I have a redergarden (not quite a renderfarm;) and I've used POV-Ray to make visualizations and animations of my supercell model data. See the Novermber 2004 Linux Journal (cover plus article) for what I did. What I did was get POV-Ray, which, note, is "free" (with restrictions especially on the latest version) and got it to recognize my model data format natively (using the source of course). Then I can fire up my 14 of my nodes, all NFS mounted to a terabyte RAID array, with a python script (using pyMPI) and they each read in their data and happily render frames. Then I make movies with the resulting PPM images using mjpegtools.
Note that this approach crashes and burns if you can't fit the 3D array of your data into core memory. This becomes an issue especially with very large datasets and if you are rendering lots of different isosurfaces at once, which I often do. You can always downsample, or just read in what the camera sees instead of the whole model domain, but you can still run into brick walls with very large data sets. Of course, if you are rendering to a 1024x768 screen, and you are looking at the entire domain which is 700x700x100 you probably can downsample significanly without losing visual detail.
This subject touches upon the larger issue of effectively archiving digital data, period. I have given a lot of thought to this because I have been keeping a journal since I was 12 (I am 36) and while its contents will undoubtedly only ever prove important to me, I want it to be preserved. I still keep a pen-on-paper journal and occasionally spend a few hours scanning it in to TIFF images and burning them to CD-ROM, and occasionally backing those up to a data archival site.
I save and archive all of my outgoing email and while a fair amount of it is 'background noise' it does serve as a reminder of what I've been doing with my life, the people I've known, my changing viewpoints, and fills in the gaps that the journal does not cover.
I suppose it all boils down to whether you have anything interesting to say, regardless of whether it is in ASCII text or a quill dipped in ink on papyrus.
I'm modeling supercells that produce tornadoes (well, almost) using supercomputers... does that count?
A talk I just gave a few days ago on this is found at the below link. Both in OpenOffice and PPT format. Note: the mpegs in that directory are BIG (1024x768) but they are very cool animations of supercells (raytraced with POV-Ray) and tornado-like circulations.
Both clusters and big iron have their place. I am a meteorology professor and my current research involves high-resolution numerical modeling of thunderstorms. For a problem where the domain decomposition is straightforward and internode communication isn't your bottleneck, clusters are great. One huge advantage of clusters is that they are cheap and it isn't too big of a deal to get a grant together to buy the hardware, and it's YOURS and nobody else's. A huge disadvantage to big iron is that you have to share it with about a hundred other researchers. Waiting in a queue for three days only to find you goofed up in your startup script (and the model exits immediately) is NO FUN (cf the Regatta at NCSA).
I am currently running a model using legacy FORTRAN 90 code which was written before there were clusters. It does use OMP but OMP sucks and is no substitute for code which is written with MPI in mind. The model as it currently stands requires big iron to do big runs, and it is inefficient, but it works and sometimes I just need to do science and not model development. I am working on MPI-izing the code; no small feat, but the rewards would be quite worth the effort.
In summary, both clusters and big iron have their place. Folks have a habit of making a false dichotomy with regards to these two options. I wouldn't trade my cluster for the world (currently doing parallel POV-Ray rendering of my 3D thunderstorm data, see my web link and an upcoming [not sure what month] Linux Journal article if interested) as it is perfect for much of what I am doing right now and I don't have to share it with anyone. But I will also use big iron when necessary.
Linux Journal Scientific American Archaeology Today Science News Utne Reader QST
I actually had my first article accepted for publication in LJ, am happy about that. Don't know if it will be in the dead tree version or online yet though.
Scientific American has changed a lot over the past ten or so years. It is much more accessible today. It used to read more like a scientific journal. They have gone a bit overboard with the layout (too many cutesy fonts/colors/pictures etc.) but by and large the articles are high quality and don't require a PhD to understand.
Science news is my weekly dose of science geek stuff that I gobble up in a half hour!
QST is the magazine of Amateur Radio.
Utne pisses me off sometimes with its "look! you can change the world! woohoo!" attitude applied to everyday mundane things (such as walking to work, what a concept) but there are gems in there too.
Archaeology Today is OK - I liked Discovering Archaeology better before the publisher scammed all of us subscribers - it was quite nice while it lasted, and focused more on prehistory (more than 10,000 years ago stuff) which is more of my interest.
I really should read more books though and put the magazines aside... oh well!
I also use PoV-Ray to render numerically modeled thunderstorms using isosurfaces. I've submitted an article to Linux Journal on how I modified the pov source to read my model data - dunno if it will be published or not.
I'm curious, have you listened to a lot of soundboards from a bunch of different bands? Some bands run a separate board with its own mix for archival recording. As long as the person working the board isn't deaf or too wasted you get something that IMO rivals just about any audience recording.
There is a real subjective quality to thise SBD vs AUD thing. I can't stand AUDs even if they are FOB with $4,000 Neumann mikes. Swishy highs, no stereo separation, flabby bass, people screaming etc... to me this detracts from the experience. Of course, if you are looking for a "what was it like to be there" experience an audience recording will make you much happier.
I agree that some SBDs are mixed poorly for home listening. Even Phish with their pay-for-a-show service has produced some poorly mixed shows - and for a price!
Some of the best recordings I've heard are "matrix" recordings which are a mix of soundboard (with instruments panned to give stereo separation) and audience (70% board to 30% AUD or so suits me) and shows with on-stage mikes (Steve Kimock etc.). But there is nothing like a well produced studio recording on a decent stereo system in a decent room. Which reminds me, I really need to get a new output transformer for my Dynaco ST70....
"Hailstones are formed and begin with a piece of dust in the clouds," he explains. "There is a lot of activity going on, and what we do is to de-ionize that activity in the clouds and keep those dust particles from collecting moisture out of the clouds in turn reacting and forming what we know as a hailstone."
I'm a professor of meteorology. If one of my students had written that drivel I would have flunked 'em!
The microphysics of clouds is very complex. I'd really like to know what mechanism they really are trying to stifle here. Here is a bit on how hail forms. First, some background:
In a rapidly growing cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) cloud, you have a strong updraft (air rising rapidly). This air is contains humid air, which condenses to form liquid cloud droplets as it cools (rising air expands and cools - basic thermodynamics). It is indeed true that cloud droplets condense upon pieces of dust/salt/gunk in the atmosphere, but ionization has very very little to do with it. Many of these so-called condensation nuclei are not ionized. Water will condense upon just about anything if cooled enough.
Eventually this rising, cloudy air reaches heights where temperatures are well below freezing - say -20 degrees C. Water actually does not have to freeze when it is below 0 degrees C, and in fact what leads to lots of hail is the fact that there is an abundance of supercooled (below freezing liquid) cloud droplets in this cloud.
Eventually some ice crystals form, either spontaneously (supercooled cloud droplets freeze at about -40 degrees C - this is called homogeneous nucleation of ice), or because they come in contact with an ice nucleus (something that has a similar crystal structure to water ice). These ice crystals fall and co-mingle with the supercooled cloud droplets. Due to the difference in saturation vapor pressures over ice and water at a given temperature, these ice crystals grow and grow at the expense of the cloud droplets without actually making physical contact!
Now the stage is set for hail. There is an abundance of supercooled cloud droplets, which freeze upon contact with ice crystals. Contact is made, and graupel is formed. Graupel is kind of an intermediate form of ice between snow and hail. The updraft of the storm keeps everything going, and in fact can suspend heavy hail particles for a while before they either become so heavy they fall through the updraft, or they are tossed horizontally to a part of the storm where they fall to the ground. The largest hailstones form with the strongest updrafts because the hail can acrete lots and lots of supercooled water (hail will melt and refreeze also as it rises and falls within the cloud).
Again, I simply cannot fathom what process they are trying to stifle with these sound waves. Hail suppression research has focused mainly on seeding clouds with silver iodide. Silver iodide is a powdery substance which has an ice crystal shape very similar to that of water ice. Overseeding a cloud with AgI, so the theory goes, will convert all that supercooled cloud water into small ice crystals, scavenging all the liquid so there won't be any "lucky" graupel particles growing to the size of hail stones.
The Russians claimed some success with this process during the cold war (launching AgI laced rockets into clouds) but frankly I think they were overstating their success. Hail suppression work reached its peak in the 70's but because of the lack of any real statistical success, funding for this kind of work has pretty much dried up.
I, for one, give a shit. I am a meteorology professor who has been using Linux for over a decade. Having the NWS transition over to Linux means it is possible for me to run the same software that NWS operational forecasters are using. In fact, that's already possible - I have a copy of the AWIPS software on a CD-ROM sitting in my office, ready to install. This, in turn, opens the door for research possibilities and just as importantly, allows me to expose students to the kinds of software they will be using should they opt to work for the NWS (many do).
I visited the Grand Rapids NWS office a month ago and most of the workstations were already running Linux. The SOO (Science Operations Officer) seemed to be pretty happy with this. Why shouldn't he - hardware and software costs go down, machines are faster, and the OS is something that most scientists are using anyway.
KG4ULP here. Two days after I got my ham radio license (August of last year) my wife and I went camping in western North Carolina in a rather remote area. A day into our trip my car wouldn't start - it seemed to be either a fried alternator or a dead battery. A fellow camper who unsuccesfully jumpered my car had a cell phone but could not hit a tower. The park ranger's office was a few miles away, so there was nobody local to help unless I bummed a ride off somebody the next day (and the ranger's office was open). I had a local repeater programmed into my newly-acquired handheld and nervously identified myself and told the two guys who were chatting on the repeater my predicament. They were extremely friendly and put our minds at ease and helped us out - the next morning a guy who worked in a garage in the nearest town paid us a visit and it turned out my 5 year old car battery had shorted out. He put in a new battery, charged us like $50 for the battery plus house call, and my wife and I could go back to enjoying our vacation.
That's just a small example of ham radio helping out in a (albeit non-emergency) predicament. I never travel without my handheld and it's very rare that I'm in a location where I can't hit a repeater. Hams by their very nature are eager to help and if given the choice of a cell phone or HT for an emergency, my choice would be the HT. Many hams are trained for handling traffic in emergency situations - see earlier posts about ARES and RACES.
Like many reading this I am a technology nut who is heavily reliant on the Internet for both work and play. But there simply is nothing like radio as a method of communication. Radio waves can travel just about anywhere in the atmosphere, which is a medium which can't be broken like a wire, and simple transmitters and receivers are cheap and easy to use. The only exception to that is the HF band in which signals are bounced off the ionosphere for long-distance communication; solar activity can completely wipe out that mode of communication, but it is rare.
It should be emphasized that ham radio operators love to tinker and experiment and in many examples cutting-edge type experiments that started on ham radio have turned into mainstream technology. That is something that the average slashdotter should appreciate.
It's not just more variables, although that is a factor, it's about how many gridpoints you can use to represent the physical domain your model covers. For instance, today's predictive models which cover the day-to-day weather over North America or Europe use too coarse a grid to "see" thunderstorms - they just don't exist because the spacing of the gridpoints is too large for such a "small" phenomenon to occur within the model. Faster computers with more memory will allow forecast models to be able to see the atmosphere more realistically from small scale features to large scale features.
As a meteorologist with lots of modeling experience, I can say with a lot of confidence that you simply can't throw too much computational power at atmospheric modeling. Personally, I won't be happy until our global models are running at 1 centimeter resolution up to the thermosphere.
Really, you can try all the tricks in the world but it really boils down to being able to be disciplined enough to focus on the task at hand.
I am a college professor and have had similar problems through college and graduate school, but when push came to shove, I just buckled down and got the work done when it was required.
For non-computer related studies, I would recommend going to the library or a place where it is quiet and there are few distractions. Of course, stay away from the damned computers!
For computer-related stuff, don't bother with all the suggestions about unplugging the ethernet, routing slashdot to localhost etc... you will always be able to circumvent your own barriers. Just FOCUS dammit! Meditation, breathing exercises, etc. may help, as well as soft music - although for some this can be a distraction.
I was never able to pull off the all-nighters; my body just isn't made for it. So I would always get my major studying done during the day and early evening. Staying up late just wasn't an option for me because my brain would shut down after midnight.
One tangential point. It worked for me anyway: when studing for a test, do you major studying up to, but not beyond, *two days* before the test. Spend the day before the test going over the highlights of the material, but don't cram the day before. This always worked best for me. I think it's because it allowd material to enter my longer-term memory where it stuck.
I've done a fair amount of audio engineering and audio post-processing and I can see several problems here. If they really are offering CDs "minutes" after the show how will they burn enough copies? Are they recording directly to a multiple CD burner? If yes, how are they going to get the track boundaries right? What about engineering glitches during the show? Fades etc.? If they are going to sell these for $15 a CD as suggested, are people willing to pay $30 for a completely unpolished raw recording? Think about it - all the reasons cited by the industry for charging that much for a CD in the first place are gone since it's really just some guy running a patch off the soundboard.
I know the band Phish is selling live shows now over the Internet - I got a 3 CD show of NYE for $15, I think, only a few days after the show. The sound quality was fine and there were no glitches, but it wasn't studio quality for sure. It seems to me the best way to do a live show is to take a multitrack recording and mix it after the fact by someone who knows what they're doing.
Another thing, for what they are charging for concerts these days perhaps they're hitting their audience at the wrong time, when the music is still fresh in their heads.
It appears they've removed roaming access from Netscape. This allowed for remote storage of bookmarks on a properly configured server (via http) so that you always had the same bookmarks regardless of what machine you were running on. Maybe they dropped it because the implementation they were using was bad, but for me it was a nearly invaluable service. Anyone know if some sort of similar service is in store for future versions of netscape or mozilla?
LWN's site says nothing of their next issue being their last (that I can find anyway), and there is no link posted in this story. Has anyone actually verified that this is true?
Supercomputing is an energy-intensive process, and Q (the name is meant to evoke both the dimension-hopping Star Trek alien and the gadget-making wizard in the James Bond thrillers) is rated at 30 teraops, meaning that it can perform as many as 30 trillion calculations a second. (The measure of choice used to be the teraflop, for "trillion floating-point operations," but no one wants to think of a supercomputer as flopping trillions of times a second.)
Since when did Flops turn into ops? It's importatnt to make a distinction between floating point operations and integer operations, right? Seems pretty dumb to me. Or is it a cracker/hacker kind of thing...
I noticed the activity light on my cable modem (charter communications @home) was on constantly - ran tcpdump and it's all these "who has x? tell y" arp queries (nameserver lookups), just like with code red.
Yesterday I went out and bought an old tabletop radio at a garage sale just so I could listen to NPR and the scary AM talk radio shows in my home office while at the computer. Tomorrow I'm going to put up my shortwave radio antenna (we moved recently) so I can broaden my news sources. We currently don't have a TV and right now I find this to be a blessing after having seen some of the CNN footage the day of the attack and the online video clips on some web sites.
If you're getting burned out on the TV news try out some of the "alternative" news sources. Sometimes it can be refreshing to listen to another country's perspective, or that of folks far from the mainstream. However I find at some point I just have to take a break from all of it and do something distracting (like drink beer at a bluegrass festival this afternoon). But much of the joy has been drained from daily activities and somehow I doubt this is going to change anytime soon, as horror shifts from the attack to our response to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, It's "National Center for Atmospheric Research" (pronnounced "en-car") ... not NARC.
Twice last year I had to tell someone what a colon was.
It's a good thing you aren't providing support to proctologists.
I have a redergarden (not quite a renderfarm ;) and I've used POV-Ray to make visualizations and animations of my supercell model data. See the Novermber 2004 Linux Journal (cover plus article) for what I did. What I did was get POV-Ray, which, note, is "free" (with restrictions especially on the latest version) and got it to recognize my model data format natively (using the source of course). Then I can fire up my 14 of my nodes, all NFS mounted to a terabyte RAID array, with a python script (using pyMPI) and they each read in their data and happily render frames. Then I make movies with the resulting PPM images using mjpegtools.
Note that this approach crashes and burns if you can't fit the 3D array of your data into core memory. This becomes an issue especially with very large datasets and if you are rendering lots of different isosurfaces at once, which I often do. You can always downsample, or just read in what the camera sees instead of the whole model domain, but you can still run into brick walls with very large data sets. Of course, if you are rendering to a 1024x768 screen, and you are looking at the entire domain which is 700x700x100 you probably can downsample significanly without losing visual detail.
Anyway, for those interested, Here is a link to a directory conttaing mpegs and a talk I gave earlier this year which contains 1024x768 mpeg files and the talk itself. NOTE: some of these files are BIG. I would recommend this 32 MB mpeg and this 73 MB mpeg for a sample of what can be done with open source tools. Some supplemental material to the LJ article can be found here
Leigh Orf
Professor of Atmospheric Sciences
Central Michigan University
This subject touches upon the larger issue of effectively archiving
digital data, period. I have given a lot of thought to this because
I have been keeping a journal since I was 12 (I am 36) and while its
contents will undoubtedly only ever prove important to me, I want it to
be preserved. I still keep a pen-on-paper journal and occasionally spend
a few hours scanning it in to TIFF images and burning them to CD-ROM,
and occasionally backing those up to a data archival site.
I save and archive all of my outgoing email and while a fair amount of
it is 'background noise' it does serve as a reminder of what I've been
doing with my life, the people I've known, my changing viewpoints, and
fills in the gaps that the journal does not cover.
I suppose it all boils down to whether you have anything interesting to
say, regardless of whether it is in ASCII text or a quill dipped in ink
on papyrus.
I'm modeling supercells that produce tornadoes (well, almost) using supercomputers... does that count?
A talk I just gave a few days ago on this is found at the below link. Both in OpenOffice and PPT format. Note: the mpegs in that directory are BIG (1024x768) but they are very cool animations of supercells (raytraced with POV-Ray) and tornado-like circulations.
http://research.orf.cx/uw2004
Leigh Orf
The code began as a simpler model written in FORTRAN 70... or maybe even earlier... in the late 1970's. It has since been converted to F90.
Both clusters and big iron have their place. I am a meteorology professor and my current research involves high-resolution numerical modeling of thunderstorms. For a problem where the domain decomposition is straightforward and internode communication isn't your bottleneck, clusters are great. One huge advantage of clusters is that they are cheap and it isn't too big of a deal to get a grant together to buy the hardware, and it's YOURS and nobody else's. A huge disadvantage to big iron is that you have to share it with about a hundred other researchers. Waiting in a queue for three days only to find you goofed up in your startup script (and the model exits immediately) is NO FUN (cf the Regatta at NCSA).
I am currently running a model using legacy FORTRAN 90 code which was written before there were clusters. It does use OMP but OMP sucks and is no substitute for code which is written with MPI in mind. The model as it currently stands requires big iron to do big runs, and it is inefficient, but it works and sometimes I just need to do science and not model development. I am working on MPI-izing the code; no small feat, but the rewards would be quite worth the effort.
In summary, both clusters and big iron have their place. Folks have a habit of making a false dichotomy with regards to these two options. I wouldn't trade my cluster for the world (currently doing parallel POV-Ray rendering of my 3D thunderstorm data, see my web link and an upcoming [not sure what month] Linux Journal article if interested) as it is perfect for much of what I am doing right now and I don't have to share it with anyone. But I will also use big iron when necessary.
Linux Journal
Scientific American
Archaeology Today
Science News
Utne Reader
QST
I actually had my first article accepted for publication in LJ, am happy about that. Don't know if it will be in the dead tree version or online yet though.
Scientific American has changed a lot over the past ten or so years. It is much more accessible today. It used to read more like a scientific journal. They have gone a bit overboard with the layout (too many cutesy fonts/colors/pictures etc.) but by and large the articles are high quality and don't require a PhD to understand.
Science news is my weekly dose of science geek stuff that I gobble up in a half hour!
QST is the magazine of Amateur Radio.
Utne pisses me off sometimes with its "look! you can change the world! woohoo!" attitude applied to everyday mundane things (such as walking to work, what a concept) but there are gems in there too.
Archaeology Today is OK - I liked Discovering Archaeology better before the publisher scammed all of us subscribers - it was quite nice while it lasted, and focused more on prehistory (more than 10,000 years ago stuff) which is more of my interest.
I really should read more books though and put the magazines aside... oh well!
I also use PoV-Ray to render numerically modeled thunderstorms using isosurfaces. I've submitted an article to Linux Journal on how I modified the pov source to read my model data - dunno if it will be published or not.
See http://research.orf.cx for pics.
I'm curious, have you listened to a lot of soundboards from a bunch of different bands? Some bands run a separate board with its own mix for archival recording. As long as the person working the board isn't deaf or too wasted you get something that IMO rivals just about any audience recording.
There is a real subjective quality to thise SBD vs AUD thing. I can't stand AUDs even if they are FOB with $4,000 Neumann mikes. Swishy highs, no stereo separation, flabby bass, people screaming etc... to me this detracts from the experience. Of course, if you are looking for a "what was it like to be there" experience an audience recording will make you much happier.
I agree that some SBDs are mixed poorly for home listening. Even Phish with their pay-for-a-show service has produced some poorly mixed shows - and for a price!
Some of the best recordings I've heard are "matrix" recordings which are a mix of soundboard (with instruments panned to give stereo separation) and audience (70% board to 30% AUD or so suits me) and shows with on-stage mikes (Steve Kimock etc.). But there is nothing like a well produced studio recording on a decent stereo system in a decent room. Which reminds me, I really need to get a new output transformer for my Dynaco ST70....
Leigh Orf
"Hailstones are formed and begin with a piece of dust in the clouds," he explains. "There is a lot of activity going on, and what we do is to de-ionize that activity in the clouds and keep those dust particles from collecting moisture out of the clouds in turn reacting and forming what we know as a hailstone."
I'm a professor of meteorology. If one of my students had written that drivel I would have flunked 'em!
The microphysics of clouds is very complex. I'd really like to know what mechanism they really are trying to stifle here. Here is a bit on how hail forms. First, some background:
In a rapidly growing cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) cloud, you have a strong updraft (air rising rapidly). This air is contains humid air, which condenses to form liquid cloud droplets as it cools (rising air expands and cools - basic thermodynamics). It is indeed true that cloud droplets condense upon pieces of dust/salt/gunk in the atmosphere, but ionization has very very little to do with it. Many of these so-called condensation nuclei are not ionized. Water will condense upon just about anything if cooled enough.
Eventually this rising, cloudy air reaches heights where temperatures are well below freezing - say -20 degrees C. Water actually does not have to freeze when it is below 0 degrees C, and in fact what leads to lots of hail is the fact that there is an abundance of supercooled (below freezing liquid) cloud droplets in this cloud.
Eventually some ice crystals form, either spontaneously (supercooled cloud droplets freeze at about -40 degrees C - this is called homogeneous nucleation of ice), or because they come in contact with an ice nucleus (something that has a similar crystal structure to water ice). These ice crystals fall and co-mingle with the supercooled cloud droplets. Due to the difference in saturation vapor pressures over ice and water at a given temperature, these ice crystals grow and grow at the expense of the cloud droplets without actually making physical contact!
Now the stage is set for hail. There is an abundance of supercooled cloud droplets, which freeze upon contact with ice crystals. Contact is made, and graupel is formed. Graupel is kind of an intermediate form of ice between snow and hail. The updraft of the storm keeps everything going, and in fact can suspend heavy hail particles for a while before they either become so heavy they fall through the updraft, or they are tossed horizontally to a part of the storm where they fall to the ground. The largest hailstones form with the strongest updrafts because the hail can acrete lots and lots of supercooled water (hail will melt and refreeze also as it rises and falls within the cloud).
Again, I simply cannot fathom what process they are trying to stifle with these sound waves. Hail suppression research has focused mainly on seeding clouds with silver iodide. Silver iodide is a powdery substance which has an ice crystal shape very similar to that of water ice. Overseeding a cloud with AgI, so the theory goes, will convert all that supercooled cloud water into small ice crystals, scavenging all the liquid so there won't be any "lucky" graupel particles growing to the size of hail stones.
The Russians claimed some success with this process during the cold war (launching AgI laced rockets into clouds) but frankly I think they were overstating their success. Hail suppression work reached its peak in the 70's but because of the lack of any real statistical success, funding for this kind of work has pretty much dried up.
Anyway, a sucker is born every minute.
Leigh Orf
I, for one, give a shit. I am a meteorology professor who has been using Linux for over a decade. Having the NWS transition over to Linux means it is possible for me to run the same software that NWS operational forecasters are using. In fact, that's already possible - I have a copy of the AWIPS software on a CD-ROM sitting in my office, ready to install. This, in turn, opens the door for research possibilities and just as importantly, allows me to expose students to the kinds of software they will be using should they opt to work for the NWS (many do).
I visited the Grand Rapids NWS office a month ago and most of the workstations were already running Linux. The SOO (Science Operations Officer) seemed to be pretty happy with this. Why shouldn't he - hardware and software costs go down, machines are faster, and the OS is something that most scientists are using anyway.
Leigh Orf
KG4ULP here. Two days after I got my ham radio license (August of last year) my wife and I went camping in western North Carolina in a rather remote area. A day into our trip my car wouldn't start - it seemed to be either a fried alternator or a dead battery. A fellow camper who unsuccesfully jumpered my car had a cell phone but could not hit a tower. The park ranger's office was a few miles away, so there was nobody local to help unless I bummed a ride off somebody the next day (and the ranger's office was open). I had a local repeater programmed into my newly-acquired handheld and nervously identified myself and told the two guys who were chatting on the repeater my predicament. They were extremely friendly and put our minds at ease and helped us out - the next morning a guy who worked in a garage in the nearest town paid us a visit and it turned out my 5 year old car battery had shorted out. He put in a new battery, charged us like $50 for the battery plus house call, and my wife and I could go back to enjoying our vacation.
That's just a small example of ham radio helping out in a (albeit non-emergency) predicament. I never travel without my handheld and it's very rare that I'm in a location where I can't hit a repeater. Hams by their very nature are eager to help and if given the choice of a cell phone or HT for an emergency, my choice would be the HT. Many hams are trained for handling traffic in emergency situations - see earlier posts about ARES and RACES.
Like many reading this I am a technology nut who is heavily reliant on the Internet for both work and play. But there simply is nothing like radio as a method of communication. Radio waves can travel just about anywhere in the atmosphere, which is a medium which can't be broken like a wire, and simple transmitters and receivers are cheap and easy to use. The only exception to that is the HF band in which signals are bounced off the ionosphere for long-distance communication; solar activity can completely wipe out that mode of communication, but it is rare.
It should be emphasized that ham radio operators love to tinker and experiment and in many examples cutting-edge type experiments that started on ham radio have turned into mainstream technology. That is something that the average slashdotter should appreciate.
It's not just more variables, although that is a factor, it's about how many gridpoints you can use to represent the physical domain your model covers. For instance, today's predictive models which cover the day-to-day weather over North America or Europe use too coarse a grid to "see" thunderstorms - they just don't exist because the spacing of the gridpoints is too large for such a "small" phenomenon to occur within the model. Faster computers with more memory will allow forecast models to be able to see the atmosphere more realistically from small scale features to large scale features.
As a meteorologist with lots of modeling experience, I can say with a lot of confidence that you simply can't throw too much computational power at atmospheric modeling. Personally, I won't be happy until our global models are running at 1 centimeter resolution up to the thermosphere.
Really, you can try all the tricks in the world but it really boils down to being able to be disciplined enough to focus on the task at hand.
I am a college professor and have had similar problems through college and graduate school, but when push came to shove, I just buckled down and got the work done when it was required.
For non-computer related studies, I would recommend going to the library or a place where it is quiet and there are few distractions. Of course, stay away from the damned computers!
For computer-related stuff, don't bother with all the suggestions about unplugging the ethernet, routing slashdot to localhost etc... you will always be able to circumvent your own barriers. Just FOCUS dammit! Meditation, breathing exercises, etc. may help, as well as soft music - although for some this can be a distraction.
I was never able to pull off the all-nighters; my body just isn't made for it. So I would always get my major studying done during the day and early evening. Staying up late just wasn't an option for me because my brain would shut down after midnight.
One tangential point. It worked for me anyway: when studing for a test, do you major studying up to, but not beyond, *two days* before the test. Spend the day before the test going over the highlights of the material, but don't cram the day before. This always worked best for me. I think it's because it allowd material to enter my longer-term memory where it stuck.
I've done a fair amount of audio engineering and audio post-processing and I can see several problems here. If they really are offering CDs "minutes" after the show how will they burn enough copies? Are they recording directly to a multiple CD burner? If yes, how are they going to get the track boundaries right? What about engineering glitches during the show? Fades etc.? If they are going to sell these for $15 a CD as suggested, are people willing to pay $30 for a completely unpolished raw recording? Think about it - all the reasons cited by the industry for charging that much for a CD in the first place are gone since it's really just some guy running a patch off the soundboard.
I know the band Phish is selling live shows now over the Internet - I got a 3 CD show of NYE for $15, I think, only a few days after the show. The sound quality was fine and there were no glitches, but it wasn't studio quality for sure. It seems to me the best way to do a live show is to take a multitrack recording and mix it after the fact by someone who knows what they're doing.
Another thing, for what they are charging for concerts these days perhaps they're hitting their audience at the wrong time, when the music is still fresh in their heads.
It appears they've removed roaming access from Netscape. This allowed for remote storage of bookmarks on a properly configured server (via http) so that you always had the same bookmarks regardless of what machine you were running on. Maybe they dropped it because the implementation they were using was bad, but for me it was a nearly invaluable service. Anyone know if some sort of similar service is in store for future versions of netscape or mozilla?
Errr... never mind, I must be blind.
LWN's site says nothing of their next issue being their last (that I can find anyway), and there is no link posted in this story. Has anyone actually verified that this is true?
Supercomputing is an energy-intensive process, and Q (the name is meant to evoke both the dimension-hopping Star Trek alien and the gadget-making wizard in the James Bond thrillers) is rated at 30 teraops, meaning that it can perform as many as 30 trillion calculations a second. (The measure of choice used to be the teraflop, for "trillion floating-point operations," but no one wants to think of a supercomputer as flopping trillions of times a second.)
Since when did Flops turn into ops? It's importatnt to make a distinction between floating point operations and integer operations, right? Seems pretty dumb to me. Or is it a cracker/hacker kind of thing...
Orp
For me there's only one thing that keeps me using Netscape 4.78: Roaming Access.
Until it gets into Mozilla I'm sticking with 4.7.
is the one feature that Netscape has (and Mozilla does not) that is keeping me from switching to Mozilla.
Orp
Available through the BBC.
Is it just a coincidence? I doubt it.
I noticed the activity light on my cable modem (charter communications @home) was on constantly - ran tcpdump and it's all these "who has x? tell y" arp queries (nameserver lookups), just like with code red.
Leigh Orf
Yesterday I went out and bought an old tabletop radio at a garage sale just so I could listen to NPR and the scary AM talk radio shows in my home office while at the computer. Tomorrow I'm going to put up my shortwave radio antenna (we moved recently) so I can broaden my news sources. We currently don't have a TV and right now I find this to be a blessing after having seen some of the CNN footage the day of the attack and the online video clips on some web sites.
If you're getting burned out on the TV news try out some of the "alternative" news sources. Sometimes it can be refreshing to listen to another country's perspective, or that of folks far from the mainstream. However I find at some point I just have to take a break from all of it and do something distracting (like drink beer at a bluegrass festival this afternoon). But much of the joy has been drained from daily activities and somehow I doubt this is going to change anytime soon, as horror shifts from the attack to our response to it.