> from my experience, computer technology is mostly driven by computer games.
It may have been right, but it's going to change for photography. With more people taking pictures than playing games, and people buying digital cameras instead of old-fashioned film cameras, PCs are becoming graphic stations for a lot of people.
Manipulating high-res images require fast CPUs (or you wait each time you do a color balance), fast I/O (or you wait each time you print), large amount of storage (I have 1Gb in my PC, no it's not all porn or illegal movies), large bandwidth when you send the pics around...
And I'm not even talking about people who want to edit their home videos... Forget games.
My coworker suggested usung a bike pump... I don't know anything about fish (except how to cook them) so take that with a grain of salt (no, that's not a recipe).
Just like immortality of the cells is called cancer and leads to the death of the individual, immortality of the individuals will lead to the death of societies.
You can never get you boss' job, never get your parents' money or house... How long do you think society would last ?
There's a classic S&F book where some kind of virus is released and brings immortality to all humans and animals. Tragedy ensues.
Not that I am too worried, in scientific magazines of the early 1900, they had those exact same "with the advancement of medecine, eternity is within reach soon." Yeah, right, life expectancy has been raising steadily but slowly and it wouldn't take much to bring it all down (remember SARS ? AIDS ?). And many biologists believe there is some kind of stumbling block around 120 years anyway.
>
As a strike team leader for a mountain search and rescue team, I'll tell you that without HAM radio, our job would be just plain impossible in many situations
I'd like to believe that, unfortunately my wife's climbing party was once swept in a rockfall. She called for hours with her radio, could reach several HAM operators, but nobody believed her or would call a rescue. Finally 2 hours later one did. It would have been faster if she walked back to Chamonix. One of the guys still can't walk properly 10 years later.
For all I care those frequencies should be put to much better use.
And I don't take useless radios when I go climbing
Companies spend millions on advertising, but pay minimum wage to those who will be the first point of contact with the customer. Ain't economics great?
There's a good solution to this: have the software/hardware do one day a week (or half a day) of tech support. Answering angry/confused customers, they will:
make sure they write better software next time
don't let their boss release it too early
give good high level support to customer (from the horse's mouth)
And maybe improve on social skills of many programmers... Maybe.
Whatever happened to MathML ? I remember when it was announced, half a decade ago, I did think it would solve all those printing and compatibility problems. I have yet to find one app that supports it, particularly the browsers.
Yes. I sell some images online, and I use a quite serious external payment system that makes several additional checks. All the orders I get from strange countries (Afghanistan, anywhere in Africa...) never get confirmed.
> When I was younger, I took a job doing telemarketing calls
Which reminds me... I had a friend admit sheepily that he did the same, with another friend of his. They showed up for the job with beer and pot, did all their calls high and drunk and had the time of their life. Never sold anything and didn't bother coming back the 2nd day...
Now that would be a telemarketing call I'd be interested in getting...
Because the shipping was almost the same as the price of the cases themselves ! And once 'modified' they worked fine for the purpose of the cluster (with a few extra fans).
And because I just suck at business. Specs, code and bugs I can handle, but not a vendor that says: "sure, send them back, we'll give you only 30% restocking fee."
I ordered 12 Lavita cases to build a cluster, but surprise, when I got them, they weren't quite E-ATX as the webpage said: the 5 1/4" bays were in the way. I had to spend an afternoon cutting metal (as I wasn't going to put CDs in them anyway). THey were light, cheap and small, but I hope no one will move them or they'll fall apart.
> Not only that, but shoes are mostly made of plastic, rubber, etc. that would look just the same as plastic explosives
On an X-ray, yes, but some other systems, like neutron scatter tomography machines, can detect some types of chemicals very well. Most explosives contain a very high ratio of nitrogen making them easy to differentiate from plasctis or metals. Those neutron tomographs are being used more and more to scan checked luggage at big European airports.
The drawback is that the radiation flux is very high: you don't want any living thing to be in your luggage (a good way to sterlize your dirty laundry), and it completely destoys undevelopped photographic films. Keep them with you and put them in the X-ray machine in their own plastic bag, it's much safer.
Your post about people refusing/not_understanding the command line reminds me of something that makes me sad to no end: people who use the [open] instead of the [explore] window way of file management in Windows. The difference, if I didn't make myself clear is that the latter has the folder structure displayed on the left and usually display all the file details on the right (so you can sort) while the former has only icons and opens a new window when you click on a folder icon.
I once watched a (more senior than me) sysadmin try to find a file this way. Clicking on subfolder after folder. At the end of ten minutes he had 50 windows open while I was standing behind, hesitating to say anything.
Are there other user behaviors that make you cringe ?
> The business of clothing manufacture operates on razor thin margins as it is
You have to be kidding. It's probably the most profitable business of all. Okay, maybe not the chinese potato bags that pass as clothing in Kmart shops in the US, but all the stuff that teenagers want to wear is highly profitable. A lot more than high-tech gizmos.
To give you an example, when I was a student my roomate had his own clothing company. Among other things they were making jackets for famous french design companies like Chanel. Chanel would give them the design and the fabric, they would put it together and sell it back to Chanel for about 20~40$ and Chanel would add their tagname and sell it for, hold on to the railing, 1000~2000$. I'm not making this up. Rich bitches and stupid teenagers will buy anything at any price as long as it's in fashion and better than what their neighbor/friends are wearing.
It's not because we are geeks without clue about this stuff that it doesn't exist. And RFID tags fit right in to sell them more of that stuff. They'll love it.
Not to nitpick too much, but I think your regexp finds the following when it's actually not a comment:
printf("Comments in C are written like/* this */ although I prefer the// C++ style");
That's why we use parsers to write compilers and not regexps. I came back from Perl after a few months using it, being very disillusionned by its read-onlyness.
> I was also interested to note that high CPU usage produces measurable extra power usage
He! I had a good example of that a couple weeks ago. I built a cluster of 12 PCs with 2 AMD Athlon 2400+ each, running OpenMosix. I had tested it in small chunks so I knew it could run. I moved everything over to the final destination, a 3000VA UPS, and invited my boss to come throw the switch.
It started perfectly and I started demonstrating the power of 30Gflops of AMD CPU working together: I started a script to run 24 instances of Seti@Home.
My finger was still on the [Enter] key when there was a loud Boom!, the UPS blew up and the whole room went dark. My boss: "Nice demo !"
...it clears all the shit out of the brain. And it's certainly a lot more healthy than watching baseball on TV. And of course photography to remember it all. Part of my website is freeware, another part is climbing pictures and I won't say what the rest is...
> when that guy crashes into the stopped car in front of him, coming to an almost instant stop, you're screwed
Well, I was in that car in front of him, so that doesn't apply to me, does it ? BTW, that sucked for a honeymoon ending:-(
More (?) seriously, another drawback of that system is that the radar is on the front of the car. Your eyes are much higher. If there's a stopped car / big rock behind a hill, your eyes will see it a lot before the radar.
There is no good linux cluster book...
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When setting up my 24 processor cluster, I did read a lot of book reviews, but no one was satisfied by the 11 books I found. This is probably because clustering is a very dynamic medium, where patches are experimental, software is used only by a few groups, and once stability is reached, no one wants to touch anything anymore !!!
So I read online, whatever I found that was up to date and settled on the satisfying OpenMosix and... it works !:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It may have been right, but it's going to change for photography. With more people taking pictures than playing games, and people buying digital cameras instead of old-fashioned film cameras, PCs are becoming graphic stations for a lot of people.
Manipulating high-res images require fast CPUs (or you wait each time you do a color balance), fast I/O (or you wait each time you print), large amount of storage (I have 1Gb in my PC, no it's not all porn or illegal movies), large bandwidth when you send the pics around...
And I'm not even talking about people who want to edit their home videos... Forget games.
My coworker suggested usung a bike pump... I don't know anything about fish (except how to cook them) so take that with a grain of salt (no, that's not a recipe).
You can never get you boss' job, never get your parents' money or house... How long do you think society would last ?
There's a classic S&F book where some kind of virus is released and brings immortality to all humans and animals. Tragedy ensues.
Not that I am too worried, in scientific magazines of the early 1900, they had those exact same "with the advancement of medecine, eternity is within reach soon." Yeah, right, life expectancy has been raising steadily but slowly and it wouldn't take much to bring it all down (remember SARS ? AIDS ?). And many biologists believe there is some kind of stumbling block around 120 years anyway.
I'd like to believe that, unfortunately my wife's climbing party was once swept in a rockfall. She called for hours with her radio, could reach several HAM operators, but nobody believed her or would call a rescue. Finally 2 hours later one did. It would have been faster if she walked back to Chamonix. One of the guys still can't walk properly 10 years later.
For all I care those frequencies should be put to much better use.
And I don't take useless radios when I go climbing
There's a good solution to this: have the software/hardware do one day a week (or half a day) of tech support. Answering angry/confused customers, they will:
Listen to this prank call: it's (more or less) on topic and hilarious...
what are the fastest fan-less CPUs on the market ? Anything above 1Gz that can go with only a heatsink and no fans like old 486s ?
Hey, I know those guys... They took some of my copyrighted wallpaper images, removed my logos, and resold them on CDs. Assholes.
Whatever happened to MathML ? I remember when it was announced, half a decade ago, I did think it would solve all those printing and compatibility problems. I have yet to find one app that supports it, particularly the browsers.
It looks like a great trick, so I just tried it and... Segmentation fault (Core dumped)
Yes. I sell some images online, and I use a quite serious external payment system that makes several additional checks. All the orders I get from strange countries (Afghanistan, anywhere in Africa...) never get confirmed.
Which reminds me... I had a friend admit sheepily that he did the same, with another friend of his. They showed up for the job with beer and pot, did all their calls high and drunk and had the time of their life. Never sold anything and didn't bother coming back the 2nd day...
Now that would be a telemarketing call I'd be interested in getting...
Just to illustrate to the discussion: two high-res images of (normal) ligthning above my condo: 1 and 2
Because the shipping was almost the same as the price of the cases themselves ! And once 'modified' they worked fine for the purpose of the cluster (with a few extra fans).
And because I just suck at business. Specs, code and bugs I can handle, but not a vendor that says: "sure, send them back, we'll give you only 30% restocking fee."
Antec is much better. Heavier too.
On an X-ray, yes, but some other systems, like neutron scatter tomography machines, can detect some types of chemicals very well. Most explosives contain a very high ratio of nitrogen making them easy to differentiate from plasctis or metals. Those neutron tomographs are being used more and more to scan checked luggage at big European airports.
The drawback is that the radiation flux is very high: you don't want any living thing to be in your luggage (a good way to sterlize your dirty laundry), and it completely destoys undevelopped photographic films. Keep them with you and put them in the X-ray machine in their own plastic bag, it's much safer.
Could it be this ?
I once watched a (more senior than me) sysadmin try to find a file this way. Clicking on subfolder after folder. At the end of ten minutes he had 50 windows open while I was standing behind, hesitating to say anything.
Are there other user behaviors that make you cringe ?
You have to be kidding. It's probably the most profitable business of all. Okay, maybe not the chinese potato bags that pass as clothing in Kmart shops in the US, but all the stuff that teenagers want to wear is highly profitable. A lot more than high-tech gizmos.
To give you an example, when I was a student my roomate had his own clothing company. Among other things they were making jackets for famous french design companies like Chanel. Chanel would give them the design and the fabric, they would put it together and sell it back to Chanel for about 20~40$ and Chanel would add their tagname and sell it for, hold on to the railing, 1000~2000$. I'm not making this up. Rich bitches and stupid teenagers will buy anything at any price as long as it's in fashion and better than what their neighbor/friends are wearing.
It's not because we are geeks without clue about this stuff that it doesn't exist. And RFID tags fit right in to sell them more of that stuff. They'll love it.
printf("Comments in C are written like /* this */ although I prefer the // C++ style");
That's why we use parsers to write compilers and not regexps. I came back from Perl after a few months using it, being very disillusionned by its read-onlyness.
He! I had a good example of that a couple weeks ago. I built a cluster of 12 PCs with 2 AMD Athlon 2400+ each, running OpenMosix. I had tested it in small chunks so I knew it could run. I moved everything over to the final destination, a 3000VA UPS, and invited my boss to come throw the switch.
It started perfectly and I started demonstrating the power of 30Gflops of AMD CPU working together: I started a script to run 24 instances of Seti@Home.
My finger was still on the [Enter] key when there was a loud Boom!, the UPS blew up and the whole room went dark. My boss: "Nice demo !"
...it clears all the shit out of the brain. And it's certainly a lot more healthy than watching baseball on TV. And of course photography to remember it all. Part of my website is freeware, another part is climbing pictures and I won't say what the rest is...
Well, I was in that car in front of him, so that doesn't apply to me, does it ? BTW, that sucked for a honeymoon ending :-(
More (?) seriously, another drawback of that system is that the radar is on the front of the car. Your eyes are much higher. If there's a stopped car / big rock behind a hill, your eyes will see it a lot before the radar.
So I read online, whatever I found that was up to date and settled on the satisfying OpenMosix and... it works ! :-)