Empty right? I guess free speech is an empty right too because others have the right to not listen. The store can ask you to do anything, and except for a few things (like leaving their property if they ask you) you don't have follow their orders.
> Any thoughts on how to keep goods from leaving the store unauthorized, without violating someone's rights?
Ummmm door alarms and tagged merchandise, Security cameras, Security guards/employees observing customers, Those big curvy mirrors, those tags that leak ink if you don't take them apart right, those plastic lock thingies on CDs/DVDs, putting valuable stuff behind the counter, or locking it up and requiring an employee to get the items for you, or asking for you receipt? Actually the number one thing they could do to prevent shrink is point a camera at the loading dock and the employee break room. About 50% of all shrink comes from employee theft.
You know 99% of people who are asked to show a receipt probably do. Why would a company open themselves up to a suit by detaining or assaulting the 1% who don't? It seems like they're not even following their own procedures for catching shoplifters, they're just harassing some of their customers.
To point #1. Totally untrue. And of course the stores themselves know this, it's in their employee manuals to NEVER search a customer, even if you've followed the 5/6 step procedure for legally detaining a shop lifter you NEVER search them, you wait for the police.
I don't own any Microsoft products and I don't intend to. But I'd really worry if Apple ever did this. The article is kind of lite, but how do they tell the difference between songs you've ripped from CDs and songs you've got from P2P? This sounds like it could be a way to get people to pay again for stuff they've already bought.
Good post. One thing I'd like to add regarding the NSA skipping FISA warrants: they're probably skipping out because they'd need to ask for 300 million warrants, and that's a lot of paperwork.
Might work out too well, the Arabs actually have a long tradition of pederasty. It's not unusual for a older Arab man to have relations with a pubescent boy, sort of like the Greeks.
Seriously though, the scenario where some "undesireable" sect of a society is to be scooped up and stuck on island/all killed/all put in jail/etc. is ignorant.
To quote Nietzsche: "Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belong to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far."
Also, in the West, please try 'n make a distinction between Ephebophilia and true Paedophilia. At the very least it will make you sound smarter.
A few more comments:
I've used Onyx systems before and they are joys to work with.
Oh, I also should mention that the summary says the University was using an Onyx2, not an Onyx4. And BTW, an Onyx4 uses (many) thoroughly modern ATI graphics cards. So I don't think there's anything in your post that's correct.
Too bad there's no "-1 Wrong" moderation option.
VR goggle that have a resolution of 100M pixels?!? Hell I'd be excited about goggle that had a resolution of 9M pixels! Whose your supplier? Of course you'd still need to setup a body tracking system, I guess you could get by with a 3D mouse, but probably no gloves or wand.
Sure there is, buy an Onyx2 and get some projectors. They can be had from anywhere between $0 and a few thousand dollars depending on config/circumstances. If you're lucky you can find one in a dumpster. You can find some Onyx3x0/3x000 on the market (most are still chugging along with their original owners) but the cost is very high .
A single pipe with a DG5-8 can drive up to 8 monitors, not sure of the res./monitor you'd get though. I only have specs for the InfiniteReality4 (IR4) but 16 pipes gets you 133 million pixels, I think this is the same for IR3 was well. Realistically you'd only need at most one pipe per wall of your CAVE.
There's a port of Quake, Quake II, and QuakeIII for SGI, I have it on my O2:)
Here's a very cool page, this guy actually works with a CAVE (and an Onyx2) and he likes Quake! (Also, checkout the wall this guy has access too!)
It's a sad story about SGI, I think even if they survive long term as a company that the "G" in their name is already dead.
So each image sensor captures a pixel worth of light?
Then if they're talking a 1:1 ratio between image sensors & pixels then that would give a 20" screen 1.76MP, a 23" screen 2.3MP, and a 30" screen 4.1MP. That's a huge improvement over iSight which is.3MP. I don't think anyone except people on a dedicated LAN could really teleconfrence at those resolutions though, so I don't really see much benefit. Maybe there are enough vain Mac users' that would buy the screen just to take pictures of themselves.
I love the idea for PDAs/mobilephones. I haven't seen a camera phone or PDA that wasn't a horrible monstrosity. Though you'd need a much better sensor ratio than 1:1 in a PDA screen to get a good picture.
Unless you want to just take pictures of yourself, the design would have to look like a window, with one side of the screen capturing light and the other side acting as a view finder. Sounds sexy eh... we can only hope Apple will release an iPhone or iPDA that does something like this.
"Let me follow that by saying that Pro/E has always been available on Linux, as has Solidworks. Even their latest software packages are available for Linux."
Wow...
First off Pro/ENGINEER was first available for Linux with the release of WildFire. That'd be version 24 for you old-schoolers. As of right now they only support RedHat on SUN or HP hardware. And that's just Pro/ENGINEER... no Mechanica, no Intralink or Windchill versions are available for Linux. So it's completely incorrect to say that all of PTCs latest software packages are available for Linux. See www.ptc.com
Actually Pro/ENGINEER only used to run on SGI gear back in the late 80's early 90's... thems was teh days.
Next up, SolidWorks has never been available for anything other than Windows and probably never will be. Microsoft and SolidWorks are joined at the hips. So it's absolutely incorrect to say that any of SolidWorks software packages are available for Linux. See www.solidworks.com
I guess they've had a long time to consider this, they're comming up on 20 years. I remember reading somewhere, probably on SNPP, that the producers would only consider doing a movie at the end of the shows run. Not sure why, maybe the work of putting out a quality movie would require all their resources and would conflict with putting the show out regularly. Anyway, if this is still true, I wonder if this means the show is in it's final season(s). Last I knew they were siged up to season 19. Personally I think the producers should have ended the show around season 10 and then taken their sweet time with a good movie. I'd like to think they wanted to end it but Fox probably drove a dump truck full of money up to Matt Groenings house, he's not made of stone!
Lt. Dan's (Gary Sinise) legs were tucked under his wheel chair and he wore green stockings. I don't think the original poster meant digital compositing when he said CGI. And Arnold (maybe it was a stunt man, I can't remember) really did jump a Harley into a canal. It was suspened on a system of wires and lowered slowly (but not too slowly) and perhaps shot in a way to keep one from noticing too much. The wires and harness were removed digitally. Checkout the behind the scenes for these movies, this is all on there. That said, I do agree with your point.
Have you ever touched a revolution controller? Are you aware that Game Cube controllers also work with the system? Are you aware that the wireless candybar part of the new controller slides into a more traditional controller housing and provides wireless connnectivity along with additional position information?
SGI has a 2nd generation product based on this: RASC, which is a node board with 2 FPGA chips that integrates (same access to shared memory) with the rest of the machines Itanium node boards.
I just looked up spare parts in the SGI price book. It's over $90,000 for a basic InfiniteReality4 pipe, about $250,000 for a fully configured pipe (4RMs and a DG5-8), or $3.25M for a full 16 pipe system (including KTOWN2 boards). I'm not sure if buying the graphics as part of an original system saved you money or not.
I'm sure that $$$ the main reason you don't see these in PCs.
That's 1GB of unified memory, so less than 1GB is available for textures ; (
It took them long enough; this is definitely the direction to go.
Almost 4 years ago Silicon Graphics gave a final revision hurrah to their best graphics product: InfiniteReality. A pipe sported 1GB dedicated texture memory, 10GB of frame buffer memory, 8 channels per pipe, and 192GB/s internal memory bandwidth.
And an Onyx system could have up to 16 pipes! That's 8.3M pixels per pipe, or 133M pixels from a full system! And all in 48-bit RGBA. And those are just the raw numbers, there were a great many high end features only found on InfiniteReality. Don't ask what it costs ; )
Sorry for the passionate post. It seems that Slashdot is very PC-ish and narrow in its viewpoint (Imagine a Beouwolf of... Can it run Doom3... etc.) so I couldn't resist blabbing about high-end kit that's off topic.
I've had the pleasure of using a small Onyx system. Too bad SGI is dead dead dead. Still they provide a good target for everyone to shoot for. Some day the above power will be available for a few hundred dollars for the average person. Though I think it will be atleast 5 years before the quality and features of InfiniteReality4 are at a consumer level. And never will we have workstations like SGI's again ; (
Re:"workstation cards" what r they 4?
on
ATI's 1GB Video Card
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As a fellow Pro/ENGINEER user this is not my experience. What version are you using and how big are your models? The latest version is a hog (as always). I can't imagine using it on an old Dell with a FireGL and doing anything very complicated. I have to admit I'm not a fan of ATI cards, their OpenGL support seems to be very flaky. But I like the larger memory on these new cards and the price is good. Price wise this card would seem to compare favorably to a top model WildCat Realizm or a top model nVidia Quadro.
Silicon Graphics sold multi-board graphics sets, RealityEngine2 I think, that had up to 12 GeometryEngine processors on board. I'm sure it wasn't cost effect but there must have been a significant benefit to the additional processing.
I know they're a dying company but tools are tools... Have you looked into using a high end Silicon Graphics system as opposed to PCs? I've see many demos (from their desktops to their highend visualization systems) paging huge ammounts of textures and doing volume rendering of multi TB data sets (mainly for oil) in real time. There used to be a demo SGI had called 'From Space to In Your Face' that simulated sky diving from a high orbit down to the ground, using several hundred GB of satelite data as texture. It's was very impressive projected on a big screen. Anyway, the raw geometry numbers might seem low compared to a GeForce but they're honest straight numbers, and the system bandwidth is otherworldly, and specs that gamers don't care about (AA for free, pixel read back speed, imaging extensions, etc.) are also otherworldly. Plus SGIs were made to do multi-monitor. Even an old Onxy2 deskside system with a DG5-8 has 8 dispay outputs.
Stop by the forums on Nekochan.net and ask around. I'm sure someone there has direct programing experience with your task and can probably give you a good idea of the best hardware, SGI or otherwise, to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Empty right? I guess free speech is an empty right too because others have the right to not listen. The store can ask you to do anything, and except for a few things (like leaving their property if they ask you) you don't have follow their orders.
> Any thoughts on how to keep goods from leaving the store unauthorized, without violating someone's rights?
Ummmm door alarms and tagged merchandise, Security cameras, Security guards/employees observing customers, Those big curvy mirrors, those tags that leak ink if you don't take them apart right, those plastic lock thingies on CDs/DVDs, putting valuable stuff behind the counter, or locking it up and requiring an employee to get the items for you, or asking for you receipt? Actually the number one thing they could do to prevent shrink is point a camera at the loading dock and the employee break room. About 50% of all shrink comes from employee theft.
You know 99% of people who are asked to show a receipt probably do. Why would a company open themselves up to a suit by detaining or assaulting the 1% who don't? It seems like they're not even following their own procedures for catching shoplifters, they're just harassing some of their customers.
To point #1. Totally untrue. And of course the stores themselves know this, it's in their employee manuals to NEVER search a customer, even if you've followed the 5/6 step procedure for legally detaining a shop lifter you NEVER search them, you wait for the police.
I don't own any Microsoft products and I don't intend to. But I'd really worry if Apple ever did this. The article is kind of lite, but how do they tell the difference between songs you've ripped from CDs and songs you've got from P2P? This sounds like it could be a way to get people to pay again for stuff they've already bought.
Good post. One thing I'd like to add regarding the NSA skipping FISA warrants: they're probably skipping out because they'd need to ask for 300 million warrants, and that's a lot of paperwork.
Maybe if we sent them to North Korea instead?
Seriously though, the scenario where some "undesireable" sect of a society is to be scooped up and stuck on island/all killed/all put in jail/etc. is ignorant.
To quote Nietzsche: "Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belong to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far."
Also, in the West, please try 'n make a distinction between Ephebophilia and true Paedophilia. At the very least it will make you sound smarter.
I say let them keep their online haunts, anything to keep Michael Douglas from robbing the craddle!
Actually it was nVidia and Intel (with some help from AMD). But dont' tell anyone.
A few more comments: I've used Onyx systems before and they are joys to work with. Oh, I also should mention that the summary says the University was using an Onyx2, not an Onyx4. And BTW, an Onyx4 uses (many) thoroughly modern ATI graphics cards. So I don't think there's anything in your post that's correct. Too bad there's no "-1 Wrong" moderation option.
Ummm the question was "how to do this cheap at home." It was not "what should the University do." What did you miss?
VR goggle that have a resolution of 100M pixels?!? Hell I'd be excited about goggle that had a resolution of 9M pixels! Whose your supplier? Of course you'd still need to setup a body tracking system, I guess you could get by with a 3D mouse, but probably no gloves or wand.
Sure there is, buy an Onyx2 and get some projectors. They can be had from anywhere between $0 and a few thousand dollars depending on config/circumstances. If you're lucky you can find one in a dumpster. You can find some Onyx3x0/3x000 on the market (most are still chugging along with their original owners) but the cost is very high .
A single pipe with a DG5-8 can drive up to 8 monitors, not sure of the res./monitor you'd get though. I only have specs for the InfiniteReality4 (IR4) but 16 pipes gets you 133 million pixels, I think this is the same for IR3 was well. Realistically you'd only need at most one pipe per wall of your CAVE.
There's a port of Quake, Quake II, and QuakeIII for SGI, I have it on my O2 :)
Here's a very cool page, this guy actually works with a CAVE (and an Onyx2) and he likes Quake! (Also, checkout the wall this guy has access too!)
It's a sad story about SGI, I think even if they survive long term as a company that the "G" in their name is already dead.
Then if they're talking a 1:1 ratio between image sensors & pixels then that would give a 20" screen 1.76MP, a 23" screen 2.3MP, and a 30" screen 4.1MP. That's a huge improvement over iSight which is .3MP. I don't think anyone except people on a dedicated LAN could really teleconfrence at those resolutions though, so I don't really see much benefit. Maybe there are enough vain Mac users' that would buy the screen just to take pictures of themselves.
I love the idea for PDAs/mobilephones. I haven't seen a camera phone or PDA that wasn't a horrible monstrosity. Though you'd need a much better sensor ratio than 1:1 in a PDA screen to get a good picture.
Unless you want to just take pictures of yourself, the design would have to look like a window, with one side of the screen capturing light and the other side acting as a view finder. Sounds sexy eh ... we can only hope Apple will release an iPhone or iPDA that does something like this.
Since 1999. Where have you been?
"Let me follow that by saying that Pro/E has always been available on Linux, as has Solidworks. Even their latest software packages are available for Linux."
... no Mechanica, no Intralink or Windchill versions are available for Linux. So it's completely incorrect to say that all of PTCs latest software packages are available for Linux. See www.ptc.com
... thems was teh days.
Wow...
First off Pro/ENGINEER was first available for Linux with the release of WildFire. That'd be version 24 for you old-schoolers. As of right now they only support RedHat on SUN or HP hardware. And that's just Pro/ENGINEER
Actually Pro/ENGINEER only used to run on SGI gear back in the late 80's early 90's
Next up, SolidWorks has never been available for anything other than Windows and probably never will be. Microsoft and SolidWorks are joined at the hips. So it's absolutely incorrect to say that any of SolidWorks software packages are available for Linux. See www.solidworks.com
Somehow I doubt I you've used Pro/E or SW.
I guess they've had a long time to consider this, they're comming up on 20 years. I remember reading somewhere, probably on SNPP, that the producers would only consider doing a movie at the end of the shows run. Not sure why, maybe the work of putting out a quality movie would require all their resources and would conflict with putting the show out regularly. Anyway, if this is still true, I wonder if this means the show is in it's final season(s). Last I knew they were siged up to season 19. Personally I think the producers should have ended the show around season 10 and then taken their sweet time with a good movie. I'd like to think they wanted to end it but Fox probably drove a dump truck full of money up to Matt Groenings house, he's not made of stone!
Lt. Dan's (Gary Sinise) legs were tucked under his wheel chair and he wore green stockings. I don't think the original poster meant digital compositing when he said CGI. And Arnold (maybe it was a stunt man, I can't remember) really did jump a Harley into a canal. It was suspened on a system of wires and lowered slowly (but not too slowly) and perhaps shot in a way to keep one from noticing too much. The wires and harness were removed digitally. Checkout the behind the scenes for these movies, this is all on there. That said, I do agree with your point.
Hard to use tiny controller you say ...
Have you ever touched a revolution controller? Are you aware that Game Cube controllers also work with the system? Are you aware that the wireless candybar part of the new controller slides into a more traditional controller housing and provides wireless connnectivity along with additional position information?
Just what I was going to say! Project Ultra-Violet is what they're calling it.
SGI has a 2nd generation product based on this: RASC, which is a node board with 2 FPGA chips that integrates (same access to shared memory) with the rest of the machines Itanium node boards.
I just looked up spare parts in the SGI price book. It's over $90,000 for a basic InfiniteReality4 pipe, about $250,000 for a fully configured pipe (4RMs and a DG5-8), or $3.25M for a full 16 pipe system (including KTOWN2 boards). I'm not sure if buying the graphics as part of an original system saved you money or not.
I'm sure that $$$ the main reason you don't see these in PCs.
That's 1GB of unified memory, so less than 1GB is available for textures ; (
... etc.) so I couldn't resist blabbing about high-end kit that's off topic.
It took them long enough; this is definitely the direction to go.
Almost 4 years ago Silicon Graphics gave a final revision hurrah to their best graphics product: InfiniteReality. A pipe sported 1GB dedicated texture memory, 10GB of frame buffer memory, 8 channels per pipe, and 192GB/s internal memory bandwidth.
And an Onyx system could have up to 16 pipes! That's 8.3M pixels per pipe, or 133M pixels from a full system! And all in 48-bit RGBA. And those are just the raw numbers, there were a great many high end features only found on InfiniteReality. Don't ask what it costs ; )
Sorry for the passionate post. It seems that Slashdot is very PC-ish and narrow in its viewpoint (Imagine a Beouwolf of... Can it run Doom3
I've had the pleasure of using a small Onyx system. Too bad SGI is dead dead dead. Still they provide a good target for everyone to shoot for. Some day the above power will be available for a few hundred dollars for the average person. Though I think it will be atleast 5 years before the quality and features of InfiniteReality4 are at a consumer level. And never will we have workstations like SGI's again ; (
As a fellow Pro/ENGINEER user this is not my experience. What version are you using and how big are your models? The latest version is a hog (as always). I can't imagine using it on an old Dell with a FireGL and doing anything very complicated. I have to admit I'm not a fan of ATI cards, their OpenGL support seems to be very flaky. But I like the larger memory on these new cards and the price is good. Price wise this card would seem to compare favorably to a top model WildCat Realizm or a top model nVidia Quadro.
Silicon Graphics sold multi-board graphics sets, RealityEngine2 I think, that had up to 12 GeometryEngine processors on board. I'm sure it wasn't cost effect but there must have been a significant benefit to the additional processing.
Works fine on WindowsXP here, using Thunderbird 1.5 and the Engimail plugin. I'm updating GPG right now too.
How do you read Slashdot and not know what GPG is?
I know they're a dying company but tools are tools ... Have you looked into using a high end Silicon Graphics system as opposed to PCs? I've see many demos (from their desktops to their highend visualization systems) paging huge ammounts of textures and doing volume rendering of multi TB data sets (mainly for oil) in real time. There used to be a demo SGI had called 'From Space to In Your Face' that simulated sky diving from a high orbit down to the ground, using several hundred GB of satelite data as texture. It's was very impressive projected on a big screen. Anyway, the raw geometry numbers might seem low compared to a GeForce but they're honest straight numbers, and the system bandwidth is otherworldly, and specs that gamers don't care about (AA for free, pixel read back speed, imaging extensions, etc.) are also otherworldly. Plus SGIs were made to do multi-monitor. Even an old Onxy2 deskside system with a DG5-8 has 8 dispay outputs.
Stop by the forums on Nekochan.net and ask around. I'm sure someone there has direct programing experience with your task and can probably give you a good idea of the best hardware, SGI or otherwise, to use.