I'm not sure I follow. They say they want it to be easily stackable, and fault tolerant (they specifically mention leaving blocks in place if they fail), but how do you combine that with a water cooling system?
With a water cooling system, you need to make sure that the joints between cubes are water-tight, and maintain them over time, thus defeating their "no maitance" theory.
Or am I missing something? Perhaps they could use "disk blocks" and "cooling blocks" and just swap out the "cooling blocks" if there is a problem? Still takes more work than air cooling, but less than inegrating it into every block would.
What about just leaving air holes, and using it in a chilled room? Most server rooms are chilled anyway.
I've been thinking about possible ways to do Space Quest to take advantage of modern 3d cards, shile still preserving the original feel.
One of the things that always bothered me about games that transitioned to 3d is that they lose the same sense of where you are. You can't see as much at once, and the camera turns with you.
With Space Quest, I think the best way to do it would be to lock the camera in one position / room. No turning, no panning.
You can still have the point/click interface, but the game becomes fully 3d-rendered, on the fly.
If the card is good enough, fans shouldn't even/notice/ that is has been rendered. Just that it looks sharp.
Parts of the newer FF games used this technique, as well as the Westwood game Bladerunner (which was pre-rendered, however)
There were two versions of Space Quest 1.
In the first version (which was EGA only), you had to use the save and restore trick.
In a follow-up VGA release, they introduced the Magnet, to make it easier.
For more information on Space Quest, please read the Space Quest FAQ
My name is Colin Davis. I'm the head producer on the Fan version of SQ7.
While this news has taken us (and the rest of the community) as a bit of a surprise, We have no intention of ceasing development of our version of the game, and we have not been asked to by Sierra.
This news is still unconfirmed, and we are still talking with Sierra to attempt to liscense their trademark.
If you have any questions, please post them here, or e-mail me at Colin@sq7.org, and we will do our best to get those answers out to you.
One of the scenes I suspect they filmed but cut was the discovery of the stone trolls while walking through the woods.
In this scene, the hobbits walk into a clearing gaurded by trolls. The look around, cautiously, and get quite frightened. Later, however, they realize that the trolls were the ones that Bilbo had seen 60 years prior, and are made of stone now.
I believe this scene was filmed and cut for two reasons-
The first is that bilbo tells that very story in the party scene early in the movie. This allows them to tie that scene in, without having the hobbit made.
The second is that we SEE the trolls. In the scene where they are resting before Arwen arrives (just before), look in the background. There be trolls there!
I can understand why the cut the scene, hwoever, it must have slowed the pacing in the early act.
I mean, run from danger, run from danger, Oh my god, trolls!
Oh wait. They are stone. Let's all have a good laugh.
Doesn't work in the fast push of the Movie.
The hard part about this is that the FT stack was designed to be distributed, like Gnutella.
There is not central server, like there was with Napster.
It's all peer->peer->Superpeer, where the SuperClient helps to route things, solving the scaling problems of Gnutella.
So there isn't a Server to shut down.
A least, there never USED to be.
When GiFT came out, Kazaa and Morpheus switched to authorizing people through a centralized sever, before accessing the peer->peer network.
Coincidentally, shortly after they implemented this filter, they were sued.
Let's look who's been sued over this.
Napster, Imesh, Kazaa post-auth server
Who hasn't been sued
Bearshare, Limewire, Kazaa pre-auth server, GiFT, Freenet, WinMX
It seems that the RIAA knows that they don't have a chance of shutting down a network that doesn't use a central server, so they aren't trying.
You may also have a stronger legal case that way. In the napster hearings, one of the key points was that napsters servers let it happen. Napster had control.
I think that what we're learning from this is if you never touch the packets yourself, just release the client and hope for the best, you're in much safer waters.
Beyond just sticking to the CDs, if you don't like the quality of WMA, Vorbis, mp3, ect, you could try using a losless codec.
Basically the difference is this- a lossy codec, such as mp3, in order to shrink the filesize as small as possible, "throws away" less relevent information, to focus on what you will hear.
A lossless codec, such as Flac, does not lose any information. You could, if you wanted to, restore it to the original WAV file.
Think of it as zipping the wav file, but with special routines that encode tighter.
Flac can be found at http://flac.sourceforge.net/.
It might be possible to modify this system to use such a format? It would save HD space, which would allow you to archive more onto it.
Nice job, Eugenia. That was word for word from an article on this mornings Debian Planet We don't usually see such blatent plagurism, but hey. it works;)
Anyone wonder if this might be an illegial modification of your Television, depriving the TV producers of the money you would have paid for larger sets?
I remember reading about one of these a while ago.
I can't get to the linked site right now (I'm presuming it was slashdotted allready), but the way it worked was to basically use a magnifing glass. The screen emmits through a box of a certain size (the screen size), If you put a lense over that, in theory, you could magnify that light, so that it would be large enough to fill a "100 inch" screen, but it would look horrible!
I would think it would be very blurred, very hard to see (they don't give off THAT much light), and the colours would wash out.
I'd be curious to hear of anyone's actual experiences in building one of these.
It was a good beginning for the series. I think there is a lot of potential for the characters, The Dr in particular.
While I'm not sure where the 29th centure guy is going to go, or wht they'll do with him, it is a plot hook, and presumabily will develop into a story arch. Which is what everyone says they like.
The Jello scene did perhaps go a bit over the line, it serverd a usefull purpose in allowing the chracters to intereact.
Without it, you'd be asking "Why the hell didn't she take the ship and run. I thought Vulcans were logical."
I think you may be slamming it because your expectations were too high. It was good television, and good startrek.
IIRC, They give out special Technical Oscars.
They aren't awarded at the show, but in a special ceremony before hand.
My former employer, AVID won one, and had it displayed in the lobby for quite some time.
The Mac really has done quite a bit of work in making video editing on a professional level possible. I think that their recognition is a "Good Thing" (tm)
From the Freenet devl mailing list this morning-
I would just like to note that my schoolterm has ended now, so I am
starting my fulltime work on Freenet as of today. I plan to work pretty
much non-stop until the fall term begins, which is on the 27th of August,
making my employment a convenient 2½ months.
I would just like to assure everybody that I am taking this opportunity
very seriously, and I will work absolutely as hard as I would under
ordinary employment conditions (harder actually, since I don't believe in
stuff like sleep and weekends when hacking on Freenet).
My first priority will be getting back in the loop with Tavin's work on
the experimental branch, and getting the remaining necessary features
(basically announcement) in and working as soon as possible. After that I
will try to balance my time between enhancing and debugging the 0.4 for
code for public usability together with the other 0.4 coders and
experimenting on the routing and caching modifications that have been
discussed here lately. Plans, like always, are subject to revision though.
--
'DeCSS would be fine. Where is it?'
'Here,' Montag touched his head.
'Ah,' Granger smiled and nodded.
Oskar Sandberg
oskar@freenetproject.org --
An Idea that I've been kicking around in my head for a while is the concept of a distribted mobile phone. Each Phone acts as a transmitter for your call, and a forwarder for other calls.
Thus, as the number of phones sold increases, so does the total range of the system.
Such an infrastructure would be, in a similiar way to the internet, very resistant to attack, and the loss of nodes would not defeat the entire network.
To handle encrpytion, such as in the article, two phones could by sync'ed, via an infrared channel (when the two persons were physically close together), upon which point they would exchange their respective public keys.
To get from Phone A to Phone E, the message hops out, from phone to phone, looking for way to phone E.
Each hop, it increases it's HTL by one.
When it arrives at the Phone E, E checks the HTLs of messages that arrive, and then sends back a message that attempts to take a similiar route.
(ie, if a node is missing, it will hop around, looking to get back ont he chain, or, to get back to phone A)
Ok, Ok, I know it's not using the same tech, but does this remind anyone else of the scene from Back to the Future when Doc picks through Marty's trash can to power his Delorean?
I re-read the JonKatz article, and my first responce was-
"Holy Sh*t! That was in 1998?!"
I remember that article, and the Halloween documents that preceded it. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but I suppose that with those postings, Slashdot became Mainstreme.
When Netscape announced the next version of Communicator would be Open Source, I think that that drove more pople to the site to figure out what the hell 'Open Source' meant.
Wow. It's been an interesting ride, slashdot.
Let's see what the future holds. --
While is is true that you use external software to run a freenet node, the access is done through a web browser. Fproxy, the current primary interface, is treated exactly as a link to any other website.
You are right about less popular content being dropped however. The best way (IMO) to fix this is to run your own freenet node, and re-insert the content daily.
Then it is auto cached around the globe as people request it, and kept up as you continue to insert it. --
There is a system being implemented to distribute websites. Freenet.
Using systems in place on freenet, you can upload a website, and have it change daily. (though the updates aren't great yet)
It is cached on computers around the world, according to who is reading the sight.
Although a lot of people want to use freenet for a napster replacement, it's real use is as you described. as they say on their website "Re-wiring the internet"
I remember BeDope posted the following back when BeOS went free. I thought you might like to read it...
Folks were arguing about whether "free like beer" was any good compared to "free like speech". Be Dope researches composed a scientific test to answer this question once and for all.
Be Dope CTO, Dr. Doxie, took her staff to a local computer show armed with several kegs of beer and hundreds of copies of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech.
The results were surprising and conclusive.
"Fully 99 out of every hundred people chose Free Beer over Free Speech," reported Doxie. "In some cases, the subject would begin stressing the importance of free speech, but all the while they'd be eyeing the free beer. In most cases, the free beer won in the end."
"We spent many hours in the lab testing both beer and speech," said Sakoman. "Those who consumed free beer reported feeling satisfied and sometimes 'buzzed'," said Be, Inc. COO Steve Sakoman. "Those speaking free afterwards rarely reported any benefits, and in fact would sometimes complain of a dry mouth or scratchy throat."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I follow. They say they want it to be easily stackable, and fault tolerant (they specifically mention leaving blocks in place if they fail), but how do you combine that with a water cooling system?
With a water cooling system, you need to make sure that the joints between cubes are water-tight, and maintain them over time, thus defeating their "no maitance" theory.
Or am I missing something? Perhaps they could use "disk blocks" and "cooling blocks" and just swap out the "cooling blocks" if there is a problem? Still takes more work than air cooling, but less than inegrating it into every block would.
What about just leaving air holes, and using it in a chilled room? Most server rooms are chilled anyway.
Just some ignorant thoughts.
Colin Davis
I've been thinking about possible ways to do Space Quest to take advantage of modern 3d cards, shile still preserving the original feel.
/notice/ that is has been rendered. Just that it looks sharp.
One of the things that always bothered me about games that transitioned to 3d is that they lose the same sense of where you are. You can't see as much at once, and the camera turns with you.
With Space Quest, I think the best way to do it would be to lock the camera in one position / room. No turning, no panning.
You can still have the point/click interface, but the game becomes fully 3d-rendered, on the fly.
If the card is good enough, fans shouldn't even
Parts of the newer FF games used this technique, as well as the Westwood game Bladerunner (which was pre-rendered, however)
Colin Davis
Colin@sq7.org
There were two versions of Space Quest 1. In the first version (which was EGA only), you had to use the save and restore trick.
In a follow-up VGA release, they introduced the Magnet, to make it easier.
For more information on Space Quest, please read the Space Quest FAQ
Colin Davis
Colin@sq7.org
My name is Colin Davis. I'm the head producer on the Fan version of SQ7.
While this news has taken us (and the rest of the community) as a bit of a surprise, We have no intention of ceasing development of our version of the game, and we have not been asked to by Sierra.
This news is still unconfirmed, and we are still talking with Sierra to attempt to liscense their trademark.
If you have any questions, please post them here, or e-mail me at Colin@sq7.org, and we will do our best to get those answers out to you.
Colin Davis
Colin@sq7.org
One of the scenes I suspect they filmed but cut was the discovery of the stone trolls while walking through the woods.
In this scene, the hobbits walk into a clearing gaurded by trolls. The look around, cautiously, and get quite frightened. Later, however, they realize that the trolls were the ones that Bilbo had seen 60 years prior, and are made of stone now.
I believe this scene was filmed and cut for two reasons-
The first is that bilbo tells that very story in the party scene early in the movie. This allows them to tie that scene in, without having the hobbit made.
The second is that we SEE the trolls. In the scene where they are resting before Arwen arrives (just before), look in the background. There be trolls there!
I can understand why the cut the scene, hwoever, it must have slowed the pacing in the early act.
I mean, run from danger, run from danger, Oh my god, trolls!
Oh wait. They are stone. Let's all have a good laugh.
Doesn't work in the fast push of the Movie.
Colin
The hard part about this is that the FT stack was designed to be distributed, like Gnutella.
There is not central server, like there was with Napster.
It's all peer->peer->Superpeer, where the SuperClient helps to route things, solving the scaling problems of Gnutella.
So there isn't a Server to shut down.
A least, there never USED to be.
When GiFT came out, Kazaa and Morpheus switched to authorizing people through a centralized sever, before accessing the peer->peer network.
Coincidentally, shortly after they implemented this filter, they were sued.
Let's look who's been sued over this.
Napster, Imesh, Kazaa post-auth server
Who hasn't been sued
Bearshare, Limewire, Kazaa pre-auth server, GiFT, Freenet, WinMX
It seems that the RIAA knows that they don't have a chance of shutting down a network that doesn't use a central server, so they aren't trying.
You may also have a stronger legal case that way. In the napster hearings, one of the key points was that napsters servers let it happen. Napster had control.
I think that what we're learning from this is if you never touch the packets yourself, just release the client and hope for the best, you're in much safer waters.
Colin
Beyond just sticking to the CDs, if you don't like the quality of WMA, Vorbis, mp3, ect, you could try using a losless codec.
Basically the difference is this- a lossy codec, such as mp3, in order to shrink the filesize as small as possible, "throws away" less relevent information, to focus on what you will hear.
A lossless codec, such as Flac, does not lose any information. You could, if you wanted to, restore it to the original WAV file.
Think of it as zipping the wav file, but with special routines that encode tighter.
Flac can be found at http://flac.sourceforge.net/.
It might be possible to modify this system to use such a format? It would save HD space, which would allow you to archive more onto it.
Be well.
Before anyone replies, yes I AM aware of t he mispelling of foul.
*sighs* this day just keeps getting better and better.
Anyway, sorry to have been an ass.
Colin
Allright, I retract my comment.
My blatent fowl mood inspired me to attack anyone around, and she seemed to be be the quickest/easiet target.
You have my appologies, Eugenia.
Colin
Nice job, Eugenia. That was word for word from an article on this mornings Debian Planet ;)
We don't usually see such blatent plagurism, but hey. it works
His channel is going to get quite a slashdotting for this. I hope that the SNR doesn't drop /that/ much.
Good Luck, Wil!
Colin
The above was intended as a Joke.
I had included a < Smirk > but Slashdot cut that out, thinking I meant HTML.
IF I had meant HTML I wouldn't have selected PLAIN OLD TEXT.
Grrr.
Anyone wonder if this might be an illegial modification of your Television, depriving the TV producers of the money you would have paid for larger sets?
Colin
I remember reading about one of these a while ago.
I can't get to the linked site right now (I'm presuming it was slashdotted allready), but the way it worked was to basically use a magnifing glass. The screen emmits through a box of a certain size (the screen size), If you put a lense over that, in theory, you could magnify that light, so that it would be large enough to fill a "100 inch" screen, but it would look horrible!
I would think it would be very blurred, very hard to see (they don't give off THAT much light), and the colours would wash out.
I'd be curious to hear of anyone's actual experiences in building one of these.
Just MHO, of course.
It was a good beginning for the series. I think there is a lot of potential for the characters, The Dr in particular.
While I'm not sure where the 29th centure guy is going to go, or wht they'll do with him, it is a plot hook, and presumabily will develop into a story arch. Which is what everyone says they like.
The Jello scene did perhaps go a bit over the line, it serverd a usefull purpose in allowing the chracters to intereact.
Without it, you'd be asking "Why the hell didn't she take the ship and run. I thought Vulcans were logical."
I think you may be slamming it because your expectations were too high. It was good television, and good startrek.
There are some reviews of it at http://www.revolutionsf.com/article/441.html
IIRC, They give out special Technical Oscars.
They aren't awarded at the show, but in a special ceremony before hand.
My former employer, AVID won one, and had it displayed in the lobby for quite some time.
The Mac really has done quite a bit of work in making video editing on a professional level possible. I think that their recognition is a "Good Thing" (tm)
Colin Davis
From the Freenet devl mailing list this morning- I would just like to note that my schoolterm has ended now, so I am starting my fulltime work on Freenet as of today. I plan to work pretty much non-stop until the fall term begins, which is on the 27th of August, making my employment a convenient 2½ months. I would just like to assure everybody that I am taking this opportunity very seriously, and I will work absolutely as hard as I would under ordinary employment conditions (harder actually, since I don't believe in stuff like sleep and weekends when hacking on Freenet). My first priority will be getting back in the loop with Tavin's work on the experimental branch, and getting the remaining necessary features (basically announcement) in and working as soon as possible. After that I will try to balance my time between enhancing and debugging the 0.4 for code for public usability together with the other 0.4 coders and experimenting on the routing and caching modifications that have been discussed here lately. Plans, like always, are subject to revision though. -- 'DeCSS would be fine. Where is it?' 'Here,' Montag touched his head. 'Ah,' Granger smiled and nodded. Oskar Sandberg oskar@freenetproject.org
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
or- Distributed mobile phones.
An Idea that I've been kicking around in my head for a while is the concept of a distribted mobile phone. Each Phone acts as a transmitter for your call, and a forwarder for other calls.
Thus, as the number of phones sold increases, so does the total range of the system.
Such an infrastructure would be, in a similiar way to the internet, very resistant to attack, and the loss of nodes would not defeat the entire network.
To handle encrpytion, such as in the article, two phones could by sync'ed, via an infrared channel (when the two persons were physically close together), upon which point they would exchange their respective public keys.
To get from Phone A to Phone E, the message hops out, from phone to phone, looking for way to phone E.
Each hop, it increases it's HTL by one.
When it arrives at the Phone E, E checks the HTLs of messages that arrive, and then sends back a message that attempts to take a similiar route.
(ie, if a node is missing, it will hop around, looking to get back ont he chain, or, to get back to phone A)
Does this sound like a viable phone model?
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
No, but there was a rumor that the hoverboards were real
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
Ok, Ok, I know it's not using the same tech, but does this remind anyone else of the scene from Back to the Future when Doc picks through Marty's trash can to power his Delorean?
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
I re-read the JonKatz article, and my first responce was-
"Holy Sh*t! That was in 1998?!"
I remember that article, and the Halloween documents that preceded it. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but I suppose that with those postings, Slashdot became Mainstreme.
When Netscape announced the next version of Communicator would be Open Source, I think that that drove more pople to the site to figure out what the hell 'Open Source' meant.
Wow. It's been an interesting ride, slashdot.
Let's see what the future holds.
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
The site was an interesting experiment on human nature, more than on the technology.
It showed that people will abuse any chance they hve to make other people miserable, where there is no accountability.
It is facinating to watch . Even when they begged (your sign, as above) their heating bills were double normal...
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
While is is true that you use external software to run a freenet node, the access is done through a web browser. Fproxy, the current primary interface, is treated exactly as a link to any other website.
You are right about less popular content being dropped however. The best way (IMO) to fix this is to run your own freenet node, and re-insert the content daily.
Then it is auto cached around the globe as people request it, and kept up as you continue to insert it.
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
There is a system being implemented to distribute websites. Freenet.
Using systems in place on freenet, you can upload a website, and have it change daily. (though the updates aren't great yet)
It is cached on computers around the world, according to who is reading the sight.
Although a lot of people want to use freenet for a napster replacement, it's real use is as you described. as they say on their website "Re-wiring the internet"
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
I remember BeDope posted the following back when BeOS went free. I thought you might like to read it...
Folks were arguing about whether "free like beer" was any good compared to "free like speech". Be Dope researches composed a scientific test to answer this question once and for all.
Be Dope CTO, Dr. Doxie, took her staff to a local computer show armed with several kegs of beer and hundreds of copies of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech.
The results were surprising and conclusive.
"Fully 99 out of every hundred people chose Free Beer over Free Speech," reported Doxie. "In some cases, the subject would begin stressing the importance of free speech, but all the while they'd be eyeing the free beer. In most cases, the free beer won in the end."
"We spent many hours in the lab testing both beer and speech," said Sakoman. "Those who consumed free beer reported feeling satisfied and sometimes 'buzzed'," said Be, Inc. COO Steve Sakoman. "Those speaking free afterwards rarely reported any benefits, and in fact would sometimes complain of a dry mouth or scratchy throat."
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis