The power to license doctors and regulate the distribution of medicines is absolutely the realm of the Federal government.
Umm, no, it's not. The 10th amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The licensing of doctors is a state power - my Dad's license is from the Wisconsin Medical Board. The Federal government does not have the power to step in here, and I'm certain the current Supreme Court would affirm that. It's only when things start to cross State lines (sometimes the Fed's idea of "crossing State lines" is pretty laughable) that the Federal Government steps in.
Re:Is the Metaverse nearing practicality?
on
Quake 1 GPL'ed
·
· Score: 1
First off, there are plenty of other engines already availble under the GPL, many of which are far better than the Quake I engine.
Every 3D programmer and their brother dreams of doing the Metaverse. But the Quake source is not the place to start out from.
At the University of Wisconsin, like many other institutions, we already pay Microsoft millions of dollars a year for a site license for Windows (and Office, and some other MS crap) So when we buy a machine with already pre-installed, we're paying for Windows twice.
Additionally, most of the larger departments already have a customized install of Windows that they use - we take them out of the box, drop in our CD, and blow away whatever crap the vendor put on the drives.
So, while this might be useful for the people who want to buy a Linux/BSD/whatever box from Dell, it's also wonderfully nice for people who do actually want a Windows box.
Umm, actually you need quite a bit of compute power to map the Human Genome. First off, you need a lot of compute time to fit that sequence of bases into whatever you've got, or to tell you if you've got something new.
Another place where you need a lot of CPU power is predicting protein structure. Once you've got the base pairs of the DNA, you can tell what proteins they code for, but just having the sequences of amino acids doesn't do you a whole lot of good. The protein will start out in a long chain, and then quickly fold up into it's final form. Knowing the structure of that final form goes a long way towards telling us what that protein actually does. Unfortuantly, it takes a lot of CPU power to perform that calculation.
Umm... maybe this should have gone under the alpha cluster story, and not the lokihack question...
Anyway, yes, I've used Myrinet before, and the reason you use Myrinet is because it's extremely low latency (and until gigabit ethernet much faster than ethernet)
I used it under NT, though and it sucked pretty hard.
What you've described is a CAVE. They're not $50 million, more like $250k-$500k, depending on how decked out your SGI is.
They're actually pretty simple - you get a couple of real good projectors, some big pieces of plastic film to use as a screen, and just project onto them. Then you get a magnetic tracker (they're not that much) and maybe a little joystick-like thing, and you've built a CAVE.
The Real Magic is in the software - the CAVE Library automagically manages all the walls and headtracking for you. When you write a CAVE program, basically you just give the library a callback that draws the world, and the library will call it each time it needs to draw a wall, setting up the correct projection magic so it's drawn properly to your head position. It's really pretty slick.
The big bummer with the CAVE library is that it's pretty expensive - about $30,000 (educational and with-hardware discounts are availble, though that drop that to about 15,000) It's availble from VRCO. There isn't any free software that does anything quite like it out there...
As a T3E programmer, what do you want in MPI2? It doesn't really seem to me that there's much in there that will make much difference in terms of speed on MPP machines - maybe the IO and onesided stuff, but the dynamic process creation is pointless on a T3E
No one has done a full MPI2 implementation yet, except for Fujitsui
The renderer is already just a commandline application, so this port wasn't really a big commitment to linux on their part (I bet it was an engineer bored one afternoon)
You'll still need an NT or SGI box to actually model anything, so don't plan on converting your shop over anytime soon. The only people this really matters for are people who have big render farms - and at the price per copy of Maya, there aren't a whole lot of people who do.
All that matters now is the artists, the recording engineer, and MTV. The artists to make the music, the engineer to make it sound good, and MTV to tell us what to listen to. The record companies are totally irrevelant. Hopefully soon MTV will join them.
The documents for a GPL wordprocessor must be GPL'd ONLY if those documents are required for the wordprocessor to run, or are intended to be part of the package, like templates (Actually, I'd release the templates with some LGPL-like license, that ensures that you can use the templates and not have to share the letter you write with it, but if you derieve a new template from it then that template must be free (speech, not beer) as well.)
Any document you CREATE with the word processor (like your letter to Grandma) would not have to be availble under the GPL - software is a tool, and the freedom to change the tool and share that change is what's important.
When the levels, or models, or QuakeC scripts, or whatever are an integral part of the game, then they must be free for the game to be free.
You don't have to use the levels provided by the game writer, and by the same logic, you don't have to use the engine provided by the level designers. (There are tons of things that can read Quake levels)
As Bruce Perens says, "It's time to talk about Free Software again."
How is a level not part of the source code? The game is useless without it! Sure, it's not written in C or assembler, but it contains instructions on how the game should work. They're what make the game! How 'bout QuakeC? Or a Quake level? You have to "compile" that before it's useful. A game is both it's engine and it's datafiles - if you only have half you don't have very much.
The GPL is about freedom - my freedom to make changes to software, and my freedom to make sure that my changes are availble to everyone else. A "free" (speech, not beer) game MUST have ALL of it's components availble for me to change and share my changes to be truely free.
I read Slashdot every day. I love it. But I don't consider it journalism. Journalists research their stories, and investigate all sides of the story, and try and discover the truth. CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the other guys look at a list of interesting submissions and then put the best of those out there. The don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to the story. That's not really a bad thing, but you have to be aware of it. As an example, just what is the truth in the Packetstorm story? At first it seemed Harvard and the Anti-Online guy were totally evil. Now it seems maybe there's more to the story. A journalist would have spent time gleaning information from all sides of the story. Slashdot provided a quick link to one side of the story.
Journalists do their best to tell me the truth, and when they betray that truth I get angry and stop reading their work. Slashdot gives me the opportunity to discover the truth for myself, if I want to sit down and work at it.
If he's doing it as an act of civil disobedience, it's still illegal, even if he's morally right. The law and the right thing to do are not always equal.
This could be used as an argument against applying local community decency standards to remote Internet sites - this way Bible Belt judges can't apply their standards to anything other than porn sites in the Bible Belt...
How 'bout a way to create a new word?
on
Slashdot Notes
·
· Score: 2
Why not have an 'Other' option, which allows you to enter a word and a point option? I don't know how well this would jive with the current code, but it would still force moderators to justify their actions.
I can see lots of potential problems, though - for example, if I added an option "Humerous", and consider it a +1, what if someone else considers humerous a -1?
Master/Slave is not the only way to do parallel computation. Many problems lend themselves very easily to be parallelized over a grid (like ocean models, for example) - then they only need to communicate with their neighbors. Oftentimes these sorts of problems can very easily scale to work efficently on large clusters.
It's also possible to use master/slave in a configuration with multiple masters - have one "master" master, and several lower-level masters, maybe one for every 500 hosts, or whatever. Same theory as the proxy servers for RC5...
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, no, it's not. The 10th amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The licensing of doctors is a state power - my Dad's license is from the Wisconsin Medical Board. The Federal government does not have the power to step in here, and I'm certain the current Supreme Court would affirm that. It's only when things start to cross State lines (sometimes the Fed's idea of "crossing State lines" is pretty laughable) that the Federal Government steps in.
First off, there are plenty of other engines already availble under the GPL, many of which are far better than the Quake I engine.
Every 3D programmer and their brother dreams of doing the Metaverse. But the Quake source is not the place to start out from.
MTBF does not mean how long can it go for without crashing - it means that in a population of 77,244
one will fail every hour.
Everything that I've gotten seems to say there's no problem, so here it is:
http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~epaulson/lionc.ps
I have a postscript version of the book, which I
think was made from the original nroff file. Is it legal for me to redistribute this?
-Erik
At the University of Wisconsin, like many other institutions, we already pay Microsoft millions of dollars a year for a site license for Windows (and Office, and some other MS crap) So when we buy a machine with already pre-installed, we're paying for Windows twice.
Additionally, most of the larger departments already have a customized install of Windows that they use - we take them out of the box, drop in our CD, and blow away whatever crap the vendor put on the drives.
So, while this might be useful for the people who want to buy a Linux/BSD/whatever box from Dell, it's also wonderfully nice for people who do actually want a Windows box.
Umm, actually you need quite a bit of compute power to map the Human Genome. First off, you need a lot of compute time to fit that sequence of bases into whatever you've got, or to tell you if you've got something new.
Another place where you need a lot of CPU power is predicting protein structure. Once you've got the base pairs of the DNA, you can tell what proteins they code for, but just having the sequences of amino acids doesn't do you a whole lot of good. The protein will start out in a long chain, and then quickly fold up into it's final form. Knowing the structure of that final form goes a long way towards telling us what that protein actually does. Unfortuantly, it takes a lot of CPU power to perform that calculation.
Umm... maybe this should have gone under the alpha
cluster story, and not the lokihack question...
Anyway, yes, I've used Myrinet before, and the reason you use Myrinet is because it's extremely low latency (and until gigabit ethernet much faster than ethernet)
I used it under NT, though and it sucked pretty hard.
-Erik
What you've described is a CAVE. They're not $50 million, more like $250k-$500k, depending on how decked out your SGI is.
They're actually pretty simple - you get a couple of real good projectors, some big pieces of plastic film to use as a screen, and just project onto them. Then you get a magnetic tracker (they're not that much) and maybe a little joystick-like thing, and you've built a CAVE.
The Real Magic is in the software - the CAVE Library automagically manages all the walls and headtracking for you. When you write a CAVE program, basically you just give the library a callback that draws the world, and the library will call it each time it needs to draw a wall, setting up the correct projection magic so it's drawn properly to your head position. It's really
pretty slick.
The big bummer with the CAVE library is that it's pretty expensive - about $30,000 (educational and with-hardware discounts are availble, though that drop that to about 15,000) It's availble from VRCO. There isn't any free software that does anything quite like it out there...
-Erik
As a T3E programmer, what do you want in MPI2? It doesn't really seem to me that there's much in there that will make much difference in terms of speed on MPP machines - maybe the IO and onesided stuff, but the dynamic process creation is pointless on a T3E
No one has done a full MPI2 implementation yet, except for Fujitsui
They sold it to Avid (at least part of it, anyway)... Mental Ray is a better renderer than Maya's (so my artist friends tell me)
The renderer is already just a commandline application, so this port wasn't really a big commitment to linux on their part (I bet it was an engineer bored one afternoon)
You'll still need an NT or SGI box to actually model anything, so don't plan on converting your shop over anytime soon. The only people this really matters for are people who have big render farms - and at the price per copy of Maya, there aren't a whole lot of people who do.
AOL's closing it's protocol? Switch protocols:
m l
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/impp-charter.ht
Don't like that one, try this:
Jabber
All that matters now is the artists, the recording engineer, and MTV. The artists to make the music, the engineer to make it sound good, and MTV to tell us what to listen to. The record companies are totally irrevelant. Hopefully soon MTV will join them.
The documents for a GPL wordprocessor must be GPL'd ONLY if those documents are required for the wordprocessor to run, or are intended to be part of the package, like templates (Actually, I'd release the templates with some LGPL-like license, that ensures that you can use the templates and not have to share the letter you write with it, but if you derieve a new template from it then that template must be free (speech, not beer) as well.)
Any document you CREATE with the word processor (like your letter to Grandma) would not have to be availble under the GPL - software is a tool, and the freedom to change the tool and share that change is what's important.
When the levels, or models, or QuakeC scripts, or whatever are an integral part of the game, then they must be free for the game to be free.
You don't have to use the levels provided by the game writer, and by the same logic, you don't have to use the engine provided by the level designers. (There are tons of things that can read Quake levels)
As Bruce Perens says, "It's time to talk about Free Software again."
-Erik
How is a level not part of the source code? The game is useless without it! Sure, it's not written in C or assembler, but it contains instructions on how the game should work. They're what make the game! How 'bout QuakeC? Or a Quake level? You have to "compile" that before it's useful. A game is both it's engine and it's datafiles - if you only have half you don't have very much.
The GPL is about freedom - my freedom to make changes to software, and my freedom to make sure that my changes are availble to everyone else. A "free" (speech, not beer) game MUST have ALL of it's components availble for me to change and share my changes to be truely free.
I read Slashdot every day. I love it. But I don't
consider it journalism. Journalists research their stories, and investigate all sides of the story, and try and discover the truth. CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the other guys look at a list of interesting submissions and then put the best of those out there. The don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to the story. That's not really a bad thing, but you have to be aware of it. As an example, just what is the truth in the Packetstorm story? At first it seemed Harvard and the Anti-Online guy were totally evil. Now it seems maybe there's more to the story. A journalist would have spent time gleaning information from all sides of the story. Slashdot provided a quick link to one side of the story.
Journalists do their best to tell me the truth, and when they betray that truth I get angry and stop reading their work. Slashdot gives me the opportunity to discover the truth for myself, if I want to sit down and work at it.
And that's not journalism.
Free speech does not allow one to break the law.
If he's doing it as an act of civil disobedience, it's still illegal, even if he's morally right. The law and the right thing to do are not always equal.
You're not. I just hope that you don't have any assets in our country, because those are in our jurisdiction.
This could be used as an argument against applying local community decency standards to remote Internet sites - this way Bible Belt judges can't apply their standards to anything other than porn sites in the Bible Belt...
Why not have an 'Other' option, which allows you to enter a word and a point option? I don't know how well this would jive with the current code, but it would still force moderators to justify their actions.
I can see lots of potential problems, though - for example, if I added an option "Humerous", and consider it a +1, what if someone else considers humerous a -1?
Try this one:
Executive Update
No, that's not true.
It all depends on your application. Some of the codes they run on the machines on the top500 will scale well to this machine, others will not.
-Erik
Yes, PVM can do everything I described. It's not hard.
-Erik
Master/Slave is not the only way to do parallel computation. Many problems lend themselves very easily to be parallelized over a grid (like ocean models, for example) - then they only need to communicate with their neighbors. Oftentimes these sorts of problems can very easily scale to work efficently on large clusters.
It's also possible to use master/slave in a configuration with multiple masters - have one "master" master, and several lower-level masters, maybe one for every 500 hosts, or whatever. Same theory as the proxy servers for RC5...
-Erik