from the 'observation deck' style to the deep bowl style, and from a regular gravity-does-it-all flush to a gravity+jet-flush, from one-flush-fits-all to the water conserving dual-flush-capacity tanks, etc. Maybe they're nowhere near as cool as an elevation-controllable toilet, but they're worthy progressions nevertheless.
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You keep using that word - I do not think it mean.. oh forget... the point is this... that one is blatantly obvious. Nobody is going to read that and go "*GASP* He's a fascist!? Let's oust him!"
But the whole (D) vs (R) thing in U.S. TV is subtle. They don't refer to it, it's not blatantly obvious if you haven't heard of the person they're talking about, so your initial reaction may be (if you're part of Fox's target viewership anyway): "damn democrats"
And maybe I live in a distorted world, but I find -that- to be much worse than some idiot proclaiming Bush a professional fascist.
There -are- ways to go over the top with this, though...
/incoherent rant.. not sure how to word what I'm feeling, but I guess a lot of you will know what I'm talking about.
Take for example Star Trek, which I think is probably a very good example.
I loved the shows - all of them, to varying degrees, but loved them. I watched TNG because I watched the originals, DS9 because I watched TNG, and voyager because I watched TNG as well (Darn them for running two series at about the same time).
I also watched Enterprise, but quite frankly that was a 'prequel' that just ruined a bunch of it.
Now shock & horror... there are fanfics. And there are official Star Trek books. There's whole storylines after the Voyager TV series' ending. And quite frankly, I cannot possibly get into all of them. It's just *too much*. I'm sure there are those superdevoted fans out there who will read / watch every single work on star trek in existence, but for me I just can't stand it anymore. To me things should come to an end eventually - happily ever after, or with the Earth scorched, I don't care - but drop it and create something at least remotely new so that I don't feel like I'm still stuck in the same story long after the main story had supposedly ended.
so yes, I'll play the Half Life episodes, but please let there be an end to it within the next 10 years, otherwise what happens is the same thing that happens to TV series... they get old, get canceled, and get the most f'ed up endings in TV. ( Like I can only imagine is what will happen with 'Lost'. ) I, for one, hope all game writers who write games with a 'story' have the ending of that story already in their mind, and are only working towards that ending in their sequels, without dragging things on and on.
Read more closely and you'll note that several specs are actually missing in the article. The single paragraph summarizing talk time/etc. isn't complete. Anyway :)
Read the article, and it hardly has any further information, other than a picture (welcome) and dimensions (also welcome - and not too bad).
n es
But a bit more info is in the actual Press Release from D-Link;
http://www.dlink.com/press/pr/?prid=299
--
Talk time - up to 5 hours GSM, 2 hours 802.11 wireless mode
Messages - up to 30 messages can be stored at 459 characters each
--
Can't say I'm impressed with that - but it explains why it's a bit lighter, smaller battery. The number of messages stored however is just pathetic.
Had to still google for Dual-Mode; it actually just means it has a phone radio and another form of wireless communications. Lame terminology comes to mind; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-Mode_Mobile_Pho
As for the rest of the info - not in the PR either.
But for those of you who have been whining about "I don't want a camera in my phone!" - there you go.. Linux, WiFi, no camera.
..for that price, it would have to deliver a significantly better bang.
Dual-mode WiFi - what is that? B/G? cool, but nothing new.
GSM/GPRS - where's EDGE? Where's UMTS? Where's HSDPA?
24 MB of memory - okay
- for storage - not okay. 24 MB? That's expandable by SD/MiniSD/MicroSD, right? And how much working memory is there? Or is this the same memory and do you lose everything when you power down? (a la pre Windows Mobile 5)
2" screen - not too bad on that
176 x 220-pixel - wtf is that? Where's 240x320 or even 480x640?
color display - 4096? 16k?
Opera browser - pre-installed, they mean, I hope. Can you replace it? (not that I can think of a reason to)
3.4 ounces (95 grams) - that *is* nice, however.
Tri-band - quad band, please?
Now to RTFA because the summary was silly in listing features without detail. Be better if it had been a more generic blurb.
hate to reply to self, but.. nevermind; just read that latest story about Wibree and BlueTooth is a seriously f*cked up bunch of 'stacks' with different functionalities and whatnot. In other words - they didn't make a low-power short-range piece of communications hardware + small protocol, they made a monstrosity that should just have been avoided at all costs because now everybody seems to have problems with it. Sucks. Glad I don't own any bluetooth crap.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but BlueTooth is only a hardware spec+protocol, right?
I.e. you could set up a LAN using BlueTooth if you were really bored, you can stream your phone's audio to a bluetooth headset if you want, you can use BlueTooth to let your carkit work without a wired hookup (Even if that's stupid)... but these are only things you -can- do, and aren't things that are specifically part of the BlueTooth standard?
I guess there might be something of a standard related to broadcasting incoming call details, so that e.g. your car stereo will show them - and it would be nice if this watch would adhere to that standard... but that isn't a BlueTooth thing per se; if your phone wouldn't support that standard anyway, even if it has BlueTooth, it doesn't matter whether the watch supports it or not?
So true - it would be different if it was iPodcaster or somesuch because that clearly has iPod in it. Furthermore, it is a tangential market to the iPod, not a competing product. If I made an mp3 player and called it myPod, I'm sure Apple would have a case. If I'm making an audio-distribution platform (if one can call podcasting that) and call it myPod, they would already have a much harder time. As it is, it's "podcasting" and they shouldn't have a leg to stand on. Sadly, they have a lot of money to stand on.
Oh dear lord I hope they sped that thing up, then! How many programs do you have installed? Have you tried going to Add/Remove Programs lately? How speedy is that thing for you? Now try and find the application in the list.
Or a user could use go to the start menu where they find the program, and click the uninstaller shortcut there.
Hmm.. tough choice!
I'm not saying that the Add/Remove Programs information shouldn't be set - I'm saying that you should use
Why would I force the user to -run- my application when all they may need to do is look up a quick item on it?
I know car analogies suck, but would you want to start your car before you can grab the owner's manual to see when it was again that you need your brakes checked?
Not sure how this one differs from...
This one. Maybe a 'Control Panel' is like AVG's quick overview of services and which ones are active, and the 'Options' are when you open the actual service. Well, in the case of AVG there's no shortcuts to the individual little services, so the 'Control Panel' or dashboard or whatever people want to call it rather needs that shortcut there. I'd be damned if I had to go all the way through Windows' own Control Panel stuff just to get there - like QuickTime does. wtf.
That said - I do believe these -both- just need to be under the program, or -be- the program (a la AVG)
I'll agree on this one - last-minute changes should simply be noted either after installation (offer the user a choice to view it), or from the Help file; updating a help-file with last-minute information isn't exactly rocket science.
And here's a disagree; again, why would I force my users to start up the app just in order to get to the webpage about it?
So let's say I implement all these...
Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\The Program
Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Uninstall
Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Help
Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Go to the web
and optionally
Start Menu\Programs\MyApp\Configure the program if there's something inane happening that's preventing The Program from running - say, a wrong choice of video resolution that's just blanking the screen - allow a Configuration app to change this without the user having to muck around in configuration files / the registry.
That' 4, 5 shortcuts tops. Is that really too many if it's all neatly in a single 'subfolder'?
well the question would be whether you can't still have the dual layers in this two/three-standards disc - if you can't, then there's no point ;)
Let's say these discs become ubiquitous... and so would dual or even triple drives... as in, the vast majority of the market would have a dual (Blu-Ray / HD-DVD) or even triple (Blu-Ray / HD-DVD / DVD) drive. Wouldn't it make sense for a producer to think "instead of putting the same content on it in 3 different forms, why don't I put the movie on the Blu-Ray layer, the extras on the HD-DVD layer, and whatever else I can think of like a computer game or something on the DVD layer?"
Then again, I hardly ever see double-sided DVDs (I just saw one, which had a pan&scan version on one side, and the widescreen version on the other side *cringe*) - even though that would help tons with picture quality if they'd keep the extras off the movie side (can use a higher bitrate encoding then).
But only because I'm not well-informed on the subject of point 1, which I fully admit. How could I be as a student anyway, when those companies tend to be less than forthcoming about how they do things (presumably because if they were, it could be worked around easily)?
My reluctance with step 1 is with regards to false positives due to chance, and due to quotations.
I'm sure you've heard about the million monkeys with a million typewriters and eventually one of them typing a work of shakespeare - which is based purely on random chance. I.e. a random string generator will eventually produce a work of shakespeare as well. So if we know that that is going to happen, then what are the odds that among a population of millions of students + millions and millions of students before them, somebody is going to write something that is similar if not exactly the same as another student - even those before them? I'd say it's pretty high.. so wouldn't that mean the chances of a false positive by chance is already high?
Then there's the issue of quotes - say you're quoting a source, just a brief bit of course, not a whole paper/dissertation/whatever. Won't that raise the qualifier for those automatic programs' notion of a cheater?
I do realize that flagged papers will still need review by the teacher, and as such it is only an additinal tool - but what if the teacher is wrongly pursuaded by the flagging that the student is indeed cheating, when truth is that they didn't and were just unlucky enough to have written sections similar to another student's?
...but I know it says that you can find the answer in minutes online; so why would you pay that $250/year support contract, again? ;)
So much for the "give the software away, charge for support" meme
( yes, yes.. I know 'support' is a broad term and could include making special extensions to the code for just that company blabla. )
The basic problem, really, is this...
Say you have a 3D graphics outfit with a renderfarm, and you use both 3dsMax and maya. Let's say you submit a network rendering job from both.
Now the 3dsMax renderer of choice - say, mental ray - sucks up 99% of the CPU on the render job, leaving the maya render job to do crap all until the 3dsMax render job is done.
So you switch the 3dsMax process to Low Priority... but now the maya render job sucks up nearly all the CPU, and the 3dsMax render job does next-to-zilch until the maya render job is done.
You could fiddle with higher/lower priorities and see if it ever balances out, but truth is that it never does. Some of these products are coded specifically to be very agressive with regards to CPU usage because most studios want their renders done yesterday.
If you could actually monitor processes and limit their CPU usage so that you could specify 3dsmax.exe to use roughly 50%, and maya.exe to use roughly 50% as well, both render jobs will progress nicely.
Not that I recommend it, as each process still eats time and more importantly the render job itself eats RAM/etc. that the other render job won't have access to. Splitting the farm up into whatever proportion and assigning the render job only to the segment of the renderfarm of interest is much more efficient even if it's a little more work to manage.
If your renderer doesn't have a Low Priority option already (e.g. Brazil r/s does), then Auto-It and similar methods (watching for the process) is your best bet. For those suggesting the command line options, please keep in mind that I think he is alluding to the 3dsmax process being started by a network rendering application such as the default BackBurner. There's a ton of information that gets passed back and forth that would make a command line option very difficult to write up.
d =16044826
I also see Auto-It in use at several larger studios when they're not using their in-house solutions, so I'll second the Auto-It suggestion specifically.
One thing to keep in mind with all this, though, is that Low Priority means exactly that - Low Priority. If anything else starts happening on your machine, your render will halt dead in its tracks. E.g. if you submit a 3dsmax job at low priority and a maya job at a higher priority, the max one will do zilch until the maya one finishes. In effect, you would have been -better off- submitting the two in succession because now the maya one will be rendering while the 3dsmax job is stuck doing nothing... but still owns a chunk of the RAM/etc. now not available to maya.
So if you really want to do something like this, I would suggest reading the comment and its follow-ups here instead:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195694&ci
That way you can actually say "max, you use 33% and maya, you go use 66%". I still wouldn't recommend it, but I know it's a solution one studio in Australia went for.
Thank you - to the other replying party as well. That clears that up :)
And, apparently, can be disabled remotely somehow? Just curious, as the infoworld article mentions that he has disabled 'the software' - it doesn't exactly say whether that's on the phone or at the Flickr end, but if it's on the phone.. then wtf?
Which makes me wonder... would there be any such thing as a rolling RAID setup?
;)
I.e. it's live with one drive on Day 1, then live with the next on Day 2, live with another on Day 3 and so forth and so on until you run out of the number of drives?
That way you would always have rolling backup as old as numDrives * interval, as well as a live RAID in case just the main drive fails?
Just curious - it doesn't sound very economical
...if the thought is this...
:)
Everybody should have a choice - humans beings and animals alike. Because animals are incapable of indicating their choice, they fight for the right of those animals. You could argue that early-state/non-viable fetuses are incapable of indicating their choice as well - but I'm sure they would argue that aforemention fetuses are not yet classified as being human beings.
If looked at that way, I don't find it all that strikingly odd/interesting
( I may not agree, but that's another subject )
Which leads me to believe that the manufacturer has some very false claims, as one of the claims is that it checks whether the finger actually has a pulse; which is something Jamie pondered how to replicate at one point. I suppose this would be for those cases where they chop a dead guy's finger off, or drag the whole body to the thing, etc. But they managed to open that lock with a b/w laserjet (I think) print-out that was wetted a bit. No pulse.
Even funnier is that they had more trouble bypassing the cheapo USB fingertip reader.. it only finally gave in to the most sophisticated of their duplications.
I have no experience with Xara or Inkscape, but...
It sounds like if it Xara is -scaling- the vector, then it very well should be scaling the rounding as well. If it is -redimensioning- the vector's width/height/whatever-property, then it's a different matter altogether.
You'll see this in something like CAD applications where changing the dimensions of a rect is a whole different thing from scaling the rect.
- you can already get moistened TP dispensers. There's one problem with these - they're expensive. I'd rather see that more places (restaurants, etc.) start using the toilet seat cover dispensers as found in any airport (well, not Schiphol - where they want you to wet some toilet paper and scrub.. arguably better) and airplane
;)
:)
- armrests? aren't you supposed to hold part of your body, at least if you're male, to make sure you're not just going to flop all over the place with that thing? And what when you want to wipe your ass? Just for kicks, try making that motion while seater in your chair with armrests. And a leather backrest? Would that be built into the toilet lid? If so - how do you handle flushing with the lid closed? ( presuming you flush with the lid closed - unless you love the spray of course )
- klingons / dingleberries? if you miss one of those, you probably didn't wipe well enough - do you really need a webcam to see where you need to wipe some more? Scary. You're never going to get it 100% clean.. if you could, you wouldn't have a particular need change underwear every day. Fact is, you're going to leak more pee than you'll have to worry about with poo.
- penile/scrotal cupholder just sounds like an STD-spreading device. The solution to not having your penis or scrotum hit the porcelain is to get a decent bowl - sounds like the one you've dealt with/are dealing with is far too shallow. Either that or you're just very, very well-endowed; congratulations
- seat angle and elevation.. now this one I can get into, but mostly due to the fact that the elderly can't sit all the way down on typical toilet seats easily - so you can get taller ones for them. While at the same time, what parent hasn't had to hoist their kid up onto the toilet? Now if you could make it alter elevation, that would indeed be cool. It'd also be a bit more difficult to manage with regards to flushing-as-we-know-it, though
- you don't have to smell the toilet, typically.. unless you live in Europe and still have an older style bowl where your faecal matter just rests in a small puddle before getting flushed ('observation deck' bowls), you'll have one where all that stuff goes into a deep body of water where no odor can escape. Presumably you'd also have some manner of perfumed flush block thingy in there to keep whatever diluted smell of urine covered.
the remainder of the list is just getting silly.. why no HD TV? fold-out laptop with broadband internet? make the seat double as a massage chair and shoepolish station! Let's leave it at it being a restroom, please
That said, there have been advances even in recent decades as far as the toilet seat goes. e.g. from the 'observation deck' style to the deep bowl style, and from a regular gravity-does-it-all flush to a gravity+jet-flush, from one-flush-fits-all to the water conserving dual-flush-capacity tanks, etc. Maybe they're nowhere near as cool as an elevation-controllable toilet, but they're worthy progressions nevertheless.
...is necessary for the functioning of our society ... who knew?
Infoworld newsclipping on Intel releasing the patches...w irelesspatches_1.html
/ cs-010623.htm
/ cs-005905.htm
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/02/HNintel
For the impatient, new drivers are here...
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb
And you can double-check what adapter you've got, as long as it's an intel anyway, with the utility here...
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb
In all the sensible word, 'leet' day will be on the 13th of March, 2007.
You would have had it on the 33rd of January or the 3rd of the 13th calendar month... -if- they existed.