I remember the 1990's very well. SGI had come out with the Indy workstation, which made the animators happy, but one class animation college (Sheridan college) became rather annoyed when another college (Centennial college) purchased 100 Indy's and started offering training courses in Maya as night school courses.
I'm at a university just now, and all the walls are decorated with game development competitions (Microsoft's Dare to Design), adverts for MSc courses in Game Development, Multimedia Technology and Content, Computer Graphics, High Performance Visualisation alongside the financial analyst adverts.
Twenty years ago, Thatcher decided that the future of the UK was "the service industry" ie. financial services. So, all the trade schools (plumbers, builders, carpenters) were closed down, and so we ended up with a shortage.
(How sales, management and finance people wind up in senior, well-paid positions when they are obviously a net liability to a business remains an eternal mystery to me.)
Nobody else wants the job - IT staff realize they can earn more, have less stress and have a stable career by being self-employed.
Another good quote from the game industry back in the 1980's, "We're not in the industry for the money, we're in for the love of programming/coding, the royalty bonuses are an extra. If you want to make money, go and work in the City". (City = financial centre of London).
Now, after certain MBA types having the absolutely brilliant idea of pushing every experienced programmer into middle management to "train up the next generation of programmers", just about all the veteran programmers have left to set up their own companies.
This is the key: AC power is available everywhere.
Unfortunately, reliable AC power is not available everywhere. It's not too fun to lose a good hours work because the trip switch on the mains power supply decides to cut the power.
Even though the laptop is old, a LCD screen is still valuable. While looking for spare parts for my laptop I came across a company called Nexttronics. They actually had some sort of part exchange refund scheme for broken LCD displays. The discount was quite substantial - over $500 per LCD screen.
Even split into parts such as mounting brackets, the total value of the system is more valuable than if the system as a whole.
I remember reading some about some research projects about 15 years ago - DARPA sponsored research into developing miniature flying machines that could fly inside buildings. One of the visual simulation experts questioned, "What do they expect to develop? Backpacks for pigeons?"
China plans to relocate 300 million peasants in order to urbanize and create a middle-class. At the current rate of education graduation, they are producing 5 million graduates/year, so it might take 60 years.
The biggest obstacle is going to be the consumption of oil. China produces 60% of all oil consumed in the country, but reserves are expected to run out in six years
I hope they can extend this to identifying the location down to the nearest street. It's possible to do this if there are some obvious hints like a postcode on a street nameplate. Having a webpage address or telephone number on a shop display can help too. Even a original shop name, or a unique combination of high street stores side-by-side can help.
Interesting - I always wondered whether purple/magenta was the missing fourth color channel. It's the only color that doesn't correspond to an actual wavelength of light.
Though it's our cornea's that block out the UV light from reaching our retina's. Some people with one artificial cornea claim to be able to see colors differently through each eye.
think the role of math as "leading" is oversold. I get the impression that a heck of a lot of math was inspired by physics. It seems as though the two develop in tandem. In particular, vector calc and E&M come to mind.
Many fields of mathematics were created simply to solve the real-world physics problems of the time. Attempts to predict tide levels in the 1800's led to the development of mechanical calculators and signal processing (sum of weighted sine waves).
A Renaissance parlor trick of placing salt on a vibrating table led to the development of the field of harmonics theory (the king offered a reward if someone could provide an explanation).
The need to be able to calculate the refraction of light for eye glasses led to the field of optics theory.
The need to understand electromagnetism led to the development of the theory like Maxwell's equations .
Another amazing thing is that all the symbols of mathematics have been defined since the mid 1800's. You can read a mathematics book written 100 years ago and still understand it as if it were just newly released publication. In many cases the high-school books of then seem to cover topics in greater detail than current publications.
Though it is a strange feeling to think that someone is able to share their knowledge of a subject even though they are no longer here in person; with a modern textbook the authors usually have a webpage forum, if not an E-mail address you can use to contact them.
I don't understand. If these four massive objects were lined up towards the observer, and each massive object can split the light into two paths, then shouldn't there be (2^n)-1 stars, rather than 5n-5?
If they were side by side, then the maximum would be 2n?
A GPU is a large number of high-speed floating point units (stream processors), parallelised memory (video ram) and some clever memory caching (texture units). In earlier GPU's, integer operations were just a special case of floating point calculations. The later GPU's have seperate logic pathways for integer calculations
A CPU consists of a single pipelined processor with all sorts of tricks to optimise performance. The Intel P6 article at wikipedia gives some explanation of these:
* Speculative execution and out-of-order completion (called "dynamic execution" by Intel), which required new retire units in the execution core. This lessened pipeline stalls, and in part enabled greater speed-scaling of the Pentium Pro and successive generations of CPUs.
* Superpipelining, which increased from Pentium's 5-stage pipeline to 14 of the Pentium Pro, and eventually morphed into the 10-stage pipeline of the Pentium III, and the 12- to 14-stage pipeline of the Pentium M.
* Integrated L2 cache that runs at the full speed of the processing core, instead of the earlier designs of off-die (on motherboard) cache, which runs at a fraction of the CPU frequency.
* Wider 36-bit physical address bus to support more than 4 GiB of physical memory (the linear address space of a process was still limited to 4 GiB).
* Register renaming, which enabled more efficient execution of multiple instructions in the pipeline.
Even if you were to run a simple hello world on a CPU, this would invoke the use of virtual memory to implement dynamic library linking, cache pages to be loaded for the executable, and all sorts of API calls to get through the windowing system and kernel IO library. A GPU just has to do some vector maths on data read from one block of memory to another.
I haven't used Usenet for a long time (after the spammers started showing up on all the newsgroups, trying to find good discussions become more like working as a gold digger than a learning experience).
I am amazed that anyone could make a 20 GByte post to a newsgroup. Surely it would be simpler to just cap the size of individual Usenet postings, and the number of posts anyone can post to a particular group?
Back in the early 90's, users were lucky to have a PC which had a 1024x768 screen resolution at 16-bit color and an ISDN modem (charged by the kilobyte). Web browsers hadn't been invented yet, so there weren't web page based forums like Slashdot. All you had were Usenet boards for discussions, gopher for searching, and ftp for uploading/downloading. If your LAN firewall didn't permit ftp, then you could perform ftp-by-email by sending a request to a suitable server. After several hours if not a day, your request would be sent back as a series of 'uuencoded' E-mails which you would have to save, recombine and 'uudecode' back into the relevant tar file. To save people time looking for a particular file, the latest version of an executable or tar file was posted monthly in one of the binaries channels.
The first ISP providers (Demon Internet) provided their own E-mail/Usenet readers for PPP. You could specify which newsgroups you wanted to subscribe to, and whether you wanted to download only the individual subject lines rather than entire posts, or whether to download individual threads rather than the entire Usenet group. Given that 14K modems were the state-of-the-art, just a handful of Usenet groups would take an hour to read.
One branch of ComputerWorld used to sell boxes of 10 3.5" pre-formatted floppy disks for 100 pounds/box. This particular branch was next to an oil company headquarters.
Will they try selling us higher quality air to shoot the EM signals through? We Introduce our latest product, the Acme professional EF signal booster. Scientific studies have proven that high humidity levels reduce signal quality of EM signals. After years of painstaking research, our scientists have designed and patented a foolproof system for maximising the quality of EM signals within a internal area. Using our patented process of filtering the air molecules within a building, our system removes all impurities and excess humidity that would reduce the quality of EM signals in your building. Our system also reshapes the air molecules as well as adding specially designed EM friendly molecules which guarantee that your electronic equipment will always receive and transmit the highest quality EM signals wherever you are.
Our system is available for immediate purchase. Just visit our website and select the number of filtering units that you require (ideally one unit should cover every 20 square metres, or one unit per corner of a room), and your order will be despatched within 24 hours.
It depends on the way they implement it. Presumably, the routing tables of the routers will be set in a way, such that the IP addresses of the blocked sites will be unreachable.
But this can be defeated by proxy servers. So France could ban the IP addresses of every proxy server, which might also be a university server or political discussion site.
But such sites could also copy botnet's and have rapidly rotating server IP addresses using DNS entries. So France would also have to ban every international DNS server.
For atoms below Iron, when you fuse two atoms together, the mass of the final isotope is slightly less than the individual masses of those two atomic nucleii. The change of mass gives out energy.
For atoms above Iron, fusion actually requires energy, so you have to use fission to get energy (nuclear reactors).
Maybe this car uses dynamos as brakes to convert the rotational energy of the car wheels into electricity and convert water into hydrogen. Then, when the car needs energy, the hydrogen can be converted back into water + heat.
It's amazing the variations on mammalian visions - some animals still have four different color receptors (the normal red, green, blue and with the extra one which sees into the ultra-violet range of the electromagnetic spectrum). Insects are able see into the UV range as well as being able to detect polarization of sunlight).
I'd assume that they would have some automatic device that could be plugged in through a USB or Firewire port. Maybe something a simple as a basic one-click file scanner.
Taking a random sample of one or two images or movies per directory would probably be the most time-efficient way of searching.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember the 1990's very well. SGI had come out with the Indy workstation, which made the animators happy, but one class animation college (Sheridan college) became rather annoyed when another college (Centennial college) purchased 100 Indy's and started offering training courses in Maya as night school courses.
I'm at a university just now, and all the walls are decorated with game development competitions (Microsoft's Dare to Design), adverts for MSc courses in Game Development, Multimedia Technology and Content, Computer Graphics, High Performance Visualisation alongside the financial analyst adverts.
Twenty years ago, Thatcher decided that the future of the UK was "the service industry" ie. financial services. So, all the trade schools (plumbers, builders, carpenters) were closed down, and so we ended up with a shortage.
(How sales, management and finance people wind up in senior, well-paid positions when they are obviously a net liability to a business remains an eternal mystery to me.)
Nobody else wants the job - IT staff realize they can earn more, have less stress and have a stable career by being self-employed.
Another good quote from the game industry back in the 1980's, "We're not in the industry for the money, we're in for the love of programming/coding, the royalty bonuses are an extra. If you want to make money, go and work in the City". (City = financial centre of London).
Now, after certain MBA types having the absolutely brilliant idea of pushing every experienced programmer into middle management to "train up the next generation of programmers", just about all the veteran programmers have left to set up their own companies.
Well said Greg Lake.
This is the key: AC power is available everywhere.
Unfortunately, reliable AC power is not available everywhere. It's not too fun to lose a good hours work because the trip switch on the mains power supply decides to cut the power.
Even though the laptop is old, a LCD screen is still valuable. While looking for spare parts for my laptop I came across a company called Nexttronics. They actually had some sort of part exchange refund scheme for broken LCD displays. The discount was quite substantial - over $500 per LCD screen.
Even split into parts such as mounting brackets, the total value of the system is more valuable than if the system as a whole.
I remember reading some about some research projects about 15 years ago - DARPA sponsored research into developing miniature flying machines that could fly inside buildings. One of the visual simulation experts questioned, "What do they expect to develop? Backpacks for pigeons?"
Now, even Youtubers are flying mini-helicopters with webcams
China plans to relocate 300 million peasants in order to urbanize and create a middle-class. At the current rate of education graduation, they are producing 5 million graduates/year, so it might take 60 years.
The biggest obstacle is going to be the consumption of oil. China produces 60% of all oil consumed in the country, but reserves are expected to run out in six years
(Source: Teachers TV).
I hope they can extend this to identifying the location down to the nearest street. It's possible to do this if there are some obvious hints like a postcode on a street nameplate. Having a webpage address or telephone number on a shop display can help too. Even a original shop name, or a unique combination of high street stores side-by-side can help.
Interesting - I always wondered whether purple/magenta was the missing fourth color channel. It's the only color that doesn't correspond to an actual wavelength of light.
Though it's our cornea's that block out the UV light from reaching our retina's. Some people with one artificial cornea claim to be able to see colors differently through each eye.
think the role of math as "leading" is oversold. I get the impression that a heck of a lot of math was inspired by physics. It seems as though the two develop in tandem. In particular, vector calc and E&M come to mind.
Many fields of mathematics were created simply to solve the real-world physics problems of the time. Attempts to predict tide levels in the 1800's led to the development of mechanical calculators and signal processing (sum of weighted sine waves).
A Renaissance parlor trick of placing salt on a vibrating table led to the development of the field of harmonics theory (the king offered a reward if someone could provide an explanation).
The need to be able to calculate the refraction of light for eye glasses led to the field of optics theory.
The need to understand electromagnetism led to the development of the theory like Maxwell's equations .
Another amazing thing is that all the symbols of mathematics have been defined since the mid 1800's. You can read a mathematics book written 100 years ago and still understand it as if it were just newly released publication. In many cases the high-school books of then seem to cover topics in greater detail than current publications.
Though it is a strange feeling to think that someone is able to share their knowledge of a subject even though they are no longer here in person; with a modern textbook the authors usually have a webpage forum, if not an E-mail address you can use to contact them.
From what I have heard of Sony (Europe's) recruitment practises, that advert is quite believable.
I don't understand. If these four massive objects were lined up towards the observer, and each massive object can split the light into two paths, then shouldn't there be (2^n)-1 stars, rather than 5n-5?
If they were side by side, then the maximum would be 2n?
Dr. Batenburg is going to have to buy four of these cards to upgrade his Fastra
A GPU is a large number of high-speed floating point units (stream processors), parallelised memory (video ram) and some clever memory caching (texture units). In earlier GPU's, integer operations were just a special case of floating point calculations. The later GPU's have seperate logic pathways for integer calculations
A CPU consists of a single pipelined processor with all sorts of tricks to optimise performance. The Intel P6 article at wikipedia gives some explanation of these:
* Speculative execution and out-of-order completion (called "dynamic execution" by Intel), which required new retire units in the execution core. This lessened pipeline stalls, and in part enabled greater speed-scaling of the Pentium Pro and successive generations of CPUs.
* Superpipelining, which increased from Pentium's 5-stage pipeline to 14 of the Pentium Pro, and eventually morphed into the 10-stage pipeline of the Pentium III, and the 12- to 14-stage pipeline of the Pentium M.
* Integrated L2 cache that runs at the full speed of the processing core, instead of the earlier designs of off-die (on motherboard) cache, which runs at a fraction of the CPU frequency.
* Wider 36-bit physical address bus to support more than 4 GiB of physical memory (the linear address space of a process was still limited to 4 GiB).
* Register renaming, which enabled more efficient execution of multiple instructions in the pipeline.
Even if you were to run a simple hello world on a CPU, this would invoke the use of virtual memory to implement dynamic library linking, cache pages to be loaded for the executable, and all sorts of API calls to get through the windowing system and kernel IO library. A GPU just has to do some vector maths on data read from one block of memory to another.
That comment reminds me of of this Sony advert
I haven't used Usenet for a long time (after the spammers started showing up on all the newsgroups, trying to find good discussions become more like working as a gold digger than a learning experience).
I am amazed that anyone could make a 20 GByte post to a newsgroup. Surely it would be simpler to just cap the size of individual Usenet postings, and the number of posts anyone can post to a particular group?
Back in the early 90's, users were lucky to have a PC which had a 1024x768 screen resolution at 16-bit color and an ISDN modem (charged by the kilobyte). Web browsers hadn't been invented yet, so there weren't web page based forums like Slashdot. All you had were Usenet boards for discussions, gopher for searching, and ftp for uploading/downloading. If your LAN firewall didn't permit ftp, then you could perform ftp-by-email by sending a request to a suitable server. After several hours if not a day, your request would be sent back as a series of 'uuencoded' E-mails which you would have to save, recombine and 'uudecode' back into the relevant tar file. To save people time looking for a particular file, the latest version of an executable or tar file was posted monthly in one of the binaries channels.
The first ISP providers (Demon Internet) provided their own E-mail/Usenet readers for PPP. You could specify which newsgroups you wanted to subscribe to, and whether you wanted to download only the individual subject lines rather than entire posts, or whether to download individual threads rather than the entire Usenet group. Given that 14K modems were the state-of-the-art, just a handful of Usenet groups would take an hour to read.
One branch of ComputerWorld used to sell boxes of 10 3.5" pre-formatted floppy disks for 100 pounds/box. This particular branch was next to an oil company headquarters.
Our system is available for immediate purchase. Just visit our website and select the number of filtering units that you require (ideally one unit should cover every 20 square metres, or one unit per corner of a room), and your order will be despatched within 24 hours.
It depends on the way they implement it. Presumably, the routing tables of the routers will be set in a way, such that the IP addresses of the blocked sites will be unreachable.
But this can be defeated by proxy servers. So France could ban the IP addresses of every proxy server, which might also be a university server or political discussion site.
But such sites could also copy botnet's and have rapidly rotating server IP addresses using DNS entries. So France would also have to ban every international DNS server.
It would lead to something like that article:
2012- The year the Internet ends
For atoms below Iron, when you fuse two atoms together, the mass of the final isotope is slightly less than the individual masses of those two atomic nucleii. The change of mass gives out energy.
For atoms above Iron, fusion actually requires energy, so you have to use fission to get energy (nuclear reactors).
Maybe this car uses dynamos as brakes to convert the rotational energy of the car wheels into electricity and convert water into hydrogen. Then, when the car needs energy, the hydrogen can be converted back into water + heat.
It's amazing the variations on mammalian visions - some animals still have four different color receptors (the normal red, green, blue and with the extra one which sees into the ultra-violet range of the electromagnetic spectrum). Insects are able see into the UV range as well as being able to detect polarization of sunlight).
Liveleak has a video of the Snapping shrimp
I'd assume that they would have some automatic device that could be plugged in through a USB or Firewire port. Maybe something a simple as a basic one-click file scanner.
Taking a random sample of one or two images or movies per directory would probably be the most time-efficient way of searching.