The whole idea seems kind of stupid to me. Trying to compare the processing power of a CPU-and-main-memory to the processing power of something that may just be a really fat and complicated neural network and may be something more complicated than that seems stupid to me.
I don't think anyone has figured out a standard that can be used to compare the data processing capabilities of a simple feedforward network to the data processing capabilities of a simple Von Neumann machine, let alone the data storage capabilities.
I get the feeling that we're comparing apples to celery here.
Most of it has little direct cracking application that I can see. We have a fancy traceroute, a system allowing multiple hosts to share an IP address and still get the correct data through MAC address translation. I can see where scanrand could be abused, but it won't be until someone writes a script for the script kiddies to use.
As for the idea of security through not telling anyone, read The Cuckoo's Egg and study up on the Internet Worm to figure out why that idea is completely idiotic.
Not entirely. There is xfce (www.xfce.org), a CDE-like desktop environment. I used to use it on my old P133 w/ 16mb of RAM, and it worked much more nicely than Gnome or KDE, which kept my computer in a pretty constant state of swapping.
I think backward(really more slantwise or sideways) compatibility is almost certainly one of the reasons behind why C++ treats string literals as arrays of characters.
I program in C++, but link to C libraries all the time. I also pass string literals into functions that have char* parameters. If C++ didn't treat string literals as char*, that would be impossible.
What are you going to be doing with the system other than running Maya?
The Fuel system is certainly a nice system, but it looks like the two things it really offers are one thing that is hard to get on Wintel sytems and one thing that isn't offered. The hard to get one is a ph4t professional graphics card, and the other is a huge data bus. (oh yeah, and Unix)
You can buy the ph4t professional graphics card for a PC. The data bus will still be small. Will there be any other work done that involves pushing large data sets around quickly, or will this system spend most of its time being used for other purposes? It seems silly to spend 15,000 of his research budget just to run Maya.
Keep in mind, too, that Linux may not fit his needs. Especially when we're talking 3D modelling. Linux's 3D acceleration support is totally krappo. DRI has come a long way, but I still keep a Windows partition around so I can reboot if I plan to be doing a lot of blendering. Lots of drivers are buggy, no support for professional 3D cards, and Mesa isn't perfect, either.
Not only that, but it's important for people to listen to the dying. If someone is nearing the end, catheterized, bedridden, having problems with shortness of breath, and dependent on pain medication and they feel crappy about it, they need to be listened to just as much as anybody else needs to talk about their recent crappy grade on a test.
I think that's the most killer part of the 'tyrrany of happiness' - if you try to force someone to be happy, you deny them their emotions. Someone dying of cancer might have few forms of dignity left other than expressing his or her feelings, and trying to make them cheer up is only going to make them feel that much more alone and make death that much more of a miserable experience.
Give enough information about the subject at hand and article being linked to that people with only a cursory interest in the subject don't feel the need to click on the link just to find out what the hell the article is about.
Sheesh, one sentence. The art of the abstract is dead.
Hmm. . a romantic depiction of sex done with some artistic license. Of course it'd be much for American censors. If you can't see tits bouncing, it's too mushy for Americans to handle.
He ruled out slackware because it was a tight fit for the amount of RAM the computer had, ~12mb.
Having run Slackware on a 486dx/33 with 8mb of RAM and set it up as a fileserver, I believe him. Even with the most bare-minimum shrinky-dink install Slack offers, it still took a lot of time with a meat cleaver to get the system pared down enough that I could do much of anything without forcing the system to swap.
Had I known about uClibc at the time, I would have used it - I don't know how much space it saves, but if the difference is signifigant, I think it might easily improve performance on older machines despite the sacrifice in speed of the code. The less RAM you have to devote to libc, the less the computer is going to have to swap.
I switched from Mandrake to Gentoo last summer, and although I won't make any statements as to how much of a difference having all the software on my computer optimized for my architecture (PIII) made, I will say that I have still noticed a speed difference. For the most part, I attribute that to the fact that basically anything that is running on my system is something I put there, meaning I don't have any unused krap on my machine, nor did I have to spend a lot of time removing that krap to get rid of it. (Instead, I spent the time watching movies while Portage did its thing - sounds more fun to me;-)
I now go from BIOS to X in about a quarter the time it took to get my computer booted when I was using Mandrake 8.1.
And I don't just mean with the modelling programs themselves. From your questions about things like NURBS, it sounds like you don't have much experience with the process of 3D modelling itself yet. (If I'm wrong, excuse my presumptuousness.)
In my experience, it's really almost impossible to judge 3D modellers until you have some experience with them and know what kinds of features you want and how you like to model. The modellers you are looking at buying are expensive enough that I would recommend you make sure you know enough about rendering that you can make your own informed decisions about what suits you.
Try starting off with something like Moonlight 3D or Blender, or using a friend's copy of 3D Studio Max or something like that, and get yourself extremely comfortable with 3D modelling, including animation-related stuff. Learn basic modelling, learn how to use NURBS, and learn how to use stuff like inverse kinematics, and make sure you are comfortable with all of them. Then, take a look at the demos you have and you will be able to tell whether one modeller's way of doing things feels more comfortable to you than another.
Otherwise, you might just find out that you've spent great heaping piles of money on a 3D modelling package that everyone on Slashdot just recommended to you based primarily on the knowledge that it's used by ILM or Pixar or what have you.
Why would phone companies want to run VoIP over and IP network running over a perfectly good phone network? They already have a perfectly good circuit switched network in place running right up to your house over the same twisted pair copper wire that you are getting your DSL service over.
What would they stand to gain from putting out the money to switch that voice service to be run over an IP being run on the same copper wire, other than adding congestion to their IP networks?
What advantage would adding VoIP to their networks offer to the user, other than increased latency and dropped packets to destroy the sound quality of their phone calls?
Re:education is the only way
on
E-Mail Size Limits?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So true.
At my work, nobody explained to the users why they shouldn't send large e-mails, and a limit wasn't set. Of course, there was they day when a chain letter involving a fairly large image file showed up, and everybody sent it to everybody else. The amount of space the individual copies of this chain letter took up on our server's hard drive grew exponentially until the partition the mail was stored on filled up, and mail services shut down because there was no room to fit incoming mail.
Explain to users this danger and show them some method of breaking files up or transferring them in other ways. In my experience, you have to either by extremely prodigious or extremely unprofessional to create a standard office document that exceeds 5meg.
Amigas with Toaster cards were something of an industry standard for inexpensive video editing up to a few years ago, when the TCO on Amgias got too high due to the increasing scarcity of hardware.
Heck, I used to work in a video production studio that is/still/ using an Amiga with a toaster card - the whole system cost them a few thousand, and in many ways it holds its own with some $10,000 NT-based systems I've seen.
I know a lot of people who are seriously dedicated to the Amiga, and still use their Amigas to this day. I understand there are even more Amiga users in Europe (I'm in the USA).
Look at all tha Amiga-specific features - you can plug this thing into a PC or an Amiga (apparently it has an ISA connector along one edge and a Zorro connector on the other), you can plug an Amiga keyboard into it, etc. etc.
They'll tell you in the pamphlets their service works with Linux. When you call tech support, you find out none of the tech support staff has even heard of Linux and refuse to even talk to you.
There are certainly times when one would want a non-CLI interface even if one were blind - for example, when using programs that are not (and should not) be for the console, such as word processors. Same for come web browsers - to the best of my knowledge, there is not and probably will never be a console web browser that supports major plugins or Java.
Besides, the trend is for allmost all applications, even on linux, to end up being for a window system. The trend is going to keep moving in that direction.
Newer phones can operate in as many as 3 different frequency bands, one each for analog, digital, and 3G service. These phones will switch bands in an attempt to find the best service available at a given point.
I don't know much about cell phones on airplanes, but I would imagine there is a fear of a cell phone operating in a radio frequency that could interfere with electronics or radio communications on the airplane. In that case, jamming the signal would force the cell phone to try a different band (say quit searching for a digital tower and start looking for an analog tower).
Of course, then you gotta wonder why the jamming signal wouldn't interfere with the airplane's electronics just as the cell phone would.
Anyone who's willing to pay $3.99/minute roaming charges just to say "Hey! I'm flying over your house!" deserves to pay $3.99/minute roaming charges just to say, "Hey! I'm flying over your house!"
After all, there can be no more than two different points of view. In the US they are known as Republican and Democratic. I thought that was one point of view?
Considering that Canada ranked 5th and the U.S ranked 17th. I've always been under the impression Canada is more restrictive than the U.S. on those points - especially B, C, and E. I'm sure there are other examples.
I have a laptop, so it's not as big of a deal to me - you don't really have to 'unpack' a laptop, provided you don't do something stupid like putting the laptop case in a box or something.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole idea seems kind of stupid to me. Trying to compare the processing power of a CPU-and-main-memory to the processing power of something that may just be a really fat and complicated neural network and may be something more complicated than that seems stupid to me.
I don't think anyone has figured out a standard that can be used to compare the data processing capabilities of a simple feedforward network to the data processing capabilities of a simple Von Neumann machine, let alone the data storage capabilities.
I get the feeling that we're comparing apples to celery here.
Do you even know what this stuff does?
Most of it has little direct cracking application that I can see. We have a fancy traceroute, a system allowing multiple hosts to share an IP address and still get the correct data through MAC address translation.
I can see where scanrand could be abused, but it won't be until someone writes a script for the script kiddies to use.
As for the idea of security through not telling anyone, read The Cuckoo's Egg and study up on the Internet Worm to figure out why that idea is completely idiotic.
Not entirely. There is xfce (www.xfce.org), a CDE-like desktop environment. I used to use it on my old P133 w/ 16mb of RAM, and it worked much more nicely than Gnome or KDE, which kept my computer in a pretty constant state of swapping.
I think backward(really more slantwise or sideways) compatibility is almost certainly one of the reasons behind why C++ treats string literals as arrays of characters.
I program in C++, but link to C libraries all the time. I also pass string literals into functions that have char* parameters. If C++ didn't treat string literals as char*, that would be impossible.
the advantages of using Linux
Care to elaborate?
What are you going to be doing with the system other than running Maya?
The Fuel system is certainly a nice system, but it looks like the two things it really offers are one thing that is hard to get on Wintel sytems and one thing that isn't offered. The hard to get one is a ph4t professional graphics card, and the other is a huge data bus. (oh yeah, and Unix)
You can buy the ph4t professional graphics card for a PC. The data bus will still be small. Will there be any other work done that involves pushing large data sets around quickly, or will this system spend most of its time being used for other purposes? It seems silly to spend 15,000 of his research budget just to run Maya.
Keep in mind, too, that Linux may not fit his needs. Especially when we're talking 3D modelling. Linux's 3D acceleration support is totally krappo. DRI has come a long way, but I still keep a Windows partition around so I can reboot if I plan to be doing a lot of blendering. Lots of drivers are buggy, no support for professional 3D cards, and Mesa isn't perfect, either.
Not only that, but it's important for people to listen to the dying. If someone is nearing the end, catheterized, bedridden, having problems with shortness of breath, and dependent on pain medication and they feel crappy about it, they need to be listened to just as much as anybody else needs to talk about their recent crappy grade on a test.
I think that's the most killer part of the 'tyrrany of happiness' - if you try to force someone to be happy, you deny them their emotions. Someone dying of cancer might have few forms of dignity left other than expressing his or her feelings, and trying to make them cheer up is only going to make them feel that much more alone and make death that much more of a miserable experience.
Give enough information about the subject at hand and article being linked to that people with only a cursory interest in the subject don't feel the need to click on the link just to find out what the hell the article is about.
Sheesh, one sentence. The art of the abstract is dead.
Hmm. . a romantic depiction of sex done with some artistic license. Of course it'd be much for American censors. If you can't see tits bouncing, it's too mushy for Americans to handle.
If Japan is anything like the United States, I'd say you should find talk shows and watch those.
He ruled out slackware because it was a tight fit for the amount of RAM the computer had, ~12mb.
Having run Slackware on a 486dx/33 with 8mb of RAM and set it up as a fileserver, I believe him. Even with the most bare-minimum shrinky-dink install Slack offers, it still took a lot of time with a meat cleaver to get the system pared down enough that I could do much of anything without forcing the system to swap.
Had I known about uClibc at the time, I would have used it - I don't know how much space it saves, but if the difference is signifigant, I think it might easily improve performance on older machines despite the sacrifice in speed of the code. The less RAM you have to devote to libc, the less the computer is going to have to swap.
I switched from Mandrake to Gentoo last summer, and although I won't make any statements as to how much of a difference having all the software on my computer optimized for my architecture (PIII) made, I will say that I have still noticed a speed difference. For the most part, I attribute that to the fact that basically anything that is running on my system is something I put there, meaning I don't have any unused krap on my machine, nor did I have to spend a lot of time removing that krap to get rid of it. (Instead, I spent the time watching movies while Portage did its thing - sounds more fun to me ;-)
I now go from BIOS to X in about a quarter the time it took to get my computer booted when I was using Mandrake 8.1.
And I don't just mean with the modelling programs themselves. From your questions about things like NURBS, it sounds like you don't have much experience with the process of 3D modelling itself yet. (If I'm wrong, excuse my presumptuousness.)
In my experience, it's really almost impossible to judge 3D modellers until you have some experience with them and know what kinds of features you want and how you like to model. The modellers you are looking at buying are expensive enough that I would recommend you make sure you know enough about rendering that you can make your own informed decisions about what suits you.
Try starting off with something like Moonlight 3D or Blender, or using a friend's copy of 3D Studio Max or something like that, and get yourself extremely comfortable with 3D modelling, including animation-related stuff. Learn basic modelling, learn how to use NURBS, and learn how to use stuff like inverse kinematics, and make sure you are comfortable with all of them. Then, take a look at the demos you have and you will be able to tell whether one modeller's way of doing things feels more comfortable to you than another.
Otherwise, you might just find out that you've spent great heaping piles of money on a 3D modelling package that everyone on Slashdot just recommended to you based primarily on the knowledge that it's used by ILM or Pixar or what have you.
Why would phone companies want to run VoIP over and IP network running over a perfectly good phone network? They already have a perfectly good circuit switched network in place running right up to your house over the same twisted pair copper wire that you are getting your DSL service over.
What would they stand to gain from putting out the money to switch that voice service to be run over an IP being run on the same copper wire, other than adding congestion to their IP networks?
What advantage would adding VoIP to their networks offer to the user, other than increased latency and dropped packets to destroy the sound quality of their phone calls?
So true.
At my work, nobody explained to the users why they shouldn't send large e-mails, and a limit wasn't set. Of course, there was they day when a chain letter involving a fairly large image file showed up, and everybody sent it to everybody else. The amount of space the individual copies of this chain letter took up on our server's hard drive grew exponentially until the partition the mail was stored on filled up, and mail services shut down because there was no room to fit incoming mail.
Explain to users this danger and show them some method of breaking files up or transferring them in other ways. In my experience, you have to either by extremely prodigious or extremely unprofessional to create a standard office document that exceeds 5meg.
Amigas with Toaster cards were something of an industry standard for inexpensive video editing up to a few years ago, when the TCO on Amgias got too high due to the increasing scarcity of hardware.
/still/ using an Amiga with a toaster card - the whole system cost them a few thousand, and in many ways it holds its own with some $10,000 NT-based systems I've seen.
Heck, I used to work in a video production studio that is
All hail the amiga.
I know a lot of people who are seriously dedicated to the Amiga, and still use their Amigas to this day. I understand there are even more Amiga users in Europe (I'm in the USA).
Look at all tha Amiga-specific features - you can plug this thing into a PC or an Amiga (apparently it has an ISA connector along one edge and a Zorro connector on the other), you can plug an Amiga keyboard into it, etc. etc.
They'll tell you in the pamphlets their service works with Linux. When you call tech support, you find out none of the tech support staff has even heard of Linux and refuse to even talk to you.
There are certainly times when one would want a non-CLI interface even if one were blind - for example, when using programs that are not (and should not) be for the console, such as word processors. Same for come web browsers - to the best of my knowledge, there is not and probably will never be a console web browser that supports major plugins or Java.
Besides, the trend is for allmost all applications, even on linux, to end up being for a window system. The trend is going to keep moving in that direction.
Probably to keep you from trying to listen to the crew's radio communications. I can see some security issues there.
Newer phones can operate in as many as 3 different frequency bands, one each for analog, digital, and 3G service. These phones will switch bands in an attempt to find the best service available at a given point.
I don't know much about cell phones on airplanes, but I would imagine there is a fear of a cell phone operating in a radio frequency that could interfere with electronics or radio communications on the airplane. In that case, jamming the signal would force the cell phone to try a different band (say quit searching for a digital tower and start looking for an analog tower).
Of course, then you gotta wonder why the jamming signal wouldn't interfere with the airplane's electronics just as the cell phone would.
Anyone who's willing to pay $3.99/minute roaming charges just to say "Hey! I'm flying over your house!" deserves to pay $3.99/minute roaming charges just to say, "Hey! I'm flying over your house!"
After all, there can be no more than two different points of view. In the US they are known as Republican and Democratic.
I thought that was one point of view?
Shh! that's supposed to be a secret!
Considering that Canada ranked 5th and the U.S ranked 17th. I've always been under the impression Canada is more restrictive than the U.S. on those points - especially B, C, and E.
I'm sure there are other examples.
I have a laptop, so it's not as big of a deal to me - you don't really have to 'unpack' a laptop, provided you don't do something stupid like putting the laptop case in a box or something.