Well when it comes down to it, then, your RedHat company is just as flawed in its patching procedures as Microsoft if they're so slow to patch.
Running Gentoo, All I had to do was emerge rsync and a new ebuild for kde 3.0.3 showed up (that's the one that patched the bug). Then I upgraded the packages (emerge kde-3.0.3) and unmerged the old ones.
If the packages aren't on your favorite mirror yet, then go get them from the source and drop them in/usr/portage/distfiles.
Really it isn't that hard to keep your system up. Ports type systems really keep you closest to the fixes when they happen (since a few characters in a build file are all that need be changed to let you have your system freshly patched).
If Redhat adds lag that's unacceptable to you then why are you using redhat?
I've even turned down paying opportunities to help windows people with their windows problems...I can make the same money by putting in a few hours overtime and do that work on Linux...
I don't want to sit down with a guy and handhold him while we reinstall win98 yet again on his five year old box...
It's just too much of a pain...
To be fair, Linux is anything but easy for the average user. Sure to set it up to do the basics isn't too tough. But for instance, setting up samba to correctly share files/printers with windows boxen is not exactly simple (whereas on windows it's a few clicks away).
I know modern distributions are dealing with this more and more effectively, but we're not there yet...
Most importantly, when something at the OS level goes wrong or the person wants to install hardware it's next to impossible without expertise...
Of course, running Gentoo/Debian/Custom I haven't seen many of the newer windows-user-friendly enhancements that companies like Lycoris and Mandrake have thrown in the box, so I could be wrong.
Believe it or not, Windows is still the right thing for these people unless they have a Linux guru nearby to explain things. Why can my family use both? well because I'm close at hand when something goes wrong...at least for windows everyone knows someone who can help them...That's added value you know.
It wouldn't work. pretty much, the user could just do a chmod a+w again because they own the files and therefore have the rights tio change their rwx perms. You'd really want to go in, do a chmod a-w, then do a chown to make them not own it (give it to root or even better, another user account that dissalows terminal login). Then they can't change the permissions back to rw anymore and can't write the files...It doesn't matter what they do, all you need to do is rm -rf $HOME at the end and those files will stay because they can't be removed.
first of all saying "u" brings bias against yourself.
First of all, remember that you have the sticky bit to work wthin directory perms (look at how/tmp behaves and you'll see what i mean).
Actually, setting the guest user's homedir to/tmp or even just giving them enough write permissions to deal with temp files for KDE/GNOME and the web browser (i.e. let root own guests directory with global read then parts of ~guest/.kde are global write). For this type of system, that's fine.
if you want to disallow write access to a file then just change the owner and make the file globally readable...
And please don't make wide and unfounded generaliztions about unix if you're going to be wrong.
give it a break and get something focused on user experience like Mandrake, Lycoris, or Lindows before throwing around cd's for a distro over your head...
some of us like the fine tuned feel of a distro like slack or gentoo once we get it working, but then again, I started with redhat and madrake and debian before getting here. These distributions are not for you if you don't already know how to get them working....
Yes. Everyone is different. I personaly am very abnormal meaning that striving for self betterment means not being satisfied with myself even when I accomplish things...Also being a musician, I put a large value on what musical experience that school was able to offer for me. I would never be where I am now without it...
in the same sense, I hate my musical sound and really want to improve it. It's that sort of attitude that makes me work...
I realize everything isn't for everyone. I watched my cousins get practically socially destroyed by homeschooling (i.e. can't get along with ANYONE ages 6-600, much less eachother)...and have some feelings...sure they did badly initially in school for reasons similar to your son, yet by being removed from the problem (which was both teachers and students) never learned how to deal with authority or peers...
bad situation...
I'm not criticizing your parenting. You seem very well informed and I think that you truly are doing what's best for your child. I've just seen the negatives of it as well and slashdot--like vodka--loosens the tounge
There's a lot of piss and moan going on about this right now so let me clear this up (I know it's been mentioned, but people don't often see things deep in the threads and make moronic comments anyways)
Cell phone use in cars is not illegal in New York state. I should know. I drive cars in New York State.
It's the *handset*. If you get a handsfree unit (indeed...it is law that all phones come with a handsfree unit in this state. typically they give you a coupon to send for one.) It's the hand off the wheel, not the conversation/distraction factor....and of course the looking for the phone when it rings (handfree makes it easy to answer and something you can learn to do without looking--like skipping tracks on the CD player).
Besides. I like having the phone in a handsfree cradle because that keeps it charged (even in the limited amount of time i spend in the car) and I always know where it is when I am getting out of the car and need to make sure I have it, etc. Makes things easier and less distracting..
this is a good thing...especially around here, high school students get into accidents involving cell phones because they're more inexperienced at driving and the extra distraction puts them over a threshold in an emergency situation...actually I think looking for the phone/getting it out of my pocket is the hardest part...
oh yeah. You can talk at stoplights and while pulled over, and for thirty seconds under any circumstances before a ticket can be given. Very few emergencies need more than thirty seconds..
so that's the scoop on cell phones in cars in new york so COOL IT
I find gaming to be nice for relaxation...I am studying music. The hours are long, the practice is intense and physically draining, and the mental aspects are very difficult.
Settling down to a few rounds of q3a/ut here and there or many more than a few rounds of "lines" on my palm is a good way to break the day. Movies work well too...
I don't know this for a fact but do any portable DVD players accept video input for play on the LCD? If there was one that did then this could be a good solution for him as it would kill multiple birds with one stone...
though a PS2 and an LCD would be just as good for that I suppose...the form factor is more lap friendly on a DVD player
Taking a child out of a difficult, but not impossible situation is hardly a good thing...they need to learn how to overcome such obstacles...
I had very serious speech deficiencies throughout elementary school...What negative attention I recieved motivated me to work harder at correcting it (along with a public school provided speech thrapist). I now talk as normally as any one else in this country and am a vocalist. If I had gone through life homeschooled, I would have had no incentive to fix this and would have been disadvantaged for the rest of my life (as these problems are harder and harder to correct with age)...
Is it the bullying? The schoolyard fights? The metal detectors at the doors? The clicques and vicious gossip?
Having gone through the public school experience myself I can say that this is *not* how it is...at least not in the burbs of the northeast.
Bullying? A little...a very little...I never felt actually intimidated. yes some people are jerks, that's a reality, not something that's public school's fault. In any case, I've never had a problem with it (and I was an easy target).
Schoolyard fights? Again, in a limited sense. some people get involved in that most don't. That minority 5-10% are also usually the ones who go buy smokes during their free periods and go across the street to get their fix before returning to class. The least of their troubles is their wimpy fights. Sure every few days a couple of kids fight and the rest of the 10% watch them wrestle and then give up. Oh no. how terrible.
No Metal detectors either....This is a *very* uncommon thing. sure it's becoming more and more common, but my district and the ones around it are even now not even close to any such action.
cliques? Okay so not everyone hangs out with everyone else. There's still a basic tradition of people treating eachother decently at least, even if they don't want to become best buddies with you. If you conduct yourself politely, respectfully, and get involved in things at school, there's no trouble making friends. This clique warfare that you seem to think runs rampant is something that I never saw around here. Nor were their fashion cults or anything like that. The real world isn't the movies.
vicious gossip? hrm...well yes people talked about eachother if that's what you mean. But that's natural. and hardly vicious. Again, by being the one who personally did not demean others with gossip I tended to stay away from people who did.....most people mind their own (And their friends') business anyways so if you're not in with them then you don't have to worry about it....besides...real friends don't jerk you around like that...
Homeschooling although not altogether a bad thing, can lead to lonliness and emotional instability. It is a very heavy load to place on a young person as their education, particularly in the later years, can often fall upon their own shoulders. Public school was *fun* I know several homeschooled people and with the exception of two who are two young (12,14) they all wanted to get into a more relaxed structured environment when it came time to go to college. They were tired of the responsibility of educating themselves....
Again...more rambling...what's gotten into me tonight?
As opposed to applying the massive development methods to fonts, wouldn't it make sense to get together some cash (by donations/possibly the distributions could help) and commision fonts (as onw would commission an artwork or composition) from people with known track records at making good fonts with the stipulation that these fonts be released under the GPL, possibly even allowing the consortium to hold the copyright for safety's sake.
Of course, lots of the best font designers are locked up at Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple and because of IP agreements couldn't enter into such a deal...so this would have to be avoided (possibly using people outside of the states where agreements aren't so crippling to individual expression).
I realize this is incidental. But as someone who went through normal school and being very close friends with someone who was homeschooled, I can safely say that she is much more social than me (who is fairly social himself). She was then, she is now.
I think the hardest thing for her will the always having family around and then not. For now she's even at the same college as her brother so she's still got immediate family in close quarters.
On the other hand, two of my cousins who are homeschooled have huge social deficiencies. I mean HUGE. Granted, they're 12 and 14 right now, but still. It's going to be a MAJOR obstacle for them later on.
So here we go...more useless personal anecdotes that are only vaguely on topic. For the record, my friend used packaged stuff and took all the state Regents exams (this is NY. Those are subject tests that you take throughout highschool to receive a regents diploma). My cousins' mother rolled her own as far as I know (it would be in her nature to do so...and to follow no guidelines at all since her state is less strict about education than NY).
So there it is. I don't believe in homeschooling myself, being of the public school ilk. I was a geek throughout...at least in spirit and still did well socially and I can't say I would have the social skills I do now without high school. I probably would have holed myself up and coded/practiced music for those four years otherwise.
I don't think they'd know what to do with a slackware CD (no CD-KEY, no "Quick-Start Guide")...better to give them lycoris and hope they don't notice that it's not XP.
If I run tar xzvf on a big archive I end up with a bigger difference from that...all you've managed to figure out is that when more processes are running, each gets less juice.
My Clie PEG-N760C works great for MP3 playing. The sound quality is good and it has a convenient remote dongle (good for jogging--can keep it in an inside pocket).
the downside is that the linux support for MemStick is flakey at best. Yes I've put files on it using Linux, Yes I've also corrupted the filesystem in the process. YMMV
Good Luck...Solves two problems (and a 128M stick holds about two hours of music which should be good for eight miles...even if you have to switch it isn't the end of the world)
I like the way this is headed. Software like this is going to be instrumental in creating competing products against the mpaa and such. If indie films can be produced and sold _online_ even easier, then there will be more.
Then the giant may begin to crumble...
I'd like to think that, but I'm probably just kidding myself...
Nope. I know. I play acoustic and electronic instruments and know quite a bit about the synthesizer technology out there (particularly of the wind variety)...but although I can make somewhat lifelike sounds on my wind synthesizer, it's responding to my breath. generating that breath data in a way that makes for tasteful playing is hard. I've tried to drive my synthesizers with software and it isn't easy...
course i wouldn't have thought this 3d stuff was easy either....
Even further out is when you think of who's soon going to be claiming "orchestra-realistic" sound renderings. Noone has made serious claims yet and they still use the big philharmonics and orchestras for soundtracks. When does this change? can it?
Hopefully never seeing as my living depends on live music:)
Realtively cheap is even a $400+ card when compared to the cost of of an UltraSparc or an Octane Workstation...these cost thousands. If a PC with an NV30 or ATI 9700 can beat a node on a renderfarm, it is almost certainly cheaper, regardless of the cost of the card.
Yes but the point is that this "crude hack" as you term it can produce stunning results, quite nearly as good as those of pixar, faster than what you would call a more "refined" method. Those two frames side by side tell quite a story. Sure, OpenGL couldn't do that in 1/30 second, but it looked just as good (better, IMHO...fewer artifacts) as the RenderMan scene and took less time.
A year back or so I did the blender work for a starwars fanflic...Now this was only a fifteen minute film...but the 5 minutes or so of 3d easily took a day to render. As this stuff gets faster, amateur movies will become better and more sophisticated. Low budget films and TV shows will gain access, and the graps of the MPAA will weaken. Anything that makes low-budget films easier is a good thing.
With the internet and a DVD Burner, a low budget film could be distributed DIRECTLY on DVD. Now the films just need to get good enough that people will want them. This would be a good direction for both music and movies.
Cool eye picture. How the heck do you make a model for that?
Brian
The technology must be applied right, that's all
on
Speaking in Tongues
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So long as this stuff stays on the recieving end, this is all a step in the right direction. You don't want to deprive the people you're sending information to of any information. Let them decide whether to use a human or a computer. Sending a computer based translation that you can't understand only increases the chance of offending someone/misrepresenting something.
Giving it to soldiers in the field so they can "speak" the foreign language is bad. Instead give one-way devices to both sides and let them use those to translate what's told to them. That way if they need a human translator to clarify that's still an option.
It would be terrible if information started flowing between countries that had been passed through a computer translator first. Please, let me use babelfish to translate that spanish document, don't use it for me (heck, I have friends from south america who can help me clarify it if I need to but that's *no good* without the original spanish)...
Translation through tounges is a lossy process. Not translating it at least prevents compromising the information. It's all still there...just a wee bit harder to get at.
The effect would be still digital. Capturing what makes Robin Williams such a great comedian is going to be next to impossible. Sure, you could develop technology to easily render him, but the inflection, the body language that he doesn't even think about that goes into the camera would be nearly impossible to simulate.
Also, ever notice how eye contact in a movie is never quite as effective when one of the characters is a toon or is animated? Well think about if all the extras were like that. They wouldn't contribute to the scene because the main characters wouldn't have them there to react to.
Of course this technology is very effective for nonhuman characters in abnormal(ly good) movies such as lotr.
Live actors aren't gone yet. They'll still be useful as long as people still enjoy looking at people on the big screen (and based on society, we like looking at people. Many of us are visually stimulated.)
Well at the rate you're going you're going to be spending ~$330 on media for one backup (around here, DVD-R media is about $3 for a 4.7 gig disk). For that you could pay for much of a tape drive and besides. Tape media is cheaper and some tapes can hold up to several hundred gigs. Also some drives (albeit the more expensive ones) can transfer data at up to 20Mb/Sec (which is at least as fast as DVD burning). Best of all the tapes are reusable so each backup won't cost you a fortune (think of keeping five backups around. Even if you use DVD-RW you're talking about $1800 in media at the least (and probably closer to $2500 since DVD-RW discs cost more than DVD-Rs)
In short, What you say doesn't make sense. Tape backups from *twenty* years ago (yes I still have some) can still be read today. Heck, My commodore can still read those old audio tape packaged programs from 1982. Tapes don't "crap out" and as long as you have IDE or even better SCSI (which also has been around at least fifteen years and probably will continue to be available for quite a while) on a system you'll be able to read them...
You don't even know that DVD won't dissapear in the next couple of years as the Blue Laser stuff comes out anyways. Tape has stood the test of time.
500gb of data _WITHOUT RAID_? Are you crazy? one of your seven drives is gonna die someday. you'd better get to backing them up....
Slashdot Mirror
Well when it comes down to it, then, your RedHat company is just as flawed in its patching procedures as Microsoft if they're so slow to patch.
/usr/portage/distfiles.
Running Gentoo, All I had to do was emerge rsync and a new ebuild for kde 3.0.3 showed up (that's the one that patched the bug). Then I upgraded the packages (emerge kde-3.0.3) and unmerged the old ones.
If the packages aren't on your favorite mirror yet, then go get them from the source and drop them in
Really it isn't that hard to keep your system up. Ports type systems really keep you closest to the fixes when they happen (since a few characters in a build file are all that need be changed to let you have your system freshly patched).
If Redhat adds lag that's unacceptable to you then why are you using redhat?
I've even turned down paying opportunities to help windows people with their windows problems...I can make the same money by putting in a few hours overtime and do that work on Linux...
I don't want to sit down with a guy and handhold him while we reinstall win98 yet again on his five year old box...
It's just too much of a pain...
To be fair, Linux is anything but easy for the average user. Sure to set it up to do the basics isn't too tough. But for instance, setting up samba to correctly share files/printers with windows boxen is not exactly simple (whereas on windows it's a few clicks away).
I know modern distributions are dealing with this more and more effectively, but we're not there yet...
Most importantly, when something at the OS level goes wrong or the person wants to install hardware it's next to impossible without expertise...
Of course, running Gentoo/Debian/Custom I haven't seen many of the newer windows-user-friendly enhancements that companies like Lycoris and Mandrake have thrown in the box, so I could be wrong.
Believe it or not, Windows is still the right thing for these people unless they have a Linux guru nearby to explain things. Why can my family use both? well because I'm close at hand when something goes wrong...at least for windows everyone knows someone who can help them...That's added value you know.
Brian
It wouldn't work. pretty much, the user could just do a chmod a+w again because they own the files and therefore have the rights tio change their rwx perms. You'd really want to go in, do a chmod a-w, then do a chown to make them not own it (give it to root or even better, another user account that dissalows terminal login). Then they can't change the permissions back to rw anymore and can't write the files...It doesn't matter what they do, all you need to do is rm -rf $HOME at the end and those files will stay because they can't be removed.
Brian
first of all saying "u" brings bias against yourself.
/tmp behaves and you'll see what i mean).
/tmp or even just giving them enough write permissions to deal with temp files for KDE/GNOME and the web browser (i.e. let root own guests directory with global read then parts of ~guest/.kde are global write). For this type of system, that's fine.
First of all, remember that you have the sticky bit to work wthin directory perms (look at how
Actually, setting the guest user's homedir to
if you want to disallow write access to a file then just change the owner and make the file globally readable...
And please don't make wide and unfounded generaliztions about unix if you're going to be wrong.
Brian
trust??? slashdot???
uhh...
Slackware is for people who already have it...
not for new users...
give it a break and get something focused on user experience like Mandrake, Lycoris, or Lindows before throwing around cd's for a distro over your head...
some of us like the fine tuned feel of a distro like slack or gentoo once we get it working, but then again, I started with redhat and madrake and debian before getting here. These distributions are not for you if you don't already know how to get them working....
that's what drake and lycoris are for.
Brian
Yes. Everyone is different. I personaly am very abnormal meaning that striving for self betterment means not being satisfied with myself even when I accomplish things...Also being a musician, I put a large value on what musical experience that school was able to offer for me. I would never be where I am now without it...
in the same sense, I hate my musical sound and really want to improve it. It's that sort of attitude that makes me work...
I realize everything isn't for everyone. I watched my cousins get practically socially destroyed by homeschooling (i.e. can't get along with ANYONE ages 6-600, much less eachother)...and have some feelings...sure they did badly initially in school for reasons similar to your son, yet by being removed from the problem (which was both teachers and students) never learned how to deal with authority or peers...
bad situation...
I'm not criticizing your parenting. You seem very well informed and I think that you truly are doing what's best for your child. I've just seen the negatives of it as well and slashdot--like vodka--loosens the tounge
Brian
There's a lot of piss and moan going on about this right now so let me clear this up (I know it's been mentioned, but people don't often see things deep in the threads and make moronic comments anyways)
Cell phone use in cars is not illegal in New York state. I should know. I drive cars in New York State.
It's the *handset*. If you get a handsfree unit (indeed...it is law that all phones come with a handsfree unit in this state. typically they give you a coupon to send for one.) It's the hand off the wheel, not the conversation/distraction factor....and of course the looking for the phone when it rings (handfree makes it easy to answer and something you can learn to do without looking--like skipping tracks on the CD player).
Besides. I like having the phone in a handsfree cradle because that keeps it charged (even in the limited amount of time i spend in the car) and I always know where it is when I am getting out of the car and need to make sure I have it, etc. Makes things easier and less distracting..
this is a good thing...especially around here, high school students get into accidents involving cell phones because they're more inexperienced at driving and the extra distraction puts them over a threshold in an emergency situation...actually I think looking for the phone/getting it out of my pocket is the hardest part...
oh yeah. You can talk at stoplights and while pulled over, and for thirty seconds under any circumstances before a ticket can be given. Very few emergencies need more than thirty seconds..
so that's the scoop on cell phones in cars in new york so COOL IT
Brian
I find gaming to be nice for relaxation...I am studying music. The hours are long, the practice is intense and physically draining, and the mental aspects are very difficult.
Settling down to a few rounds of q3a/ut here and there or many more than a few rounds of "lines" on my palm is a good way to break the day. Movies work well too...
I don't know this for a fact but do any portable DVD players accept video input for play on the LCD? If there was one that did then this could be a good solution for him as it would kill multiple birds with one stone...
though a PS2 and an LCD would be just as good for that I suppose...the form factor is more lap friendly on a DVD player
Brian
Taking a child out of a difficult, but not impossible situation is hardly a good thing...they need to learn how to overcome such obstacles...
I had very serious speech deficiencies throughout elementary school...What negative attention I recieved motivated me to work harder at correcting it (along with a public school provided speech thrapist). I now talk as normally as any one else in this country and am a vocalist. If I had gone through life homeschooled, I would have had no incentive to fix this and would have been disadvantaged for the rest of my life (as these problems are harder and harder to correct with age)...
Brian
Is it the bullying? The schoolyard fights? The metal detectors at the doors? The clicques and vicious gossip?
Having gone through the public school experience myself I can say that this is *not* how it is...at least not in the burbs of the northeast.
Bullying? A little...a very little...I never felt actually intimidated. yes some people are jerks, that's a reality, not something that's public school's fault. In any case, I've never had a problem with it (and I was an easy target).
Schoolyard fights? Again, in a limited sense. some people get involved in that most don't. That minority 5-10% are also usually the ones who go buy smokes during their free periods and go across the street to get their fix before returning to class. The least of their troubles is their wimpy fights. Sure every few days a couple of kids fight and the rest of the 10% watch them wrestle and then give up. Oh no. how terrible.
No Metal detectors either....This is a *very* uncommon thing. sure it's becoming more and more common, but my district and the ones around it are even now not even close to any such action.
cliques? Okay so not everyone hangs out with everyone else. There's still a basic tradition of people treating eachother decently at least, even if they don't want to become best buddies with you. If you conduct yourself politely, respectfully, and get involved in things at school, there's no trouble making friends. This clique warfare that you seem to think runs rampant is something that I never saw around here. Nor were their fashion cults or anything like that. The real world isn't the movies.
vicious gossip? hrm...well yes people talked about eachother if that's what you mean. But that's natural. and hardly vicious. Again, by being the one who personally did not demean others with gossip I tended to stay away from people who did.....most people mind their own (And their friends') business anyways so if you're not in with them then you don't have to worry about it....besides...real friends don't jerk you around like that...
Homeschooling although not altogether a bad thing, can lead to lonliness and emotional instability. It is a very heavy load to place on a young person as their education, particularly in the later years, can often fall upon their own shoulders. Public school was *fun* I know several homeschooled people and with the exception of two who are two young (12,14) they all wanted to get into a more relaxed structured environment when it came time to go to college. They were tired of the responsibility of educating themselves....
Again...more rambling...what's gotten into me tonight?
Brian
As opposed to applying the massive development methods to fonts, wouldn't it make sense to get together some cash (by donations/possibly the distributions could help) and commision fonts (as onw would commission an artwork or composition) from people with known track records at making good fonts with the stipulation that these fonts be released under the GPL, possibly even allowing the consortium to hold the copyright for safety's sake.
Of course, lots of the best font designers are locked up at Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple and because of IP agreements couldn't enter into such a deal...so this would have to be avoided (possibly using people outside of the states where agreements aren't so crippling to individual expression).
Any Takers?
Brian
I realize this is incidental. But as someone who went through normal school and being very close friends with someone who was homeschooled, I can safely say that she is much more social than me (who is fairly social himself). She was then, she is now.
I think the hardest thing for her will the always having family around and then not. For now she's even at the same college as her brother so she's still got immediate family in close quarters.
On the other hand, two of my cousins who are homeschooled have huge social deficiencies. I mean HUGE. Granted, they're 12 and 14 right now, but still. It's going to be a MAJOR obstacle for them later on.
So here we go...more useless personal anecdotes that are only vaguely on topic. For the record, my friend used packaged stuff and took all the state Regents exams (this is NY. Those are subject tests that you take throughout highschool to receive a regents diploma). My cousins' mother rolled her own as far as I know (it would be in her nature to do so...and to follow no guidelines at all since her state is less strict about education than NY).
So there it is. I don't believe in homeschooling myself, being of the public school ilk. I was a geek throughout...at least in spirit and still did well socially and I can't say I would have the social skills I do now without high school. I probably would have holed myself up and coded/practiced music for those four years otherwise.
Random and Long..yes I know.
Brian
I don't think they'd know what to do with a slackware CD (no CD-KEY, no "Quick-Start Guide")...better to give them lycoris and hope they don't notice that it's not XP.
Brian
Uhm....and this proves?
If I run tar xzvf on a big archive I end up with a bigger difference from that...all you've managed to figure out is that when more processes are running, each gets less juice.
This has been known for years.
Brian
My Clie PEG-N760C works great for MP3 playing. The sound quality is good and it has a convenient remote dongle (good for jogging--can keep it in an inside pocket).
the downside is that the linux support for MemStick is flakey at best. Yes I've put files on it using Linux, Yes I've also corrupted the filesystem in the process. YMMV
Good Luck...Solves two problems (and a 128M stick holds about two hours of music which should be good for eight miles...even if you have to switch it isn't the end of the world)
Brian
I like the way this is headed. Software like this is going to be instrumental in creating competing products against the mpaa and such. If indie films can be produced and sold _online_ even easier, then there will be more.
Then the giant may begin to crumble...
I'd like to think that, but I'm probably just kidding myself...
Brian
Nope. I know. I play acoustic and electronic instruments and know quite a bit about the synthesizer technology out there (particularly of the wind variety)...but although I can make somewhat lifelike sounds on my wind synthesizer, it's responding to my breath. generating that breath data in a way that makes for tasteful playing is hard. I've tried to drive my synthesizers with software and it isn't easy...
course i wouldn't have thought this 3d stuff was easy either....
Brian
Even further out is when you think of who's soon going to be claiming "orchestra-realistic" sound renderings. Noone has made serious claims yet and they still use the big philharmonics and orchestras for soundtracks. When does this change? can it?
:)
Hopefully never seeing as my living depends on live music
Brian
Realtively cheap is even a $400+ card when compared to the cost of of an UltraSparc or an Octane Workstation...these cost thousands. If a PC with an NV30 or ATI 9700 can beat a node on a renderfarm, it is almost certainly cheaper, regardless of the cost of the card.
Brian
Yes but the point is that this "crude hack" as you term it can produce stunning results, quite nearly as good as those of pixar, faster than what you would call a more "refined" method. Those two frames side by side tell quite a story. Sure, OpenGL couldn't do that in 1/30 second, but it looked just as good (better, IMHO...fewer artifacts) as the RenderMan scene and took less time.
Death to SGI methinks...
Brian
A year back or so I did the blender work for a starwars fanflic...Now this was only a fifteen minute film...but the 5 minutes or so of 3d easily took a day to render. As this stuff gets faster, amateur movies will become better and more sophisticated. Low budget films and TV shows will gain access, and the graps of the MPAA will weaken. Anything that makes low-budget films easier is a good thing.
With the internet and a DVD Burner, a low budget film could be distributed DIRECTLY on DVD. Now the films just need to get good enough that people will want them. This would be a good direction for both music and movies.
Cool eye picture. How the heck do you make a model for that?
Brian
So long as this stuff stays on the recieving end, this is all a step in the right direction. You don't want to deprive the people you're sending information to of any information. Let them decide whether to use a human or a computer. Sending a computer based translation that you can't understand only increases the chance of offending someone/misrepresenting something.
Giving it to soldiers in the field so they can "speak" the foreign language is bad. Instead give one-way devices to both sides and let them use those to translate what's told to them. That way if they need a human translator to clarify that's still an option.
It would be terrible if information started flowing between countries that had been passed through a computer translator first. Please, let me use babelfish to translate that spanish document, don't use it for me (heck, I have friends from south america who can help me clarify it if I need to but that's *no good* without the original spanish)...
Translation through tounges is a lossy process. Not translating it at least prevents compromising the information. It's all still there...just a wee bit harder to get at.
Brian
The effect would be still digital. Capturing what makes Robin Williams such a great comedian is going to be next to impossible. Sure, you could develop technology to easily render him, but the inflection, the body language that he doesn't even think about that goes into the camera would be nearly impossible to simulate.
Also, ever notice how eye contact in a movie is never quite as effective when one of the characters is a toon or is animated? Well think about if all the extras were like that. They wouldn't contribute to the scene because the main characters wouldn't have them there to react to.
Of course this technology is very effective for nonhuman characters in abnormal(ly good) movies such as lotr.
Live actors aren't gone yet. They'll still be useful as long as people still enjoy looking at people on the big screen (and based on society, we like looking at people. Many of us are visually stimulated.)
Brian
Well at the rate you're going you're going to be spending ~$330 on media for one backup (around here, DVD-R media is about $3 for a 4.7 gig disk). For that you could pay for much of a tape drive and besides. Tape media is cheaper and some tapes can hold up to several hundred gigs. Also some drives (albeit the more expensive ones) can transfer data at up to 20Mb/Sec (which is at least as fast as DVD burning). Best of all the tapes are reusable so each backup won't cost you a fortune (think of keeping five backups around. Even if you use DVD-RW you're talking about $1800 in media at the least (and probably closer to $2500 since DVD-RW discs cost more than DVD-Rs)
In short, What you say doesn't make sense. Tape backups from *twenty* years ago (yes I still have some) can still be read today. Heck, My commodore can still read those old audio tape packaged programs from 1982. Tapes don't "crap out" and as long as you have IDE or even better SCSI (which also has been around at least fifteen years and probably will continue to be available for quite a while) on a system you'll be able to read them...
You don't even know that DVD won't dissapear in the next couple of years as the Blue Laser stuff comes out anyways. Tape has stood the test of time.
500gb of data _WITHOUT RAID_? Are you crazy? one of your seven drives is gonna die someday. you'd better get to backing them up....
Brian