What you really need is a tracking signal attached to each player so that you can pin-point any of them automagically with a very small error margin.
The best lense setting on each camera may be obtained by minimising the differences between frames from close cameras.
For a real 360 loop, that'll probably give you a global error minimum too, with camera 1 getting minimised with camera N.
I'm not too sure about the morphing, but it seems feasable with RBFs or something similar when you already have close images.
The point is, they already have at least 50% of the installation, I wonder how much it would cost to have proper morphing instead of crappy frame switching...
Do you think I could ask for a million or 2 to implement it? You just gotta love these Ph.D. in blablabla thingies attached to your business card;-)
Okay, so for a smooth rotation, the object is at the center of the cameras, all having the same lense settings.
If not at the center, then you have to compensate for the error with matched zooms so that you don't have, as the viewer, the weird impression of a comet like elliptical motion (not even as they only cover 270 degrees).
Even if you compensate for the distance with a zoom, what about the fields of view? how do you morph your different frozen camera views into one smooth video sequence, when all your field of views are different?
My (wild) guess is that you'll see quite a lot of these instant replays at the center of the field...
Ubercool nontheless... I wonder how much processing power you need to render your animation... and how automated the whole thing really is. 33 cameras, say 3 second animation @ 60 frames/s, 800x600 that's 247Mb uncompressed @ 24bit/pixel and 32 different morphs to compute with say 5 images each... I wonder how many anchor points you use in such a morph. Anyway, sounds highly//isable to me, so 32 processors on a nifty board or a beowulf?
Funilly enough, about the same thing happened to me... I used to be a natural (now with all the crap I must use, I can hardly program in C anymore). I was programming in assembly when I was 13 because basic was getting too slow for the kind of programming I was doing, and also, because I had very supportive parents who bought me DAMS, the best Amstrad CPC assembler ever.
Anyway, I got into this industrial computing course, and we was doing assembly on some 68K boards. I was bored throughout the whole thing which was really pissing off the guy I was working with:-)
Anyway, comes the exam (2 hours) and off I go, programming in assembly as if it was basic and getting a working version of the program in about 1/2 hour! (some weird shit, interfacing the 68K with some IO ports and timers)
15 minutes later and the program was looking a lot less messy than the original version. Around this time comes the teacher to check on me, checks the program, sees that it works, and asks me for my flowchart...
So I tell the teacher that I haven't quite finished my program, that surely there are things to optimize, so I'll draw the freakin flowchart when I'm done with the programming.
Not quite the question order he had in mind (was I supposed to draw the flowchart thingy BEFORE coding??? me???:), so I got marked down... eventhough I knew my shit like nobody else.
After getting my result and talking to the guy I learned a valuable lesson: I gave him the impression that I could have done the thing my eyes closed and ended-up making some minor mistakes (can't remember what it was, but it was some silly 68K specific shit, or something... took him quite some time to find something to mark me down on, though!) so he hurt me plenty for that (like, that'll teach you being so arrogant:-)
What I'd say is that a mark is just a freakin mark, nothing else... is it going to affect your carrer if you're only the second best in your field? (especially if being the best means so much more work).
Is a mark that important that you can't take a joke? Was you going to fill A Complaint because you was marked down? come-on, man, cheer-up!;-)
The most addictive game I've ever played is called Linux.
After having played for several years I got a little tired of some of the adventures (to name a few, slackware and redhat come to mind) and I'm still playing the debian one. I've passed the hamm, slink and potato levels but don't feel quite confident with the woody level yet.
I've played both the 1.2 2.0 and 2.2 characters... still haven't tried the new 2.4 (sounds like great fun, though:)
Seriously, anybody who's not telling you he/she has great fun (mmhh.. err err...) using linux is just plain lying;-)
uhuh, it all depends on your app... sure a small server of some sort will do just fine on 32Mb RAM, things like linuxrouter (www.linuxrouter.org) can work on a 486: it decompress from a floppy to 4Mb RAM and use the remainder of the 8Mb ram for it's memory... awsome!
However, how do you go about solving say a 4000x4000 double float linear system on the same machine? (that's err... 8x4000x4000=128Mb RAM for ONE matrix on a 32bit machine if I'm not mistaken...)
For any computation of this size, you need lotsa memory (and a fast proc;), especially if your system is dense.
Sure, not everybody needs to do things like that, but it just gives you an idea of what memory is used for.
If you're wondering why the hech I would want to solve a 4000x4000 system, I'm doing 3-D warping/morphing, 4000 is somewhere in the range of the number of deformation vectors I end-up using.
mmhhh... I can't find it anymore, but one of the online books on C++ went through a move like this (the thing is huge compared to a thesis) They did say something like keeping the document in LaTeX wasn't manageable anymore so they went for SGML.
Still, you get back to the same problem, how do style sheels translate when you go from SGML to TeX or SGML to HTML and does it mean I have to rewrite all the somehow hackish LaTeX stuff in style sheets?
Maybe when I write my first book or something, right now, I'll stick to LaTeX (blah! typing LaTeX all the time makes me feel like a script kiddy;)
In vim you can put something like this in your.vimrc (it's not mine, but I can't remember where I found this hack, sorry:-/ )
map ^T:w!^M:!aspell check %^M:e! %^M
to type the ^ control characters in vi, type ctrl-V and then the special character (^M is the return key)
Then when you have this ready, everytime you want to spell check, you press ^T in vim and there you go, instant aspell mode...
PS: It's not that I dislike emacs, (the viper mode is actually quite nice;) but I've been using vi since my first account on a silicon graphics... wouldn't use anything else now:-)
Interesting that you more or less had to do the layout for your wife.
Generating layouts yourself is a nightmare. I tried it for my thesis, but had to give-up. So I just took csthesis and hacked it a bit. This is a more serious complaint about LaTeX but it's supposed to get fixed in version 3.
The good thing is, there are loads of layouts, styles whatever on the net, just grab the one you like most, and \include your chapters in:-)
If you are into scientific writing, any of the major publishers, IEEE, elsevier... have a LaTeX file somewhere so you don't bother with the layout of your articles. Would be a lot nicer if it weren't so hard to do custom ones yourself... ('coz you need to know TeX as well as LaTeX)
[...] but anyone who tries to
use it for anything but Text-with-two-figures documents needs to budget a good day just to make it come our right. For example, it puts figures
at the end of the document at the drop of a hat.
uhuh! I know! this sounds like one of the major complaint about LaTeX:-)
Read the epslatex.[ps,pdf] document carefully, All Will Be Explained;-) The normal behaviour is for all the figures to get flushed at the end of sections/chapters. It doesn't have to be so, if you use the right packages. check the placeins package, that's the one you need.
Then if you use \begin{figure}[!htbp] it will actually do it! (place the figure here, top of the next page, or bottom or float it to the end of the section.
If you're not sure about the packages you need, check my header:
If you're wondering about some of the other packages, psfrag is absolutly incredible! it allows you to change text in ps figures.
if you have the text AAA in the figure, you can use
You know when people tell you to go for opensource software and stuff? This is especially true for word processing. See what happens when you don't? Just imagine you started to write documents on the beta and now you're stuck because they're not going to release the software in the end. The beta runs out, and You Are Stuck In Your Shit.
2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD;)...
WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.
Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.
I remember having had this discussion on/. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.
Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.
But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project.
If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.
There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?
The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.
The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.
For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?
For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved:) and it works great. Use whatever you want.
Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...
Sorry about that, I had a look at the sourceforge website and the version therere was 0.07 the very same version I had on my computer... and downloaded ages ago. (still, patato makes version 0.04 available)
Once again, sorry if I wasn't looking in the right place!
First, my rant about windows (hehe, this is bound to get me some carma;-)
What's your best thing to test and compare operating systems? mine, as stupid as it may sound is to put it on a laptop and check what happens:
The more the system is processor hungry, the shorter the battery life and/or the warmer the power suply.
Agree with me or not, this is my opinion. I don't have all the figures, but bear with me.
Win 2000 on a tecra 8100 (tosh) is a dooggggggggg. I thought the power supply was going to melt! Deleted it straight away to install win98 on it and it was much better. If you change in your system.ini the shell to read:
shell=PROGMAN.EXE
it's slightly better. YMMV.
Compare win to linux (Y-A silly comparison, and still on my laptop)
The computer requirements are always low, unless you are hammering the computer with a specific task (running vim won't, starting solving some equation systems will).
Also, be careful what widgetset you're using... like, try pressing on something in xv and keep pressing: mhhh... where did this 100% CPU coming from?
Finally, just to get back in the subject of debian
I'm running debian and upgrading the kernel the debian way is as difficult as
make menuconfig
make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image
dpkg -i../kernel-image-X.XXX_1.0_.deb
shutdown -r now
(from somewhere in the debian docs)
What Debian needs is not a prettier install (or maybe it does) it's an automatic one (... oh wait!)
Also, we-need-a-better-dselect! (oh, wait again!) Actually, looking at the state of aptitude, people may do just fine with dselect and apt-get... that's why it hasn't been upgraded (I guess) in a lonnng time
I think debian is great, linux is cool especially on a laptop and that when it comes to windows, yeah YMMV! If you like it and can do anything you like/want in it, go for it... mmhhh uhhh and talking about 'doze in good terms on/. is bound to get you flamed anyway;-)
Check it out. It's an IDE floppy that holds 120Mb per media AND reads normal floppies at the same time. Also, it reads its media 5x as fast as a normal floppy
Sony have a similar product, HiFD. Apparently it's faster than LS120, holds 200Mb and of course, is not compatible.
While the LS120 is slower than a zip, it's main advantage is that it completly replaces the floppy drive. Yes you can boot from it on new motherboards, and linux recognises it just fine (/dev/hd ). Also, with syslinux you can boot small distros, such as LRP and get the same advantage as with a normal floppy: You can write-protect the media, easily.
It's just the thing you need for backing-up your data... if it weren't so expensive (both the drive and its media)
Just on a side note, I've read the new superdisk drives will let you format normal floppies to up to 32Mb, but can't find the reference to this anywhere... any link?
Do you remember the bit in the samba documentation, about samba being "pizzaware" ? Who am I supposed to send the pizzas to, now that the project has forked?:-)
Those who have registered in the Samba survey as "Pizza Factory" will already know this, but the rest may need some help. Andrew doesn't ask for payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza. This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty thousand kilometres away, but it has been done.
I've just checked the page, it looks nice that compaq has gpled it... yet another reason not to just bash alphalinux for its lack of performance: 64 bit, and black magic profiling capabilities;-)
About page coloring, this is something I heard freebsd does and not linux. myth or reality? I don't know.
So far, to reduce bottlenecks all I've done was to try and use sparse solvers, as I can get quite a few 0s in my system (up to a ridiculous 97%) But yep, you still need some profiling to get your code just right, especially if you have several \emph{blocks} working together in your code.
if you're interested, the libraries I'm using for sparse solvers are meschach (great but sparse documentation) and since yesterday sparse QR (I can't tell yet if it's any better than some of the solvers in meschach, but it looks nice nonetheless...).
Yes, linux runs very fine. At least Debian does...
I still need to upgrade my box to patato and check-out ccc, but all in all, it looks like the box will never run Tru64, then:-/
I wasn't impressed by the speed of say... povray compiled with gcc, but with an alpha compiler released by compaq, I should still see some improvement in my calculations...
You ever tried to solve a 4000x4000 double float system? it's... slow. All I'm waiting for is a decent 4 to 8 SMP athlon box with 2Gb of memory. That should last a couple of years in terms of my computational needs! I think;-)
Thanks for that!
And I thought I had problems booting milo from my floppy:-)
My config is a samsung mobo with a 2940 adaptec, a 3c905 and somekind of ATI that was working well under NT.
Nothing's recognised by the bios (especially not the adaptec), but it will still boot milo and linux from the floppy. Amazingly impressive that everything works under linux as is, especially with cards that were after all designed for x86.
So I might have trouble with my config under tru64? it's a pitty, because I was having the best transfer rate with the 3c905 nic and the adaptec card instead of using the onboard chipset.
BTW, I remember reading somewhere that you have to flash an alpha specific bios in your videocard, in order for it to work under alpha... but I guess that's not a problem if you're using a separate xterm.
The fact that I've owned my very own alpha 600MHz for the past two years?
The fact that booo booo I haven't had time to upgrade from 2.0.38 yet? (remember that stable patato has only been released recently)
The fact that ohhh goshhhhhh I need Tru64 to check 64bit code compatibility with my workplace... oh gossshhhhh does it mean I'll have to delete linux? not if I can help it, dual boot with milo is no problem at all.
Kids these days... makes you wonder if Linux will ever make it seriously in the workplace when 99.9% of the user base are kids on crack.
I think I've already asked this on/. but here you go anyway:)
I've got a ruffian (samsung) motherboard with a 21164 on it, and was wondering if I can install Tru64 on it:
If I remember, digital unix could only boot on digital unix mobos, not on alphaPCs. Is that still the case?
Not that I dislike alphalinux or anything (still haven't updated from 2.0.38 yet, need to flash a milo 2.2.something), just wondering:)
Slashdot Mirror
The best lense setting on each camera may be obtained by minimising the differences between frames from close cameras.
For a real 360 loop, that'll probably give you a global error minimum too, with camera 1 getting minimised with camera N.
I'm not too sure about the morphing, but it seems feasable with RBFs or something similar when you already have close images.
The point is, they already have at least 50% of the installation, I wonder how much it would cost to have proper morphing instead of crappy frame switching...
Do you think I could ask for a million or 2 to implement it? You just gotta love these Ph.D. in blablabla thingies attached to your business card ;-)
---
Okay, so for a smooth rotation, the object is at the center of the cameras, all having the same lense settings.
If not at the center, then you have to compensate for the error with matched zooms so that you don't have, as the viewer, the weird impression of a comet like elliptical motion (not even as they only cover 270 degrees).
Even if you compensate for the distance with a zoom, what about the fields of view? how do you morph your different frozen camera views into one smooth video sequence, when all your field of views are different?
My (wild) guess is that you'll see quite a lot of these instant replays at the center of the field...
Ubercool nontheless... I wonder how much processing power you need to render your animation... and how automated the whole thing really is. 33 cameras, say 3 second animation @ 60 frames/s, 800x600 that's 247Mb uncompressed @ 24bit/pixel and 32 different morphs to compute with say 5 images each... I wonder how many anchor points you use in such a morph. Anyway, sounds highly //isable to me, so 32 processors on a nifty board or a beowulf?
---
Anyway, I got into this industrial computing course, and we was doing assembly on some 68K boards. I was bored throughout the whole thing which was really pissing off the guy I was working with :-)
Anyway, comes the exam (2 hours) and off I go, programming in assembly as if it was basic and getting a working version of the program in about 1/2 hour! (some weird shit, interfacing the 68K with some IO ports and timers) 15 minutes later and the program was looking a lot less messy than the original version. Around this time comes the teacher to check on me, checks the program, sees that it works, and asks me for my flowchart...
So I tell the teacher that I haven't quite finished my program, that surely there are things to optimize, so I'll draw the freakin flowchart when I'm done with the programming. :), so I got marked down... eventhough I knew my shit like nobody else.
Not quite the question order he had in mind (was I supposed to draw the flowchart thingy BEFORE coding??? me???
After getting my result and talking to the guy I learned a valuable lesson: I gave him the impression that I could have done the thing my eyes closed and ended-up making some minor mistakes (can't remember what it was, but it was some silly 68K specific shit, or something... took him quite some time to find something to mark me down on, though!) so he hurt me plenty for that (like, that'll teach you being so arrogant :-)
What I'd say is that a mark is just a freakin mark, nothing else... is it going to affect your carrer if you're only the second best in your field? (especially if being the best means so much more work). Is a mark that important that you can't take a joke? Was you going to fill A Complaint because you was marked down? come-on, man, cheer-up! ;-)
---
Suspend seems to work quite alright with 2.2.18 (compile your kernel with the toshiba stuff) on my 7020ct
When you suspend the sucker, you get a message in the kernel log:
But yeah, having both proper hibernation and a 100% proof suspend would be ace cool.---
After having played for several years I got a little tired of some of the adventures (to name a few, slackware and redhat come to mind) and I'm still playing the debian one. I've passed the hamm, slink and potato levels but don't feel quite confident with the woody level yet.
I've played both the 1.2 2.0 and 2.2 characters... still haven't tried the new 2.4 (sounds like great fun, though :)
Seriously, anybody who's not telling you he/she has great fun (mmhh.. err err...) using linux is just plain lying ;-)
---
---
However, how do you go about solving say a 4000x4000 double float linear system on the same machine? (that's err... 8x4000x4000=128Mb RAM for ONE matrix on a 32bit machine if I'm not mistaken...)
For any computation of this size, you need lotsa memory (and a fast proc ;), especially if your system is dense.
Sure, not everybody needs to do things like that, but it just gives you an idea of what memory is used for.
If you're wondering why the hech I would want to solve a 4000x4000 system, I'm doing 3-D warping/morphing, 4000 is somewhere in the range of the number of deformation vectors I end-up using.
---
Just shows you you need to check CTAN more often ;-)
---
---
Still, you get back to the same problem, how do style sheels translate when you go from SGML to TeX or SGML to HTML and does it mean I have to rewrite all the somehow hackish LaTeX stuff in style sheets?
Maybe when I write my first book or something, right now, I'll stick to LaTeX (blah! typing LaTeX all the time makes me feel like a script kiddy ;)
---
Then when you have this ready, everytime you want to spell check, you press ^T in vim and there you go, instant aspell mode...
PS: It's not that I dislike emacs, (the viper mode is actually quite nice ;) but I've been using vi since my first account on a silicon graphics... wouldn't use anything else now :-)
---
---
Generating layouts yourself is a nightmare. I tried it for my thesis, but had to give-up. So I just took csthesis and hacked it a bit. This is a more serious complaint about LaTeX but it's supposed to get fixed in version 3.
The good thing is, there are loads of layouts, styles whatever on the net, just grab the one you like most, and \include your chapters in :-)
If you are into scientific writing, any of the major publishers, IEEE, elsevier... have a LaTeX file somewhere so you don't bother with the layout of your articles. Would be a lot nicer if it weren't so hard to do custom ones yourself... ('coz you need to know TeX as well as LaTeX)
---
Read the epslatex.[ps,pdf] document carefully, All Will Be Explained
Then if you use \begin{figure}[!htbp] it will actually do it! (place the figure here, top of the next page, or bottom or float it to the end of the section.
If you're not sure about the packages you need, check my header:
If you're wondering about some of the other packages, psfrag is absolutly incredible! it allows you to change text in ps figures. if you have the text AAA in the figure, you can useto replace AAA in your eps file by some dynamic information generated by LaTeX... isn't that just absolutly unbelievably cool?
---
2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...
WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.
Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.
I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.
Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.
But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.
There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?
So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.
The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.
The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.
For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?
For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.
Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...
---
Sorry about that, I had a look at the sourceforge website and the version therere was 0.07 the very same version I had on my computer... and downloaded ages ago. (still, patato makes version 0.04 available)
Once again, sorry if I wasn't looking in the right place!
---
First, my rant about windows (hehe, this is bound to get me some carma ;-)
What's your best thing to test and compare operating systems? mine, as stupid as it may sound is to put it on a laptop and check what happens:
The more the system is processor hungry, the shorter the battery life and/or the warmer the power suply.
Agree with me or not, this is my opinion. I don't have all the figures, but bear with me.
Win 2000 on a tecra 8100 (tosh) is a dooggggggggg. I thought the power supply was going to melt! Deleted it straight away to install win98 on it and it was much better. If you change in your system.ini the shell to read:
it's slightly better. YMMV.Compare win to linux (Y-A silly comparison, and still on my laptop) The computer requirements are always low, unless you are hammering the computer with a specific task (running vim won't, starting solving some equation systems will).
Also, be careful what widgetset you're using... like, try pressing on something in xv and keep pressing: mhhh... where did this 100% CPU coming from?
Finally, just to get back in the subject of debian
I'm running debian and upgrading the kernel the debian way is as difficult as
(from somewhere in the debian docs)What Debian needs is not a prettier install (or maybe it does) it's an automatic one (... oh wait!)
Also, we-need-a-better-dselect! (oh, wait again!) Actually, looking at the state of aptitude, people may do just fine with dselect and apt-get... that's why it hasn't been upgraded (I guess) in a lonnng time
I think debian is great, linux is cool especially on a laptop and that when it comes to windows, yeah YMMV! If you like it and can do anything you like/want in it, go for it... mmhhh uhhh and talking about 'doze in good terms on /. is bound to get you flamed anyway ;-)
---
Sony have a similar product, HiFD. Apparently it's faster than LS120, holds 200Mb and of course, is not compatible.
While the LS120 is slower than a zip, it's main advantage is that it completly replaces the floppy drive. Yes you can boot from it on new motherboards, and linux recognises it just fine (/dev/hd ). Also, with syslinux you can boot small distros, such as LRP and get the same advantage as with a normal floppy: You can write-protect the media, easily.
It's just the thing you need for backing-up your data... if it weren't so expensive (both the drive and its media)
Just on a side note, I've read the new superdisk drives will let you format normal floppies to up to 32Mb, but can't find the reference to this anywhere... any link?
---
---
About page coloring, this is something I heard freebsd does and not linux. myth or reality? I don't know.
So far, to reduce bottlenecks all I've done was to try and use sparse solvers, as I can get quite a few 0s in my system (up to a ridiculous 97%) But yep, you still need some profiling to get your code just right, especially if you have several \emph{blocks} working together in your code.
if you're interested, the libraries I'm using for sparse solvers are meschach (great but sparse documentation) and since yesterday sparse QR (I can't tell yet if it's any better than some of the solvers in meschach, but it looks nice nonetheless...).
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Yes, linux runs very fine. At least Debian does... :-/
I still need to upgrade my box to patato and check-out ccc, but all in all, it looks like the box will never run Tru64, then
I wasn't impressed by the speed of say... povray compiled with gcc, but with an alpha compiler released by compaq, I should still see some improvement in my calculations...
You ever tried to solve a 4000x4000 double float system? it's... slow. All I'm waiting for is a decent 4 to 8 SMP athlon box with 2Gb of memory. That should last a couple of years in terms of my computational needs! I think ;-)
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My config is a samsung mobo with a 2940 adaptec, a 3c905 and somekind of ATI that was working well under NT.
Nothing's recognised by the bios (especially not the adaptec), but it will still boot milo and linux from the floppy. Amazingly impressive that everything works under linux as is, especially with cards that were after all designed for x86.
So I might have trouble with my config under tru64? it's a pitty, because I was having the best transfer rate with the 3c905 nic and the adaptec card instead of using the onboard chipset.
BTW, I remember reading somewhere that you have to flash an alpha specific bios in your videocard, in order for it to work under alpha... but I guess that's not a problem if you're using a separate xterm.
Cheers
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- The fact that I've owned my very own alpha 600MHz for the past two years?
- The fact that booo booo I haven't had time to upgrade from 2.0.38 yet? (remember that stable patato has only been released recently)
- The fact that ohhh goshhhhhh I need Tru64 to check 64bit code compatibility with my workplace... oh gossshhhhh does it mean I'll have to delete linux? not if I can help it, dual boot with milo is no problem at all.
Kids these days... makes you wonder if Linux will ever make it seriously in the workplace when 99.9% of the user base are kids on crack.---
I think I've already asked this on /. but here you go anyway :)
I've got a ruffian (samsung) motherboard with a 21164 on it, and was wondering if I can install Tru64 on it:
If I remember, digital unix could only boot on digital unix mobos, not on alphaPCs. Is that still the case?
Not that I dislike alphalinux or anything (still haven't updated from 2.0.38 yet, need to flash a milo 2.2.something), just wondering :)
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