Well, you could use POVRay or BMRT. Those will do network rendering. Just search google for information on using those for network rendering.
You probably will need to come up with some custom scripts to convert DXF files into the proper format. In my experience, DXF files are a very poor way to transport models. If you are doing work in Autocad, then I recommend finding a DWG converting.
One thing I actually get asked a lot is what the proper way to dispose of old monitors is. Frankly, I've never managed to figure out who to take my old moniters to to have them properly recycled. Heck, I'd even be willing to pay a nominal fee to get rid of them safely.
Well, so far all the charities that I've talked to refuse anything older than a mid-range pentium. However, I keep all pentiums and some of the high-end 486s that come my way, so I only want to dump low-end 486s and older.
And have you seen shipping to send old machines to third world contries?
Every computer museam has hundreds of the machines that come my way, and I'm getting rid of old machines because I don't have space for them. Starting my own museaum isn't going to help the space problem.
Frankly I have enough linux machines. I don't really need to spend the time cramming linux onto a 386 when I could be doing real work instead.
I have no use for door more door stops. Especially not ones as large as a PC case. Likewise, I have no use for such small tables.
So, SETI@home runs on old 16bit machines does it? Even so, I'd save money buying a new machine that eats less power and churns through the numbers faster.
I have more than ample capacity on my 486 gateway to act as an NNTP server (and in fact it does, carying the groups I like). Why do I need to keep older slower machines around to do this?
I don't have kids. Nor do I have a girl-friend, so kids aren't going to happen anytime soon.
I'd love to see a car playing MP3s on a 386.
Now we get to the interesting one. I have a 386 of some sort, and a 486sx, 25 mhz. If you want to drive across the country to pick them up (or pay shipping. These machines are heavy though), you are welcome to them. However, you would be better served to scour the classifieds in you local newspaper.
Kurt and his subsequent death allowed her to form a band, capture national attention, and allow the misconception that she had something "deep" to write lyrics about.
Actually, Hole was around before Kurt died. I don't know when the two got together, but I have a Hole CD here copyright 1991, titled Pretty On The Inside. One could say that Celebrity Skin, which I like a lot better, is their "Pretty On The Outside" disc.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but doesn't google already essentially tell us their criteria for finding the best page (eachs page is weighted by the sum weights of pages that point to it). I mean, they used to have thesis papers on their site explaining the details of how it works.
From my experience, if the lemon law for computers is like the lemon law for cars, virtually every Windows 95 computer and most of the NT machines I've used would need to be replaced numerous times.
Currently, I've only seen one stable windows 95 machine, and that's my current one, and I believe the only reason it is now stable is because it has exactly three pieces of software installed that didn't come on the Windows 95 cd. Those three pieces of software are Creative Encore DVD software, Diablo 2, and Final Fantasy 8.
And for people who would tell me to use NT instead of 95, I've only ever seen one stable NT machine and that was a monster of a machine (dual xeons, 512 megs ram, and a video card that takes both a AGP and a PCI slot). All the rest have been unstable for me.
Due to the above, I suspect that they are going to write the bill so that almost no one can collect. Bleh.
Oh, BTW, for anyone reading old posts of mine and realizing that I do development, I thought I should disclaim that I some times use GTK to wrap an OpenGL context, but more and more I expect to be using SDL for my major apps, and whatever is convienient for minor utils.
In case your wonder why SDL for major apps, I think that what I want to do is move towards having my apps run full screen, ala inferno, softimage, and other great SGI programs. I do plan to update the paradigm a little. At a minimum, I want my programs to be friendly for usage with virtual desktop, and while I will be using pretty much all custom widgets, I want my widgets to operate in a manor obvious to people familiar with the platform (meaning a different version of the widgets for Windows, MacOS, and Linux).
OK, as an end user, I find gtk to be more intuitive, and since gnome is based on gtk, I naturally prefer it. However, I don't use gnome that much, prefering ye ol' rxvt. That's what I get for starting out on unix by dialing into Suns.
I've switched from Netscape to Mozilla, and I find that I'm much better off now. Things are mostly faster, and they certainly crash less. I installed m17 the day after it came out. My biggest complaint is that drop down boxes often render incorrectly, particularly on ebay.
I don't know how closely tied it is, but it is tied, and it has some custom controls written for Motif. That said, I think you could pull off using both, as long as everything was in seperate windows. But that's just not quite as nice as having your program contained in one window. I don't know how receptive they be to merging GTK support (or Qt support) into the main source tree if someone wrote it.
I thought everything already had an IP address. I'd post the IP, but command.com keeps gpfing. I do know that to have a domain you need an IP, and everything.com, everything.org, and everything2.org all exist, so everything obviously has an IP.
Hmm, your right. I had heard that before. But anyway, I feel my point stands. I don't feel better about it running Windows 2k instead (and I wonder why CE isn't a better choice here).
Any if it makes Windows users feel any better, I have the same feelings about the Indrama game box using linux. I think game boxes should do without OSs, or rather that the OS should be on the game media, so that programs can strip out the OS if they want.
I'm not sure if Microsoft bans such reporting. However, that wouldn't nescesarily stop a US based magazine from reporting it. After all, that has got to be covered by the constitution. I realize that the constitution rarely applies to business affairs, but I have a hard time believing that a court wouldn't see it as covered.
A 486 should be able to keep up with the speed of the internet connection. Of course, this depends on two things. First, it depends on the speed of your connection (like is it 640k or 7mbit?), and the complexity of the firewall setup. A simple firewall and a reasonably slow connection (like only 1.5mbit) should pose no problem to the aging machine. However, a complex firewall and a fast connection would be hard.
That said, on you main machine, just tell all set it up so that requests on ports from external interfaces are denied. You should be able to set that in your hosts.allow and hosts.deny file. Just add ALL:127.0.0.1 to the hosts.allow file, and ALL:* to the hosts.deny file. From there add services you want allowed to get through to the hosts.allow file.
>BTW, in a comment a couple of days ago, you
>mentioned that you couldn't install your
>Voodoo3, 'coz it didn't work without XFree86-4.
>You're misinformed about that -- mine works
>perfectly under XFree86-3.3.6
Yeah, a couple of people have mentioned that. All I know is that the XFree configuration program bundled with Redhat 6.1 doesn't pick out my card. And maybe I only have Xfree 3.3.4 or 3.3.5. I don't know. All I know was my first try failed, and I didn't have time to much around anymore. In another week I should have more available time to figure out why things didn't work the first time. I'm really looking forward to getting that card to work so that I can do more than color vertices in the program I'm working on.
Actually, I thought the shots looked markedly better than the SNES. And it is actually 9 bit graphics. That or 15 bits, but programming for 15 bits is going to be a pain because the processor is slow and for 15 we have to handle our own sprites instead of letter other hardware do it.
Unfortunatly, not many people would be willing to pay true cost for this device. Thus, to get people to buy it, they drop the price below the manufacturing cost and make their losses up on game royalties. If anyone can program the machine and if games are easy to download, then there aren't any game royalties to be made.
First of all, on the GBA you can only display 32k colors in bitmap mode. I don't expect that people are going to use bitmap mode much, especially not at first. To my understanding, the SNES doesn't have such a bitmap mode (and I have a set of documents for programming the SNES in front of me).
So, in character mode we get 512 colors, except color 0 is a transparency bit, so really only 511 colors. By comparison, on the SNES, we have sprites that are made up of tiles. Each tile can display 16 colors. I believe that you can get up to a total of 256 colors between all the different tile palets on screen.
So, the difference between 256 colors and 511 is pretty obvious. Also, the different between 256 colors and 32k colors is even more obvious.
I'm assuming that you are getting you 16k and 32k numbers from the fact that the SNES is a 16bit machine and the 32k colors from the fact that the GBA is a 32bit machine. However, this just isn't the way it works. For starters, if the number of displayable colors and the bit depth of the main processor lined up, then the SNES would display 64k colors (2^16), and the GBA would display over 4 billion colors (2^32). However, processor bit depth and and on screen colors don't always line up. If they did then the N64 would be able to display 2^64 colors, but alas, it is limited to 2^24 (with 8 bit transparency. I'm not sure if the transparency can be used to eek out more colors, but I'm inclined to think not). Actually, pretty much every machine in existance could display more colors than it currently does (with the exception of SGI's Onyx2, which can display 64bit color and it is a 64bit chip).
Uhm, even if you could use a totale of 16k colors on the SNES, you couldn't use them all at once. Each sprite on the SNES is limited to 16 colors. And the difference between 16 colors and 32 colors is pretty big. I forget what size pallete those 16 colors are drawn from, but I don't think that it is a 16k palete. I'm kinda thinking it might be a 256 color overal pallete, but that might be from a larger pallete of 14bit color.
Well, frankly, who would pay extra for a computer just to have linux on it? I mean, I don't go and pay extra for a computer just to have windows on it. Well, OK, maybe I am paying extra for windows, but still, it comes at a lower price than a linux machine.
That's probably the biggest thing that Linux needs. I need to be able to go to the local store and buy a machine with linux on it. Of the local computer stores, one of them has several linux users on staff. So why can't the store offer linux preloaded? It wouldn't cost them much. Just don't offer that service to people who don't ask.
The saturn hardware has dual hitachi CPUs. The genesis used a 68000 chip. Now, there was an upgrade for the genesis that plugged into the cartidge slot, and then cartridges went into this thing. I forget the name, but it also had dual hitachi CPUs, but they were slower.
The dual CPUs is why the saturn flopped. The PS also has dual CPUs, but the software library that came with it took advantage of that. The software libraries that came with th Saturn didn't, so programmers had to balance their program across both CPUs themselves. This meant that the initial games only used a little over 50% of the power available, whereas the initial PS games used over 80% of the available power.
Also, the second CPU of the PS had the same core instructions, but the stripped parts of it and added some other parts, so the stuff they added might have given it an additional edge. Well, that's what I heard at least. The docs I'm able to find aren't clean whether that second chip is a modified r3000 or if it is totally different, and I'm not familiar with the r3000 to tell just by looking at the instruction sets.
>AFAIK, artist's 3d tools are geared towards
>polygonal based rendering. It's not a given that
>artists will find voxels intuitive to model with
>(although it may be that the raster-vector
>analogy stands). I'm not an artist so I don't
>know. But one of the challenges will be
>providing decent tools.
Well, the tools render polygons, but increasingly the artists used more sophisticated tools like NURBS and implicit surfaces (implemented as things like metaballs, or metaclay). It just more efficient currently to render polygons, so the rendering programs take the surfaces and convert them to polys. But the artist doesn't need to know this, and increasingly they don't.
First, if voxel rendering were cheaper, things like NURBS and metaballs could be just as easily converted to voxels as they are to polys (in fact probably even easier), also, doing CSGs with voxels is darn simple. I think that we could switch the main engine of a lot of programs to voxels and the artists wouldn't notice. But the artists would notice that a lot of new tools would become available because voxels make some things so easy.
For instance, I'm working on the design of a program that lets a wacom tablet act as a knife modeling clay. Force feed back would make it a lot easier to use, not to mention having a 3d input device would be nice, but for now I have to do with what I've got. However, it should still be a lot mor intuitive than learning to use polys or NURBS.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you could use POVRay or BMRT. Those will do network rendering. Just search google for information on using those for network rendering.
You probably will need to come up with some custom scripts to convert DXF files into the proper format. In my experience, DXF files are a very poor way to transport models. If you are doing work in Autocad, then I recommend finding a DWG converting.
One thing I actually get asked a lot is what the proper way to dispose of old monitors is. Frankly, I've never managed to figure out who to take my old moniters to to have them properly recycled. Heck, I'd even be willing to pay a nominal fee to get rid of them safely.
Well, so far all the charities that I've talked to refuse anything older than a mid-range pentium. However, I keep all pentiums and some of the high-end 486s that come my way, so I only want to dump low-end 486s and older.
And have you seen shipping to send old machines to third world contries?
Every computer museam has hundreds of the machines that come my way, and I'm getting rid of old machines because I don't have space for them. Starting my own museaum isn't going to help the space problem.
Frankly I have enough linux machines. I don't really need to spend the time cramming linux onto a 386 when I could be doing real work instead.
I have no use for door more door stops. Especially not ones as large as a PC case. Likewise, I have no use for such small tables.
So, SETI@home runs on old 16bit machines does it? Even so, I'd save money buying a new machine that eats less power and churns through the numbers faster.
I have more than ample capacity on my 486 gateway to act as an NNTP server (and in fact it does, carying the groups I like). Why do I need to keep older slower machines around to do this?
I don't have kids. Nor do I have a girl-friend, so kids aren't going to happen anytime soon.
I'd love to see a car playing MP3s on a 386.
Now we get to the interesting one. I have a 386 of some sort, and a 486sx, 25 mhz. If you want to drive across the country to pick them up (or pay shipping. These machines are heavy though), you are welcome to them. However, you would be better served to scour the classifieds in you local newspaper.
Kurt and his subsequent death allowed her to form a band, capture national attention, and allow the misconception that she had something "deep" to write lyrics about.
Actually, Hole was around before Kurt died. I don't know when the two got together, but I have a Hole CD here copyright 1991, titled Pretty On The Inside. One could say that Celebrity Skin, which I like a lot better, is their "Pretty On The Outside" disc.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but doesn't google already essentially tell us their criteria for finding the best page (eachs page is weighted by the sum weights of pages that point to it). I mean, they used to have thesis papers on their site explaining the details of how it works.
From my experience, if the lemon law for computers is like the lemon law for cars, virtually every Windows 95 computer and most of the NT machines I've used would need to be replaced numerous times.
Currently, I've only seen one stable windows 95 machine, and that's my current one, and I believe the only reason it is now stable is because it has exactly three pieces of software installed that didn't come on the Windows 95 cd. Those three pieces of software are Creative Encore DVD software, Diablo 2, and Final Fantasy 8.
And for people who would tell me to use NT instead of 95, I've only ever seen one stable NT machine and that was a monster of a machine (dual xeons, 512 megs ram, and a video card that takes both a AGP and a PCI slot). All the rest have been unstable for me.
Due to the above, I suspect that they are going to write the bill so that almost no one can collect. Bleh.
Oh, BTW, for anyone reading old posts of mine and realizing that I do development, I thought I should disclaim that I some times use GTK to wrap an OpenGL context, but more and more I expect to be using SDL for my major apps, and whatever is convienient for minor utils.
In case your wonder why SDL for major apps, I think that what I want to do is move towards having my apps run full screen, ala inferno, softimage, and other great SGI programs. I do plan to update the paradigm a little. At a minimum, I want my programs to be friendly for usage with virtual desktop, and while I will be using pretty much all custom widgets, I want my widgets to operate in a manor obvious to people familiar with the platform (meaning a different version of the widgets for Windows, MacOS, and Linux).
OK, as an end user, I find gtk to be more intuitive, and since gnome is based on gtk, I naturally prefer it. However, I don't use gnome that much, prefering ye ol' rxvt. That's what I get for starting out on unix by dialing into Suns.
I've switched from Netscape to Mozilla, and I find that I'm much better off now. Things are mostly faster, and they certainly crash less. I installed m17 the day after it came out. My biggest complaint is that drop down boxes often render incorrectly, particularly on ebay.
I don't know how closely tied it is, but it is tied, and it has some custom controls written for Motif. That said, I think you could pull off using both, as long as everything was in seperate windows. But that's just not quite as nice as having your program contained in one window. I don't know how receptive they be to merging GTK support (or Qt support) into the main source tree if someone wrote it.
I thought everything already had an IP address. I'd post the IP, but command.com keeps gpfing. I do know that to have a domain you need an IP, and everything.com, everything.org, and everything2.org all exist, so everything obviously has an IP.
Hmm, your right. I had heard that before. But anyway, I feel my point stands. I don't feel better about it running Windows 2k instead (and I wonder why CE isn't a better choice here).
Any if it makes Windows users feel any better, I have the same feelings about the Indrama game box using linux. I think game boxes should do without OSs, or rather that the OS should be on the game media, so that programs can strip out the OS if they want.
And yet, the bandwidth between the CPU and GPU ain't all that hot. And the CPU is going to be throttled due to Windows CE.
Besides, there is more to a good system than graphics. Like how fun the games are. That's why the PS is still going strong despite being so slow.
I'm not sure if Microsoft bans such reporting. However, that wouldn't nescesarily stop a US based magazine from reporting it. After all, that has got to be covered by the constitution. I realize that the constitution rarely applies to business affairs, but I have a hard time believing that a court wouldn't see it as covered.
A 486 should be able to keep up with the speed of the internet connection. Of course, this depends on two things. First, it depends on the speed of your connection (like is it 640k or 7mbit?), and the complexity of the firewall setup. A simple firewall and a reasonably slow connection (like only 1.5mbit) should pose no problem to the aging machine. However, a complex firewall and a fast connection would be hard.
That said, on you main machine, just tell all set it up so that requests on ports from external interfaces are denied. You should be able to set that in your hosts.allow and hosts.deny file. Just add ALL:127.0.0.1 to the hosts.allow file, and ALL:* to the hosts.deny file. From there add services you want allowed to get through to the hosts.allow file.
Well, to be factious, they do. It is called the N64. But seriously, SGI makes more than just the main CPU for that system.
>BTW, in a comment a couple of days ago, you
>mentioned that you couldn't install your
>Voodoo3, 'coz it didn't work without XFree86-4.
>You're misinformed about that -- mine works
>perfectly under XFree86-3.3.6
Yeah, a couple of people have mentioned that. All I know is that the XFree configuration program bundled with Redhat 6.1 doesn't pick out my card. And maybe I only have Xfree 3.3.4 or 3.3.5. I don't know. All I know was my first try failed, and I didn't have time to much around anymore. In another week I should have more available time to figure out why things didn't work the first time. I'm really looking forward to getting that card to work so that I can do more than color vertices in the program I'm working on.
Actually, I thought the shots looked markedly better than the SNES. And it is actually 9 bit graphics. That or 15 bits, but programming for 15 bits is going to be a pain because the processor is slow and for 15 we have to handle our own sprites instead of letter other hardware do it.
Unfortunatly, not many people would be willing to pay true cost for this device. Thus, to get people to buy it, they drop the price below the manufacturing cost and make their losses up on game royalties. If anyone can program the machine and if games are easy to download, then there aren't any game royalties to be made.
First of all, on the GBA you can only display 32k colors in bitmap mode. I don't expect that people are going to use bitmap mode much, especially not at first. To my understanding, the SNES doesn't have such a bitmap mode (and I have a set of documents for programming the SNES in front of me).
So, in character mode we get 512 colors, except color 0 is a transparency bit, so really only 511 colors. By comparison, on the SNES, we have sprites that are made up of tiles. Each tile can display 16 colors. I believe that you can get up to a total of 256 colors between all the different tile palets on screen.
So, the difference between 256 colors and 511 is pretty obvious. Also, the different between 256 colors and 32k colors is even more obvious.
I'm assuming that you are getting you 16k and 32k numbers from the fact that the SNES is a 16bit machine and the 32k colors from the fact that the GBA is a 32bit machine. However, this just isn't the way it works. For starters, if the number of displayable colors and the bit depth of the main processor lined up, then the SNES would display 64k colors (2^16), and the GBA would display over 4 billion colors (2^32). However, processor bit depth and and on screen colors don't always line up. If they did then the N64 would be able to display 2^64 colors, but alas, it is limited to 2^24 (with 8 bit transparency. I'm not sure if the transparency can be used to eek out more colors, but I'm inclined to think not). Actually, pretty much every machine in existance could display more colors than it currently does (with the exception of SGI's Onyx2, which can display 64bit color and it is a 64bit chip).
Uhm, even if you could use a totale of 16k colors on the SNES, you couldn't use them all at once. Each sprite on the SNES is limited to 16 colors. And the difference between 16 colors and 32 colors is pretty big. I forget what size pallete those 16 colors are drawn from, but I don't think that it is a 16k palete. I'm kinda thinking it might be a 256 color overal pallete, but that might be from a larger pallete of 14bit color.
Well, frankly, who would pay extra for a computer just to have linux on it? I mean, I don't go and pay extra for a computer just to have windows on it. Well, OK, maybe I am paying extra for windows, but still, it comes at a lower price than a linux machine.
That's probably the biggest thing that Linux needs. I need to be able to go to the local store and buy a machine with linux on it. Of the local computer stores, one of them has several linux users on staff. So why can't the store offer linux preloaded? It wouldn't cost them much. Just don't offer that service to people who don't ask.
Genesis emulation? Possible, but why?
The saturn hardware has dual hitachi CPUs. The genesis used a 68000 chip. Now, there was an upgrade for the genesis that plugged into the cartidge slot, and then cartridges went into this thing. I forget the name, but it also had dual hitachi CPUs, but they were slower.
The dual CPUs is why the saturn flopped. The PS also has dual CPUs, but the software library that came with it took advantage of that. The software libraries that came with th Saturn didn't, so programmers had to balance their program across both CPUs themselves. This meant that the initial games only used a little over 50% of the power available, whereas the initial PS games used over 80% of the available power.
Also, the second CPU of the PS had the same core instructions, but the stripped parts of it and added some other parts, so the stuff they added might have given it an additional edge. Well, that's what I heard at least. The docs I'm able to find aren't clean whether that second chip is a modified r3000 or if it is totally different, and I'm not familiar with the r3000 to tell just by looking at the instruction sets.
You know, when I read that article, it got me started wondering if I would be able to use the xbox's particle system to emulate voxels.
>AFAIK, artist's 3d tools are geared towards
>polygonal based rendering. It's not a given that
>artists will find voxels intuitive to model with
>(although it may be that the raster-vector
>analogy stands). I'm not an artist so I don't
>know. But one of the challenges will be
>providing decent tools.
Well, the tools render polygons, but increasingly the artists used more sophisticated tools like NURBS and implicit surfaces (implemented as things like metaballs, or metaclay). It just more efficient currently to render polygons, so the rendering programs take the surfaces and convert them to polys. But the artist doesn't need to know this, and increasingly they don't.
First, if voxel rendering were cheaper, things like NURBS and metaballs could be just as easily converted to voxels as they are to polys (in fact probably even easier), also, doing CSGs with voxels is darn simple. I think that we could switch the main engine of a lot of programs to voxels and the artists wouldn't notice. But the artists would notice that a lot of new tools would become available because voxels make some things so easy.
For instance, I'm working on the design of a program that lets a wacom tablet act as a knife modeling clay. Force feed back would make it a lot easier to use, not to mention having a 3d input device would be nice, but for now I have to do with what I've got. However, it should still be a lot mor intuitive than learning to use polys or NURBS.