Probably I just know too little about this to make any sense (kinda like how I couldn't understand Enron's bandwidth trading operation) but isn't this sort of like what Benjamin Franklin did with studying the Gulf Stream and other oceanic currents? Only this time, the ship makes its own current and just steers itself away from things which would slow it down. Hm. Maybe it isn't quite like that.
Maybe it is more like get launched, then just coast and steer. I kinda don't see why this is such a big deal... Wouldn't some kind of gravitational radiation antenna be able to just figure out where the gravitation is lowest?
Somehow, I don't think I'm qualified yet for the space pilot position. (Also, for some reason, probably the coast and steer part, I was thinking about Japanese pagodas, with the central stability beam and all the layers resting on each other, but not using the beam for structural support, only stability. Maybe just randomness...)
I've used blender on and off for the past 2 years, I'm not sure how exactly I came across it, but it was after I had gotten the utah-glx to work with my matrox g200 card.
That it has gone open source is a welcome development. The site says that it will be under "GPL (or similar) license" which I think is a very good sign indeed.
As for the interface... It is awesome. There is nothing wrong with the interface, in fact, there are lots of things right with it that other products don't even approach. Yes, it is weird to start with, but if you are prepared to use the keyboard and mouse, and learn a few gestures, you should be all set to go. The window creation and resizing is very well thought out as well.
But hey, if you don't like it, maybe there can be an alternative interface made. All in all, this is really good news.
Maybe there will be a strain of flesh-eating bacteria that flourishes in keyboards (ok, so that is far from likely) and then the media can go have a field day of panic.
How about a plastic-eating bacteria? Then we could see them try and explain it not as a computer "bug" or a "virus."
Wow. That's a lot of memory. In fact, that's how much RAM I have in my system right now. Let us think about this for a moment... Could it be possible (even feasible) to have a faily stripped internal system (simple cpu, ram, little or no expansion cards) and have the GPU be the main processor for a computer system? Perhaps it is a nutty idea, and now that I think about it, how far away is that from your average game console? Still, it would be nice to be able to use the very powerful graphics-optimized chips for things other than simply graphics. (All that dithering and interpolation, though, not really good for exact mathematical calculations. Great for making computer-generated images look more realistic, but maybe not the best for any sort of precise mathematical calculation.) Or am I really wrong? Hey, at the very least, I'm a little off-topic.:-)
I was thinking of this, too... Well, I was thinking to make a themable animated login system... with the animation being done with some kind of vector drawing libraries.
Hmm. Perhaps I can contribute. At the very least, give pretty pictures to them to code to...
Personally, I would start with the login and work from there. And maybe draw the whole thing on the framebuffer, to reduce flicker from animations.
Basically, remember all that talk about 500 cable channels? The phone companies made all this hype, got some money from the counties, states, feds, and then kept charging lots of money for things. Hmm...
I wouldn't mind a little fiber hookup...
certron (i should post more. maybe I could say something intelligent once in a while.)
Well, at least I feel better about stealing stuff out of the 'recycling' dumpters at the recylcing center.
What about that paste solder that didn't require baking at high temperature, and could be heated again to remove the components from the printed circuit board? That would help, perhaps... a resistor is a resistor...
If you find a previous I, Cringley "What I want for Christmas / A Supercomputer in every garage" http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20011227. html you will see he makes note of an even more exciting technology, not involved directly with the cluster, but with networking.
Ultrawideband is what it is called, and instead of sending a modulated signal in a stream on a single frequency, the data stream is broken up and broadcast over different frequencies at the same time. The idea is not new, 'spread spectrum' cordless phones do it, it's just another application of multiplexing.
What makes ultrawideband interesting is that because the bursts are so short and spread across frequencies instead of on one frequency, the FCC is saying that they will classify it as acceptable noise and not regulate it, if at all. The plan is to use frequencies below 60GHz, but I only include that because I remember it. Also, it doesn't really matter, due to the very small utilization of a single frequency.
More information, as well as some papers on company sites can be found at www.uwb.org (the ultra-wideband working group)
OK, so I borrowed the 'Lump - Stick - Rectangle' from somewhere else.:-)
I don't understand how people can be so critical of this. It is truly innovative, with a 700-800MHz G4 packed into the small package (as well as 128MB of RAM and a GeForce2 card.) The only things I don't like are the price, and the screen size. Still, it's a marvelous piece of engineering and design. If you need something else to like about it, take a gander at all the ports in the back. Definitely impressive.
Don't like it? don't buy it. But at least acknowledge the craftsmanship and vision.
(No, I am not affected by the reality distortion field... otherwise I would have put down the money and bought one, and not seen any shortcomings.:-)
After a while they will just self-assemble into a quake-IV-playing machine, but without having to worry about any sort of lame CRT-based frame-displaying device. Then you will never be able to make them do any sort of useful work.
All that technological progress... just for the ultimate game of quake. Hmm... sounds like a day at work...
(well, if I had work, that is. I think it would get in the way of playing quake, though...)
certron
I remember a few things about the power glove (for the nintendo system, that it had two ultrasonic sensors on the unit, above the outermost knuckles, and that the 3 receivers on the tv set got 12-byte bursts that both had the button and finger-tension information (digital) and the x-y-z-tilt spatial information was extracted from the relative signal strengths (analog).
OK, i remember the glove, but most of the above is from reading a simple VR book. It was listed as one of the really cool items to try and use, and they also said that even though they don't make power gloves any more, the company who holds the patent(s) won't let anyone else make them or anything similar. grr...
So where does this thing stand? If an 8-bit nintendo was able to use it, what is the hold-up? OK, so it doesn't cost $10,000 anymore... is that any reason not to make the drivers? (Maybe I should contribute instead of running my mouth:-)
Those driver guys should look at "The Virtual Reality Construction Kit" by Joe Gradecki, which would be helpful because it apparently had equations and other stuff that tells you the math needed to make the glove useful.
some links, i guess:
http://www.angelfire.com/ok2/stepinto/PowerGlove Pa ge.html
http://www.speech.kth.se/kacor/press/press.htm
I can't find a picture of the power glove gestures poster, though! Grr... And yes, while searching, I came across the previous slashdot article on 'data gloves'.
Amen brother. The public airwaves are supposed to belong to the public, and yet the broadcasters of all kinds have been given a free ride for the past, oh... 70 years? 80 years? Well, a damn long time. The fact that the original bandwidth auction of the newly set aside HDTV spectrum wasn't on the news is saddening but far from unexplainable. The media companies weren't going to let the little folk in on their little goldmine...
We should have our own broadcast stations, low-power FM stations, and other radio-based services for our communities. Instead, the community is slowly dissapearing in a blue glow and static fuzz. After a while of staring at super-high resolutions and hearing super-high-fidelity sounds, perhaps their sharpness is dulling us. The world will look less and less appealing, and we'll only be capable of interacting with the glowing box, and not each other.
I could go on a LONG time here, but suffice it to say that the spectrum was stolen from us, sold by the government, and is still being held captive and even perhaps used against us (hmm... advertising as warfare...) every day.
It's time to take back what is ours. Educate yourself and educate others. Only ignorance stands to defeat us.
certron
Oh, and one of the reasons why the cellphone people are pushing their digital services is that 7 digital signals can fit in the same bandwidth space as 1 analog signal. Hmm... They've found a more economical way to profit from public property. Great, eh?
Does it really undermine intellectual property or does it just mean that you can borrow it all you want? Say, it is my property, but you can use it all you want, just don't destroy it (which is difficult, since I have 1 copy of it, and so do many other people), you can borrow it as much as you want, but it is still mine.
I interperet the GPL as using copyright law to give rights to the author and ownership to the world at large. It is still intellectual property, but everyone owns it. Are they arguing somehow that it would diminish their own ownership of their code in some way to have other code owned by other people being shared freely?
Why are they trying to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own property? (I won't start on whether this concept is American or unAmerican... depends on when you are looking at America...)
I don't know about 6 hr movies, but maybe make a 2 or 3 part movie or... hmm. hey, maybe someone could make it as an art film or something, spend the money on production and not on advertising, release it in those little theatres, and make sure it's really really good and let the word of mouth carry it. I wish that movie ticket prices weren't so high, and that a mini-series of movies was more possible. I'm sure there is some way to break things up so that they make sense by themselves and just tell enough of the story for one movie.
If you really watch Star Wars, there isn't really that much story in each movie (or at least the story is very well spread out over the entire film) but when the movies are watched in sequence, the whole thing comes into much better focus. I would seriously favor the mini-series approach, although I doubt that this will be supported by the people with the money. The idea seems to be make a good-enough product, hype it, and then just wait for the money to come in.
If you watch ID4 enough, you'll realize it's really just a big global PR scheme. [sigh] Uplifting but empty. Oh well.
I still want this on as anime. Maybe it'll be anime's 'big break' in the US. Maybe not. (Hopefully after having been introduced to 'the masses' the quality won't go completely downhill, but... this is America...) certron
I have no idea how they are going to do this in a real life movie actor kind of way. I haven't seen The Matrix enough to decide whether the same sort of nutso effects could be used to do Neuromancer justice on the screen, but almost immediatly after reading the book for the second time about 2 years ago, I thought that the only possible way (or at least a very good way) to bring Neuromancer to life would be to make the entire movie as an anime. (why do I expect to be flamed for that last one?)
After watching a few movies like Ghost in the Shell, I was pretty sure that if done properly the animation medium would be ideal for this movie. I think I would be against live action for this one, but then it might not meet with commercial success (and then become a cult film! hey, not so bad...) as The Matrix did. I don't know. I would steer towards doing it really well with animation, but if they manage to do it, I hope they do it damn well. This is a story that deserves to be told properly. Special FX technical wizardry isn't that necessarry, look at Tron, the FX worked. (I personally think that cyberspace might look like it was being drawn by a huge color Vectrex, but that's just me. Also might require someone lugging laser projection equiptment to augment the actual film... hmm. ok, bad idea.)
All I can hope is that they do this story right, because whether you liked the book or not, it was important, and it deserves better treatment than to be turned into another Johnny Mn.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably I just know too little about this to make any sense (kinda like how I couldn't understand Enron's bandwidth trading operation) but isn't this sort of like what Benjamin Franklin did with studying the Gulf Stream and other oceanic currents? Only this time, the ship makes its own current and just steers itself away from things which would slow it down. Hm. Maybe it isn't quite like that.
Maybe it is more like get launched, then just coast and steer. I kinda don't see why this is such a big deal... Wouldn't some kind of gravitational radiation antenna be able to just figure out where the gravitation is lowest?
Somehow, I don't think I'm qualified yet for the space pilot position. (Also, for some reason, probably the coast and steer part, I was thinking about Japanese pagodas, with the central stability beam and all the layers resting on each other, but not using the beam for structural support, only stability. Maybe just randomness...)
I've used blender on and off for the past 2 years, I'm not sure how exactly I came across it, but it was after I had gotten the utah-glx to work with my matrox g200 card.
That it has gone open source is a welcome development. The site says that it will be under "GPL (or similar) license" which I think is a very good sign indeed.
As for the interface... It is awesome. There is nothing wrong with the interface, in fact, there are lots of things right with it that other products don't even approach. Yes, it is weird to start with, but if you are prepared to use the keyboard and mouse, and learn a few gestures, you should be all set to go. The window creation and resizing is very well thought out as well.
But hey, if you don't like it, maybe there can be an alternative interface made. All in all, this is really good news.
certron
Hey, at least I know where the germs came from!
Maybe there will be a strain of flesh-eating bacteria that flourishes in keyboards (ok, so that is far from likely) and then the media can go have a field day of panic.
How about a plastic-eating bacteria? Then we could see them try and explain it not as a computer "bug" or a "virus."
eh. I have too much free time.
certron
Yes, predicted in Serial Experiments: Lain !
wtf?
Space travel to the moon predicted in early film!
Romances predicted in summer movie!
Natural disasters predicted in book written 10 years ago!
Sorry if I'm not impressed... but hey, i'm a little jaded today.
certron
Wow. That's a lot of memory. In fact, that's how much RAM I have in my system right now. Let us think about this for a moment... Could it be possible (even feasible) to have a faily stripped internal system (simple cpu, ram, little or no expansion cards) and have the GPU be the main processor for a computer system? Perhaps it is a nutty idea, and now that I think about it, how far away is that from your average game console? Still, it would be nice to be able to use the very powerful graphics-optimized chips for things other than simply graphics. (All that dithering and interpolation, though, not really good for exact mathematical calculations. Great for making computer-generated images look more realistic, but maybe not the best for any sort of precise mathematical calculation.) Or am I really wrong? Hey, at the very least, I'm a little off-topic. :-)
certron
I was thinking of this, too... Well, I was thinking to make a themable animated login system... with the animation being done with some kind of vector drawing libraries.
Hmm. Perhaps I can contribute. At the very least, give pretty pictures to them to code to...
Personally, I would start with the login and work from there. And maybe draw the whole thing on the framebuffer, to reduce flicker from animations.
Guess I should go contribute!
certron
How The Bells Stole America's Digital Future
A NetAction White Paper
http://www.netaction.org/broadband/bells/
Basically, remember all that talk about 500 cable channels? The phone companies made all this hype, got some money from the counties, states, feds, and then kept charging lots of money for things. Hmm...
I wouldn't mind a little fiber hookup...
certron
(i should post more. maybe I could say something intelligent once in a while.)
Well, at least I feel better about stealing stuff out of the 'recycling' dumpters at the recylcing center.
What about that paste solder that didn't require baking at high temperature, and could be heated again to remove the components from the printed circuit board? That would help, perhaps... a resistor is a resistor...
certron
No one can be told what .NET is...
:-)
You have to see it destroy your privacy and then crash for yourself.
OK, so that is blatant trolling. Oh, but it was fun.
certron
If you find a previous I, Cringley "What I want for Christmas / A Supercomputer in every garage" http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20011227. html you will see he makes note of an even more exciting technology, not involved directly with the cluster, but with networking.
Ultrawideband is what it is called, and instead of sending a modulated signal in a stream on a single frequency, the data stream is broken up and broadcast over different frequencies at the same time. The idea is not new, 'spread spectrum' cordless phones do it, it's just another application of multiplexing.
What makes ultrawideband interesting is that because the bursts are so short and spread across frequencies instead of on one frequency, the FCC is saying that they will classify it as acceptable noise and not regulate it, if at all. The plan is to use frequencies below 60GHz, but I only include that because I remember it. Also, it doesn't really matter, due to the very small utilization of a single frequency.
More information, as well as some papers on company sites can be found at www.uwb.org (the ultra-wideband working group)
That is all.
certron
Same reason they bought netscape... and then *what*? AOL should make a first start of using mozilla instead of IE.
OK, maybe they do already and I haven't heard about it. Wtf will they be doing with RedHat?
certron
OK, so I borrowed the 'Lump - Stick - Rectangle' from somewhere else. :-)
:-)
I don't understand how people can be so critical of this. It is truly innovative, with a 700-800MHz G4 packed into the small package (as well as 128MB of RAM and a GeForce2 card.) The only things I don't like are the price, and the screen size. Still, it's a marvelous piece of engineering and design. If you need something else to like about it, take a gander at all the ports in the back. Definitely impressive.
Don't like it? don't buy it. But at least acknowledge the craftsmanship and vision.
(No, I am not affected by the reality distortion field... otherwise I would have put down the money and bought one, and not seen any shortcomings.
>(Yeah, EFF has Freedom in the title, but that doesn't automatically make it a target.)
:-) at www.eff.org
It does? I thought EFF was 'Electronic Frontier Foundation'
Maybe it has Freedom stuck in between the other 2 F's.
certron
After a while they will just self-assemble into a quake-IV-playing machine, but without having to worry about any sort of lame CRT-based frame-displaying device. Then you will never be able to make them do any sort of useful work.
All that technological progress... just for the ultimate game of quake. Hmm... sounds like a day at work...
(well, if I had work, that is. I think it would get in the way of playing quake, though...)
certron
I remember a few things about the power glove (for the nintendo system, that it had two ultrasonic sensors on the unit, above the outermost knuckles, and that the 3 receivers on the tv set got 12-byte bursts that both had the button and finger-tension information (digital) and the x-y-z-tilt spatial information was extracted from the relative signal strengths (analog).
:-)
e Pa ge.html
OK, i remember the glove, but most of the above is from reading a simple VR book. It was listed as one of the really cool items to try and use, and they also said that even though they don't make power gloves any more, the company who holds the patent(s) won't let anyone else make them or anything similar. grr...
So where does this thing stand? If an 8-bit nintendo was able to use it, what is the hold-up? OK, so it doesn't cost $10,000 anymore... is that any reason not to make the drivers? (Maybe I should contribute instead of running my mouth
Those driver guys should look at "The Virtual Reality Construction Kit" by Joe Gradecki, which would be helpful because it apparently had equations and other stuff that tells you the math needed to make the glove useful.
some links, i guess:
http://www.angelfire.com/ok2/stepinto/PowerGlov
http://www.speech.kth.se/kacor/press/press.htm
I can't find a picture of the power glove gestures poster, though! Grr... And yes, while searching, I came across the previous slashdot article on 'data gloves'.
Amen brother. The public airwaves are supposed to belong to the public, and yet the broadcasters of all kinds have been given a free ride for the past, oh... 70 years? 80 years? Well, a damn long time. The fact that the original bandwidth auction of the newly set aside HDTV spectrum wasn't on the news is saddening but far from unexplainable. The media companies weren't going to let the little folk in on their little goldmine...
We should have our own broadcast stations, low-power FM stations, and other radio-based services for our communities. Instead, the community is slowly dissapearing in a blue glow and static fuzz. After a while of staring at super-high resolutions and hearing super-high-fidelity sounds, perhaps their sharpness is dulling us. The world will look less and less appealing, and we'll only be capable of interacting with the glowing box, and not each other.
I could go on a LONG time here, but suffice it to say that the spectrum was stolen from us, sold by the government, and is still being held captive and even perhaps used against us (hmm... advertising as warfare...) every day.
It's time to take back what is ours. Educate yourself and educate others. Only ignorance stands to defeat us.
certron
Oh, and one of the reasons why the cellphone people are pushing their digital services is that 7 digital signals can fit in the same bandwidth space as 1 analog signal. Hmm... They've found a more economical way to profit from public property. Great, eh?
Does it really undermine intellectual property or does it just mean that you can borrow it all you want? Say, it is my property, but you can use it all you want, just don't destroy it (which is difficult, since I have 1 copy of it, and so do many other people), you can borrow it as much as you want, but it is still mine.
I interperet the GPL as using copyright law to give rights to the author and ownership to the world at large. It is still intellectual property, but everyone owns it. Are they arguing somehow that it would diminish their own ownership of their code in some way to have other code owned by other people being shared freely?
Why are they trying to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own property? (I won't start on whether this concept is American or unAmerican... depends on when you are looking at America...)
certron
I don't know about 6 hr movies, but maybe make a 2 or 3 part movie or... hmm. hey, maybe someone could make it as an art film or something, spend the money on production and not on advertising, release it in those little theatres, and make sure it's really really good and let the word of mouth carry it. I wish that movie ticket prices weren't so high, and that a mini-series of movies was more possible. I'm sure there is some way to break things up so that they make sense by themselves and just tell enough of the story for one movie.
If you really watch Star Wars, there isn't really that much story in each movie (or at least the story is very well spread out over the entire film) but when the movies are watched in sequence, the whole thing comes into much better focus. I would seriously favor the mini-series approach, although I doubt that this will be supported by the people with the money. The idea seems to be make a good-enough product, hype it, and then just wait for the money to come in.
If you watch ID4 enough, you'll realize it's really just a big global PR scheme. [sigh] Uplifting but empty. Oh well.
I still want this on as anime. Maybe it'll be anime's 'big break' in the US. Maybe not. (Hopefully after having been introduced to 'the masses' the quality won't go completely downhill, but... this is America...) certron
I have no idea how they are going to do this in a real life movie actor kind of way. I haven't seen The Matrix enough to decide whether the same sort of nutso effects could be used to do Neuromancer justice on the screen, but almost immediatly after reading the book for the second time about 2 years ago, I thought that the only possible way (or at least a very good way) to bring Neuromancer to life would be to make the entire movie as an anime. (why do I expect to be flamed for that last one?)
After watching a few movies like Ghost in the Shell, I was pretty sure that if done properly the animation medium would be ideal for this movie. I think I would be against live action for this one, but then it might not meet with commercial success (and then become a cult film! hey, not so bad...) as The Matrix did. I don't know. I would steer towards doing it really well with animation, but if they manage to do it, I hope they do it damn well. This is a story that deserves to be told properly. Special FX technical wizardry isn't that necessarry, look at Tron, the FX worked. (I personally think that cyberspace might look like it was being drawn by a huge color Vectrex, but that's just me. Also might require someone lugging laser projection equiptment to augment the actual film... hmm. ok, bad idea.)
All I can hope is that they do this story right, because whether you liked the book or not, it was important, and it deserves better treatment than to be turned into another Johnny Mn.
certron