True, that. But the majority of it that doesn't run exclusively on Mac OS runs on a UNIX or on Linux, and a fully functioning Mac version is usually only a recompile away. Also, Apple is giving away the iNquiry software toolkit which claims to include over 200 applications preconfigured for the Workgroup Cluster environment, which is pretty damn spiffy.
Curse.mb all you want, but Maya's.ma format is quite nice. Especially when you have to do something to your scene by hand. Just about any program can use it, because it's all human-readable ASCII, and figuring out how to read what you need from it is very trivial. I wouldn't exactly call it open, but anyone who can read the Maya documentation (or has a good understanding of 3d concepts and a grasp of the English language) can "reverse engineer" the format.
Amazing. I've been though 4 Zip drives, and ALL of them failed in some fashion. 1 was the original parallel port external drive, and the other three were IOmega-branded internal IDE drives. 3 of them (2 internal and the parallel port one) failed due to Click'O'Death, and I ran over the other one with my chair when it was laying on the floor. Purely an accident, I swear!
The most annoying thing about the click of death was that it was a transmittable disease. Any disk that was put in the drive once it had started clicking was damaged, and had a high probability of damaging any other Zip drive that it was put into, causing the other drive to get the click too.
I agree with just about everything on that list; the only one that I can show mercy for is a nodelocked license (locked to hardware identifiers). Not in the Windows XP way, where if you have to put in a new hard drive or (god forbid) upgrade your motherboard, you're completely screwed. I can deal with the licensing systems that lock to the MAC address of your NIC (like FlexLM). Mainly because I have one NIC that I use in my workstation that follows me through every hardware upgrade (Netgear GA302 - Broadcom Tigon3 chipset, 10/100/1000 copper), and FlexLM likes to lock onto it...
If there was any way to "really" nodelock a license on an x86 machine, without having it latch onto a potentially volatile identifier, I'd love to see it. I like that, for Sun machines, if you need to put a new motherboard in your machine, you can just pull the (socketed) NVRAM chip off of the old one, plop it in the new one, et voila - your new machine has all of the old node-locked licenses (and the same MAC address for the onboard ethernet - no network reconfiguration required!), because all Sun license management systems lock to that identifier. Sun will even tell you to move the chip if you have to replace a motherboard; they fully support it. While I haven't tried it, AFAIK you can even move the chip between different models of machines (Ultra2 to Ultra60, for example), and it'll still work just fine. And if you manage to kill the chip, you can call up Sun - they'll have you mail them the dead chip, and they'll make you a new one with the same identifiers.
I, thankfully, don't have to deal with Windows licensing issues; I have a bought-and-paid-for retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional, that I have installed on 1 machine. (Well, I suppose if you count 2 VMWare instances under Linux, and the dualboot configuration, it's 3 installs, but I never have, and never will, run 2 at once). IMHO, Windows 2000 was the last good Windows - no licensing crap, good hardware support, runs quite well on even the lowliest P2 machine (if you have 128mb or more), runs DirectX 9, and a minimum of bloat. I've used XP on a friend's machine occasionally, and plan never to "upgrade" to it.
The $333 per gigaflop figure is for the XServe cluster node - which, if you configure it to 1 GB of RAM, is actually $3149 at checkout, not $2799, making that figure slightly higher - but still much less than the Opterons!
I'd buy an XServe Cluster node if I had the money...
Maurice van der Stee noted that he got an oops on a HPFS filesystem when saving an edited file..
<stares at the code> <blinks> <wonders whereTF do we assign hpfs1_i and hpfs2_i if both inodes are non-NULL> <finds the patch in question> <stares at jgarzik>
This fixes it. That, BTW, means that *nobody* had ever tried to use hpfs r/w since 2.5.3-pre3.
Best Final Fantasy game, meet proper 3d rendered graphics. I'll take eight!
I hope they don't decide to do something stupid, like drop a character (Cid and Nanaki/Red XIII come to mind), and/or some major chunk of the plot. I see that Vincent is included, which is cool. I guess that all I can do is wait and see what it's like when it's released...
Hey, I never had manuals for Maya. I installed it and started trying to do some stuff (having had experience with Rhinoceros and Bryce, I know the basics of modelling and simple scenebuilding [respectively]). I haven't had to read a tutorial yet (though I will admit to consulting the online docs a few times for the Fur plugin as applied to Polygon models), and I've made my way through modelling, animation (IK/FK skeletions), dynamics (particle effects and solid/rigid body), and rendering using nothing but common sense and an excess of spare time. Sure, it took me 3 weeks to build my first polygonal model (a 35k polygon tiger, starting from profile sketches), and a week to start over and rebuild it as a NURBS model when I realized that trying to apply Fur to a poly model is quite a nasty hack, but it's all about learning. Never having a manual is a good incentive to figure stuff out by thinking it through! And I try not to think of it in that I wasted 3 weeks, but that I now know the Maya polygonal modelling tools inside and out, and I probably would've spent the time reading the bash.org QDB anyway.
I played with Lightwave for a while, but wasn't all that interested in 3d at the time (2 years ago, I think), so I didn't really give it a chance. I tried to get a friend to work with it (gave him a Lightwave CD and a couple of free models of Star Trek ships and told him to make something cool), and he thought it was too hard to use, but he doesn't have the patience that I do with software. I've been trying to get him to pick up a copy of Maya, but it's a no-go so far...
Anyway, if Alias|Wavefront gets bought out, I hope the new company doesn't do something stupid. I'd hate to have it stuck at version 5.0.1 for the rest of eternity. And no Maya Unlimited on the Mac? There's just no good reason to limit platform choices like that. Perhaps Apple will buy them; I wouldn't mind swapping my Athlon64 linux box for a Dual G5...
I wonder how my future family would interpret the edge notes in my books. Let's see:
In my Pre-calculus book (from last year), there were plenty of pagebacks and blank pages,
because it was a comb-bound job. It contains most of the lyrics to Incense Peppermints, a few
TI-BASIC programs (I might have stuck the listing for PONG that I wrote in there), a few diagrams
of the unit circle, and random patterns and scribbling.
My German book contains a functional block diagram for a program that I was writing, several
scribbled phrases in german (obviously), and a couple of detailed drawings: one lion, one tiger. The
lion floats next to the secton on question words, while the tiger stands on the page number for
adjectives.
My current math book remains untouched, but not for long! I'm sure I can find some weird stuff
to put in there...
On a side note, I'd like to see what the next person to get my books (especially the German book,
I have way too much time in that class) will think... (if I decide to sell them back)
An XBox memory card is basically a USB keychain drive (in fact, the XBox controller bus is USB, just with a different physical interface on it). If you run EvolutionX on your XBox, it has an FTP server that gives you access not only to the hard drive partitions and the DVD drive, but also to the memory card. It only holds a couple of megs, but that should be enough for the really important stuff.
I heard about that cinematic shortly after playing through on Heroic (I never bothered with Easy or Normal, just went straight to the good stuff) and beating the game. I had to see it, so I beat the whole thing again on Legendary, and by the end, I didn't really care about the cinematic anymore because I was too busy concentrating on beating it - the game has great replay value. The cinematic was still pretty damn cool, though.
Running components above their rated voltages can be fun and exciting... I've had two instances of that. First time, I was building a voltage doubler for 35 VAC to 70 VDC. I used generic electrolytic caps rated at 50 VDC. I turned it on and it worked for about 5 seconds before exploding in a plume of electrolyte steam and spraying me with bits of capacitor.
The second explosion was even better, though. I was building a 48V 20A power supply from a somewhat limited selection of components. I didn't have an input transformer, so it was running directly from rectified 120V AC (with a hefty, properly rated smoothing capacitor) Rather than have a 48V zener as the reference, I had to use the 12V zener that I happened to have and quadruple the voltage with a 555-based circuit. I built up a test of the voltage reference circuit, and it seemed to work on the 5V input I gave it. So, I plugged in the 12V zener, plugged in the power transistor bank, and fired it up. Quite literally, as it turned out. As the multimeter I had hooked up to the output briefly registered somewhere around 200 V DC, the entire low-power section (reference zener and 555) of the power supply exploded in flame and sparks. Every single component on the board exploded, the electrolyte in all of the capacitors vaporized, the diodes were nowhere to be seen (though I did get shrapneled with bits of them), and there was a nice big black stain on my Radio Shack experimentor's solderless breadboard. I had managed to stick the zener in backwards. With the way it was built, that resulted in delivering the full recitified line voltage (somewhere around 120 V DC) into the input of the very low power circuitry surrounding the 555 timer IC. The quadrupler's drive transistors overloaded and shorted into nice 3-wire jumpers, causing a short to ground through the nearest circuitry - poor 555, never knew what hit it... Thankfully, the (expensive) power transistor assembly survived.
Lessons learned: Check the ratings on the components you're using. Think, then assemble.
I did exactly the same thing in 9th grade, net send * with a harmless message (no obsceneties). I got kicked out of the class for the rest of the year (but since it was only 2 days from the end of the year, no big deal). Still got an A in the class, because I was one of the 3 people who actually knew what we were doing in that class (the other 2 being my friends, both of whom also got kicked out for guilt through association).
One D-Link product to watch out for is the DI-624. I have one, and while it makes a reasonably good WAP (range isn't so great, but that's probably due to my house being full of copper heating pipes and wire mesh holding concrete for ceilings and walls), the router bit is just HORRIBLE. I had to demote it from router to WAP because it would crash and reboot every 20 or so minutes from the amount of traffic I was pushing through it. I wasn't even saturating my (1024/256 kbps) cable line, but I did have hundreds of concurrent TCP connections. I'd think that it would degrade in performance gracefully, but instead it just died every time the NAT tables filled up, dropping all of my connections. I have since put a SUN box (running Solaris and ipfw) in its place.
My friend has a DI-614+ (802.11b / turbo, 22Mbps) and its router function is far better (and its WAP is still pretty good), so I'm just thinking it's the one problem product (and others have had this problem with the same model, and yes I am running the latest firmware, etc)
I flew a Sun Ultra 2 from LAX to SEA, and it had some quite expensive drives in it, so I wrapped them in static bags and put them in my carry-on bag. The lady at the security checkout pulled out the drives, asked me what they were, so I told her "hard drives." She said, "Oh," and sent me on my way. I was expecting far worse, but I didn't get off completely; one of the drives was KIA (the less expensive of the two, which didn't have any important data on it fortunately).
It does present a standard USB (or firewire) FS interface (FAT32 for the Windows ones, HFS+ for the Mac iPods). I don't know if you can load songs onto it that way directly; you probably will still need a program to update the song DB files, but there are several OSS projects to do so (mostly directed towards Linux, obviously). I'd just use the iTunes software, but if you don't like it for whatever reason, try one of the free (as in GPL, iTunes already being free as in beer) iPod loaders. It takes standard MP3 files (both VBR and CBR encoded, so your lameenc collection should work just fine) and AAC files.
I have an Asus A7M266-D with an AMD 760 MPX chipset. I just upgraded to 2.6.0 - everything seemed fine, kernel booted with no issues, but AGP support is apparently broken. Upon loading my ATI FireGL drivers (rebuilt against the latest kernel, and configured to use the kernel's AGP GART rather than ATI's), I get a kernel OOPS (null pointer dereference) in the AGP GART driver (specifically when it enables AGP 4x transfer mode on device 01:05.0 - my video card. Enabling AGP4X on the northbridge reported success, but when it gets to the card itself, crash time!)
Has anyone had similar experiences with the new kernel? I'd like to see if it's just my configuration, my video drivers (though the ATI drivers had no AGP problems and were rock solid under 2.4, and claim to support 2.6, you never know...), or something else. I know that the AGP subsystem has had a major overhaul in 2.6 and the bugs are still being ironed out, but it'd be nice to know what to blame.
And if something in my post doesn't make sense, it's 1:45 AM over here (GMT -08:00), so I have an excuse:)
I just built up a workstation on which to run Maya 5, and have been using the hell out of it for a week or two, so here's what I have to say about Maya render stations (which are basically workstations minus the Quadro or FireGL card):
Motherboard: Because Maya's renderer is SMP-enabled, you'll probably want to get dual-processor boxes. I suggest AMD machines based on cost - they're a hell of a lot cheaper than their Intel counterparts. A good motherboard is the Asus A7M266-D (760 MPX chipset) - it supports upto 3.5 GB of RAM, and has been rock-solid stable under Linux for me, but it doesn't have onboard video or networking. A good board with onboard video/LAN/SCSI/etc is the Tyan S2466 dual-Athlon board. Keep in mind, though, that these things suck a LOT of power; a good (think Antec) 400 watt (or better) PS is a MUST, or you're going to fry it. I had a Tyan S2460 (2466 minus SCSI, NIC, and onboard video) that fried an off-brand 400 watt power supply because it was sucking so much juice. Don't worry about the specs of the onboard video, because Maya's batch renderer doesn't even bother setting up an OpenGL context; it's completely software rendering from the command line.
Processors: Currently, the Athlon MP 2600+ is at a good price/performance point (approx $150 ea, and the next one up is $200 ea). I'd load every box with a pair of those. If you're looking to save some money and don't mind furiously voiding the warranty on each and every CPU you buy (like me), you can grab some conductive paint, a paintbrush, and a bit of tape, and convert Athlon XP processors into MP-capable processors simply by connecting one of the bridges on the top of the CPU. I did that to a pair of XP2000+ processors, and it worked great; they're still churning away together just fine after almost a year. The price difference is about $70 - if it's worth the savings to you, go ahead and try it. If the chip won't run in SMP mode (rare), you can always stick it into a cheap motherboard and make a desktop workstation for your favorite manager.
Memory: Maya is HEAVY on RAM usage. If you're not planning on having a disk in every machine with plenty of swap space (for those larger scenes), I'd go with at least 1.5 GB (and probably 2 GB) of registered DDR RAM. You should be able to get away with only putting in 1 GB per machine if you have swap space. If you can afford it, spend the extra for ECC memory, because it's nice not to have to worry about memory errors. I did a quick test render (Maya software, 640x480, draft quality) of a 350,000-poly object I'm currently working on, and its average memory usage was right around 600 MB (peak arena size 1186.25 MB, as reported by the renderer). Don't underestimate the amount of RAM that you'll need! My workstation has 1.5 GB of RAM, and it still hits swap.
If you're not booting over the network, I'd throw a fast 18 GB drive in every machine. Make a swap partition of at least 2 GB, and install the OS (I prefer Debian stable, use whatever you want) on the rest of it. You shouldn't have to go overboard on disk; a 7200 RPM IDE drive will be more than adequate.
Networking: Depending on how your scene data is distributed (central fileserver? every node gets a copy beforehand?), I'd go with 100mb switched or full GigE. It basically depends on whether or not you're willing to pay the premium for the faster interconnect. If you put GigE cards in all of the nodes (which doesn't cost much more than putting a good 100mbit card in anyway - I recommend the Netgear GA302 and GA604 gigabit cards), you can always replace the switch if you find things are too slow.
Power and cooling - you'll need plenty of both. One Athlon puts of quite a bit of heat, but pack two into a small box and put 20 of them in a rack (assuming 2U), and you're talking about serious overheating possibilities. You're going to need one hell of an air-conditioning system. If you've already got a datacenter set up, then y
No matter how technically incorrect the proceedurees described in the original Jurassic Park, we all know that when a home DNA-combining kit is released, there'll be a worldwide shortage of "defective" amber...
I'll vouch for that. I picked up a Sun SSA without any of the drive arrays in it - just the cabinet, doors, and power sequencer. Cost me $100 (and if you're in the Seattle area, RE-PC [both stores] still have a couple). I wired up a 240v outlet in a corner of an unused workroom (which already had network access) and filled it with a server and a few disk arrays. It currently contains a Sun Enterprise 3000 (1x166 UltraSPARC-II, 512MB ram), a Sun RSM-210 with 3x IBM 36GB 10KRPM SCSI drives (RAID5), and a Sun A5000 FC array with 10x Seagate 9.1GB 10KRPM Fibre Channel drives (also RAID5). Makes a great fileserver, and it does a variety of useful tasks (WebDAV httpd, ftp server, IRC server, MySQL, and a few others)
I've gone through some really nice CRTs and some really nice LCDs, and I think that the LCDs are better overall.
My two best CRTs right now are a Dell (Sony rebranded) 19" Flat Trinitron, and it's absolutely beautiful (very bright and clear) in 1280x1024x85hz. My other great CRT is a Sony 21" (not sure of the exact model, but it was very expensive), and it looks great in 1600x1200.
The last two LCDs I've had, though, have clearly outclassed both of them, both in functionality and style. I had (sold to a friend) a Dell Ultrasharp 1900FP LCD. Best desktop monitor I've ever owned, especially when using the DVI connector. (The VGA interpolation didn't look as good as straight DVI, but I rarely used it.) It ran at 1280x1024x70hz, and did a great job for every game I threw at it - Battlefield 1942, Quake 3, JK2, MoH:AA, and a few others. I only got rid of it because I bought a laptop.
The other LCD is permanently attached to my laptop - a Powerbook G4 17". Its brightness and clarity are far better than that of most CRTs that I've seen (and match or exceed that of both of my higher-end CRTs). I like the 1440x900 resolution, too; it seems to me to be a good resolution for that size of panel, unlike Dell's laptops, many of which try to cram 1600x1200 into a 15" panel (unreadable). DVDs look great on it, along with Quake 3 and MoH:Spearhead.
Hmmm... I've never taken a shred of notes in any class, save for writing down the assignment (less of a note thing and more of a planning thing). The classes where note-taking is suggested and practiced by most of the students (sciences and math) are the classes in which I do very well, even though I'm not always paying attention (writing a program to draw a curve through control points [bezier curve] on my TI-85 was a recent time-waster, but popping open the Powerbook and reading cached/. pages is a favorite). The reason I don't fail the classes (and I actually do quite well) is that I can read the damn book to get the information. Why bother trying to digest the material by listening to someone read the book aloud (which the class basically consists of), when I can read it at my own (usually accelerated) pace, and skip past the bits I don't need?
Then again, there are some people for whom the lecture/notes format works. Do what you must to learn, but I'll stick with my methods.
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True, that. But the majority of it that doesn't run exclusively on Mac OS runs on a UNIX or on Linux, and a fully functioning Mac version is usually only a recompile away. Also, Apple is giving away the iNquiry software toolkit which claims to include over 200 applications preconfigured for the Workgroup Cluster environment, which is pretty damn spiffy.
Curse .mb all you want, but Maya's .ma format is quite nice. Especially when you have to do something to your scene by hand. Just about any program can use it, because it's all human-readable ASCII, and figuring out how to read what you need from it is very trivial. I wouldn't exactly call it open, but anyone who can read the Maya documentation (or has a good understanding of 3d concepts and a grasp of the English language) can "reverse engineer" the format.
Amazing. I've been though 4 Zip drives, and ALL of them failed in some fashion. 1 was the original parallel port external drive, and the other three were IOmega-branded internal IDE drives. 3 of them (2 internal and the parallel port one) failed due to Click'O'Death, and I ran over the other one with my chair when it was laying on the floor. Purely an accident, I swear! The most annoying thing about the click of death was that it was a transmittable disease. Any disk that was put in the drive once it had started clicking was damaged, and had a high probability of damaging any other Zip drive that it was put into, causing the other drive to get the click too.
I agree with just about everything on that list; the only one that I can show mercy for is a nodelocked license (locked to hardware identifiers). Not in the Windows XP way, where if you have to put in a new hard drive or (god forbid) upgrade your motherboard, you're completely screwed. I can deal with the licensing systems that lock to the MAC address of your NIC (like FlexLM). Mainly because I have one NIC that I use in my workstation that follows me through every hardware upgrade (Netgear GA302 - Broadcom Tigon3 chipset, 10/100/1000 copper), and FlexLM likes to lock onto it...
If there was any way to "really" nodelock a license on an x86 machine, without having it latch onto a potentially volatile identifier, I'd love to see it. I like that, for Sun machines, if you need to put a new motherboard in your machine, you can just pull the (socketed) NVRAM chip off of the old one, plop it in the new one, et voila - your new machine has all of the old node-locked licenses (and the same MAC address for the onboard ethernet - no network reconfiguration required!), because all Sun license management systems lock to that identifier. Sun will even tell you to move the chip if you have to replace a motherboard; they fully support it. While I haven't tried it, AFAIK you can even move the chip between different models of machines (Ultra2 to Ultra60, for example), and it'll still work just fine. And if you manage to kill the chip, you can call up Sun - they'll have you mail them the dead chip, and they'll make you a new one with the same identifiers.
I, thankfully, don't have to deal with Windows licensing issues; I have a bought-and-paid-for retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional, that I have installed on 1 machine. (Well, I suppose if you count 2 VMWare instances under Linux, and the dualboot configuration, it's 3 installs, but I never have, and never will, run 2 at once). IMHO, Windows 2000 was the last good Windows - no licensing crap, good hardware support, runs quite well on even the lowliest P2 machine (if you have 128mb or more), runs DirectX 9, and a minimum of bloat. I've used XP on a friend's machine occasionally, and plan never to "upgrade" to it.
The $333 per gigaflop figure is for the XServe cluster node - which, if you configure it to 1 GB of RAM, is actually $3149 at checkout, not $2799, making that figure slightly higher - but still much less than the Opterons! I'd buy an XServe Cluster node if I had the money...
Haha, I have a runner up here:
Maurice van der Stee noted that he got an oops on a HPFS filesystem when
saving an edited file..
<stares at the code>
<blinks>
<wonders whereTF do we assign hpfs1_i and hpfs2_i if both inodes are non-NULL>
<finds the patch in question>
<stares at jgarzik>
This fixes it. That, BTW, means that *nobody* had ever tried to use
hpfs r/w since 2.5.3-pre3.
Poor HPFS. Nobody ever loved you...
Maya Complete has been on OS X for a while. Unlimited, though (adds Fur, Cloth, Live, and Fluids) is not available.
Best Final Fantasy game, meet proper 3d rendered graphics. I'll take eight! I hope they don't decide to do something stupid, like drop a character (Cid and Nanaki/Red XIII come to mind), and/or some major chunk of the plot. I see that Vincent is included, which is cool. I guess that all I can do is wait and see what it's like when it's released...
SGI Personal IRIS, anyone? It cost way too much compared to the other available desktops at the time, though, and died a fairly quiet death.
Hey, I never had manuals for Maya. I installed it and started trying to do some stuff (having had experience with Rhinoceros and Bryce, I know the basics of modelling and simple scenebuilding [respectively]). I haven't had to read a tutorial yet (though I will admit to consulting the online docs a few times for the Fur plugin as applied to Polygon models), and I've made my way through modelling, animation (IK/FK skeletions), dynamics (particle effects and solid/rigid body), and rendering using nothing but common sense and an excess of spare time. Sure, it took me 3 weeks to build my first polygonal model (a 35k polygon tiger, starting from profile sketches), and a week to start over and rebuild it as a NURBS model when I realized that trying to apply Fur to a poly model is quite a nasty hack, but it's all about learning. Never having a manual is a good incentive to figure stuff out by thinking it through! And I try not to think of it in that I wasted 3 weeks, but that I now know the Maya polygonal modelling tools inside and out, and I probably would've spent the time reading the bash.org QDB anyway.
I played with Lightwave for a while, but wasn't all that interested in 3d at the time (2 years ago, I think), so I didn't really give it a chance. I tried to get a friend to work with it (gave him a Lightwave CD and a couple of free models of Star Trek ships and told him to make something cool), and he thought it was too hard to use, but he doesn't have the patience that I do with software. I've been trying to get him to pick up a copy of Maya, but it's a no-go so far...
Anyway, if Alias|Wavefront gets bought out, I hope the new company doesn't do something stupid. I'd hate to have it stuck at version 5.0.1 for the rest of eternity. And no Maya Unlimited on the Mac? There's just no good reason to limit platform choices like that. Perhaps Apple will buy them; I wouldn't mind swapping my Athlon64 linux box for a Dual G5...
I wonder how my future family would interpret the edge notes in my books. Let's see:
In my Pre-calculus book (from last year), there were plenty of pagebacks and blank pages, because it was a comb-bound job. It contains most of the lyrics to Incense Peppermints, a few TI-BASIC programs (I might have stuck the listing for PONG that I wrote in there), a few diagrams of the unit circle, and random patterns and scribbling.
My German book contains a functional block diagram for a program that I was writing, several scribbled phrases in german (obviously), and a couple of detailed drawings: one lion, one tiger. The lion floats next to the secton on question words, while the tiger stands on the page number for adjectives.
My current math book remains untouched, but not for long! I'm sure I can find some weird stuff to put in there...
On a side note, I'd like to see what the next person to get my books (especially the German book, I have way too much time in that class) will think... (if I decide to sell them back)
An XBox memory card is basically a USB keychain drive (in fact, the XBox controller bus is USB, just with a different physical interface on it). If you run EvolutionX on your XBox, it has an FTP server that gives you access not only to the hard drive partitions and the DVD drive, but also to the memory card. It only holds a couple of megs, but that should be enough for the really important stuff.
I heard about that cinematic shortly after playing through on Heroic (I never bothered with Easy or Normal, just went straight to the good stuff) and beating the game. I had to see it, so I beat the whole thing again on Legendary, and by the end, I didn't really care about the cinematic anymore because I was too busy concentrating on beating it - the game has great replay value. The cinematic was still pretty damn cool, though.
Running components above their rated voltages can be fun and exciting... I've had two instances of that. First time, I was building a voltage doubler for 35 VAC to 70 VDC. I used generic electrolytic caps rated at 50 VDC. I turned it on and it worked for about 5 seconds before exploding in a plume of electrolyte steam and spraying me with bits of capacitor.
The second explosion was even better, though. I was building a 48V 20A power supply from a somewhat limited selection of components. I didn't have an input transformer, so it was running directly from rectified 120V AC (with a hefty, properly rated smoothing capacitor) Rather than have a 48V zener as the reference, I had to use the 12V zener that I happened to have and quadruple the voltage with a 555-based circuit. I built up a test of the voltage reference circuit, and it seemed to work on the 5V input I gave it. So, I plugged in the 12V zener, plugged in the power transistor bank, and fired it up. Quite literally, as it turned out. As the multimeter I had hooked up to the output briefly registered somewhere around 200 V DC, the entire low-power section (reference zener and 555) of the power supply exploded in flame and sparks. Every single component on the board exploded, the electrolyte in all of the capacitors vaporized, the diodes were nowhere to be seen (though I did get shrapneled with bits of them), and there was a nice big black stain on my Radio Shack experimentor's solderless breadboard. I had managed to stick the zener in backwards. With the way it was built, that resulted in delivering the full recitified line voltage (somewhere around 120 V DC) into the input of the very low power circuitry surrounding the 555 timer IC. The quadrupler's drive transistors overloaded and shorted into nice 3-wire jumpers, causing a short to ground through the nearest circuitry - poor 555, never knew what hit it... Thankfully, the (expensive) power transistor assembly survived.
Lessons learned: Check the ratings on the components you're using. Think, then assemble.
I did exactly the same thing in 9th grade, net send * with a harmless message (no obsceneties). I got kicked out of the class for the rest of the year (but since it was only 2 days from the end of the year, no big deal). Still got an A in the class, because I was one of the 3 people who actually knew what we were doing in that class (the other 2 being my friends, both of whom also got kicked out for guilt through association).
One D-Link product to watch out for is the DI-624. I have one, and while it makes a reasonably good WAP (range isn't so great, but that's probably due to my house being full of copper heating pipes and wire mesh holding concrete for ceilings and walls), the router bit is just HORRIBLE. I had to demote it from router to WAP because it would crash and reboot every 20 or so minutes from the amount of traffic I was pushing through it. I wasn't even saturating my (1024/256 kbps) cable line, but I did have hundreds of concurrent TCP connections. I'd think that it would degrade in performance gracefully, but instead it just died every time the NAT tables filled up, dropping all of my connections. I have since put a SUN box (running Solaris and ipfw) in its place.
My friend has a DI-614+ (802.11b / turbo, 22Mbps) and its router function is far better (and its WAP is still pretty good), so I'm just thinking it's the one problem product (and others have had this problem with the same model, and yes I am running the latest firmware, etc)
I flew a Sun Ultra 2 from LAX to SEA, and it had some quite expensive drives in it, so I wrapped them in static bags and put them in my carry-on bag. The lady at the security checkout pulled out the drives, asked me what they were, so I told her "hard drives." She said, "Oh," and sent me on my way. I was expecting far worse, but I didn't get off completely; one of the drives was KIA (the less expensive of the two, which didn't have any important data on it fortunately).
It does present a standard USB (or firewire) FS interface (FAT32 for the Windows ones, HFS+ for the Mac iPods). I don't know if you can load songs onto it that way directly; you probably will still need a program to update the song DB files, but there are several OSS projects to do so (mostly directed towards Linux, obviously). I'd just use the iTunes software, but if you don't like it for whatever reason, try one of the free (as in GPL, iTunes already being free as in beer) iPod loaders. It takes standard MP3 files (both VBR and CBR encoded, so your lameenc collection should work just fine) and AAC files.
I have an Asus A7M266-D with an AMD 760 MPX chipset. I just upgraded to 2.6.0 - everything seemed fine, kernel booted with no issues, but AGP support is apparently broken. Upon loading my ATI FireGL drivers (rebuilt against the latest kernel, and configured to use the kernel's AGP GART rather than ATI's), I get a kernel OOPS (null pointer dereference) in the AGP GART driver (specifically when it enables AGP 4x transfer mode on device 01:05.0 - my video card. Enabling AGP4X on the northbridge reported success, but when it gets to the card itself, crash time!)
:)
Has anyone had similar experiences with the new kernel? I'd like to see if it's just my configuration, my video drivers (though the ATI drivers had no AGP problems and were rock solid under 2.4, and claim to support 2.6, you never know...), or something else. I know that the AGP subsystem has had a major overhaul in 2.6 and the bugs are still being ironed out, but it'd be nice to know what to blame.
And if something in my post doesn't make sense, it's 1:45 AM over here (GMT -08:00), so I have an excuse
I just built up a workstation on which to run Maya 5, and have been using the hell out of it for a week or two, so here's what I have to say about Maya render stations (which are basically workstations minus the Quadro or FireGL card):
Motherboard: Because Maya's renderer is SMP-enabled, you'll probably want to get dual-processor boxes. I suggest AMD machines based on cost - they're a hell of a lot cheaper than their Intel counterparts. A good motherboard is the Asus A7M266-D (760 MPX chipset) - it supports upto 3.5 GB of RAM, and has been rock-solid stable under Linux for me, but it doesn't have onboard video or networking. A good board with onboard video/LAN/SCSI/etc is the Tyan S2466 dual-Athlon board. Keep in mind, though, that these things suck a LOT of power; a good (think Antec) 400 watt (or better) PS is a MUST, or you're going to fry it. I had a Tyan S2460 (2466 minus SCSI, NIC, and onboard video) that fried an off-brand 400 watt power supply because it was sucking so much juice. Don't worry about the specs of the onboard video, because Maya's batch renderer doesn't even bother setting up an OpenGL context; it's completely software rendering from the command line.
Processors: Currently, the Athlon MP 2600+ is at a good price/performance point (approx $150 ea, and the next one up is $200 ea). I'd load every box with a pair of those. If you're looking to save some money and don't mind furiously voiding the warranty on each and every CPU you buy (like me), you can grab some conductive paint, a paintbrush, and a bit of tape, and convert Athlon XP processors into MP-capable processors simply by connecting one of the bridges on the top of the CPU. I did that to a pair of XP2000+ processors, and it worked great; they're still churning away together just fine after almost a year. The price difference is about $70 - if it's worth the savings to you, go ahead and try it. If the chip won't run in SMP mode (rare), you can always stick it into a cheap motherboard and make a desktop workstation for your favorite manager.
Memory: Maya is HEAVY on RAM usage. If you're not planning on having a disk in every machine with plenty of swap space (for those larger scenes), I'd go with at least 1.5 GB (and probably 2 GB) of registered DDR RAM. You should be able to get away with only putting in 1 GB per machine if you have swap space. If you can afford it, spend the extra for ECC memory, because it's nice not to have to worry about memory errors. I did a quick test render (Maya software, 640x480, draft quality) of a 350,000-poly object I'm currently working on, and its average memory usage was right around 600 MB (peak arena size 1186.25 MB, as reported by the renderer). Don't underestimate the amount of RAM that you'll need! My workstation has 1.5 GB of RAM, and it still hits swap.
If you're not booting over the network, I'd throw a fast 18 GB drive in every machine. Make a swap partition of at least 2 GB, and install the OS (I prefer Debian stable, use whatever you want) on the rest of it. You shouldn't have to go overboard on disk; a 7200 RPM IDE drive will be more than adequate.
Networking: Depending on how your scene data is distributed (central fileserver? every node gets a copy beforehand?), I'd go with 100mb switched or full GigE. It basically depends on whether or not you're willing to pay the premium for the faster interconnect. If you put GigE cards in all of the nodes (which doesn't cost much more than putting a good 100mbit card in anyway - I recommend the Netgear GA302 and GA604 gigabit cards), you can always replace the switch if you find things are too slow.
Power and cooling - you'll need plenty of both. One Athlon puts of quite a bit of heat, but pack two into a small box and put 20 of them in a rack (assuming 2U), and you're talking about serious overheating possibilities. You're going to need one hell of an air-conditioning system. If you've already got a datacenter set up, then y
No matter how technically incorrect the proceedurees described in the original Jurassic Park, we all know that when a home DNA-combining kit is released, there'll be a worldwide shortage of "defective" amber...
I'll vouch for that. I picked up a Sun SSA without any of the drive arrays in it - just the cabinet, doors, and power sequencer. Cost me $100 (and if you're in the Seattle area, RE-PC [both stores] still have a couple). I wired up a 240v outlet in a corner of an unused workroom (which already had network access) and filled it with a server and a few disk arrays. It currently contains a Sun Enterprise 3000 (1x166 UltraSPARC-II, 512MB ram), a Sun RSM-210 with 3x IBM 36GB 10KRPM SCSI drives (RAID5), and a Sun A5000 FC array with 10x Seagate 9.1GB 10KRPM Fibre Channel drives (also RAID5). Makes a great fileserver, and it does a variety of useful tasks (WebDAV httpd, ftp server, IRC server, MySQL, and a few others)
I've gone through some really nice CRTs and some really nice LCDs, and I think that the LCDs are better overall.
My two best CRTs right now are a Dell (Sony rebranded) 19" Flat Trinitron, and it's absolutely beautiful (very bright and clear) in 1280x1024x85hz. My other great CRT is a Sony 21" (not sure of the exact model, but it was very expensive), and it looks great in 1600x1200.
The last two LCDs I've had, though, have clearly outclassed both of them, both in functionality and style. I had (sold to a friend) a Dell Ultrasharp 1900FP LCD. Best desktop monitor I've ever owned, especially when using the DVI connector. (The VGA interpolation didn't look as good as straight DVI, but I rarely used it.) It ran at 1280x1024x70hz, and did a great job for every game I threw at it - Battlefield 1942, Quake 3, JK2, MoH:AA, and a few others. I only got rid of it because I bought a laptop.
The other LCD is permanently attached to my laptop - a Powerbook G4 17". Its brightness and clarity are far better than that of most CRTs that I've seen (and match or exceed that of both of my higher-end CRTs). I like the 1440x900 resolution, too; it seems to me to be a good resolution for that size of panel, unlike Dell's laptops, many of which try to cram 1600x1200 into a 15" panel (unreadable). DVDs look great on it, along with Quake 3 and MoH:Spearhead.
SGI's FSN - 3d Filesystem Navigator. For IRIX 4.0.1 - 5.3 only. Have fun!
An open-source clone, fsv, is also available on SourceForge.
Hmmm... I've never taken a shred of notes in any class, save for writing down the assignment (less of a note thing and more of a planning thing). The classes where note-taking is suggested and practiced by most of the students (sciences and math) are the classes in which I do very well, even though I'm not always paying attention (writing a program to draw a curve through control points [bezier curve] on my TI-85 was a recent time-waster, but popping open the Powerbook and reading cached /. pages is a favorite). The reason I don't fail the classes (and I actually do quite well) is that I can read the damn book to get the information. Why bother trying to digest the material by listening to someone read the book aloud (which the class basically consists of), when I can read it at my own (usually accelerated) pace, and skip past the bits I don't need?
Then again, there are some people for whom the lecture/notes format works. Do what you must to learn, but I'll stick with my methods.