I'd like to run some Windows programs but not have a windows partition. I have tried before to install Windows DLL's on a Linux partition with mixed results - certainly nothing usable. Anyone else had much success? Please don't make me install a FAT32 partition! What about with Wine under FreeBSD? --
Look at a graph of computers/head in the classroom vs. educational standards across countries around the world. Given the incredibly low educational standards we see in the US and the high standards in countries with only a basic information technology infrastructure I think it's pretty clear that there is a negative correlation (I don't have references to hand - check out many newspaper articles and Scientific American over the last year or two). --
If you have hardware that can do collision detection the chances are you could use it to speed up many other graphics related problems too - dynamics, visibility testing and a whole lot more. It would probably end up being more efficient to simply make the device general purpose and speed up those operations common to all of these tasks. These tasks include vector and matrix mathematics.
At least one games console currently available has a 4-way vector processor (everyone probably knows which machine but I'm under NDA...). This can be used for collision detection or anything else you fancy. This is more useful, it seems to me, than a collision detector. The downside is that they can be tricky beasts to program and writing an optimising compiler is hard.
...for a given quantity of energy is given in this paper: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/9907500 I'm not sure we'll actually be hitting those limits within the next century or so but it's an interesting paper nonetheless. --
Remember how for about a year or so manufacturers advertised that they were selling computers with 200Mb hard drives but when you looked in the small print it said "With XXX installed" where XXX was some disk 'doubler'? I guess we're going to get a year of companies misleadingly trying to sell 1/2 Gigabyte PCs claiming they're Gigabyte PCs. You have been warned! --
True. I work at a major motion picture visual effects company and we do a lot of work now with floating point colour data in order to get a nice high dynamic range. In fact we used some fairly hairy compression schemes to get our data into 16 bits (per channel) for those off the shelf tools that don't support floating point. For compositing we use Shake which is very happy with floating point data and we'd be pretty excited if Gimp did this too. But I don't see it happening for a long time. For 99% of people it will be unlikely that they could even view stuff that benefits from floating point. But if you have a long and complex imaging pipeline with lots of image processing it makes a big difference. Not just for those darks either - it's fantastic for motion blurring bright lights or realistically simulating lens flares and defocus. --
Someone needs to merge that 16 bit branch into the main source tree. 8 bits really isn't enough for, say, visual effects work - but being stuck out on a limb is a bit annoying when the main development is happening somewhere else. Please merge it back in someone! --
I recently put together a paper using TeX and included some tiff images. I was worried about how I was going to submit it to the journal as it ended up being several hundred megs of postscript. And then I tried ps2pdf on it and the file size was reduced by about 90%! I couldn't believe how good ps2pdf was! But free OCR software doesn't seem to exist if you want to create pdf from scanned documents. If it did you'd have a free alternative to the pdf's IBM offers on its patent server (which I believe are searchable - but I may be mistaken). --
They look like pretty low quality textures to me. Do games players eventually adapt and evolve some kind of upconverting filters in their eyes so that this stuff looks photoreal to them - like the way people at SGI used to be able to filter out the dithering in their old machines and the way Sony people filter out anti-aliasing on their game machines. --
It used to be fun to share CDs with friends so that you could discover new types of music (I don't mean to rip them, I mean to *listen* to them). Now you're going to have to have a biometric scan before playing your music. Is the lending of music (and an important part of our culture) going to come to an end? --
I work in movie visual effects and this is traditionally a Unix based culture. But with SGI completely letting the industry down we have to turn to Windows. Even before getting onto building GUIs we need to manage our basic projects. I use CVS with Makefiles under Unix. But that doesn't really sit well with Visual C/C++ which stores projects in mysterious (at least to me) binary files. What is a good cross platform revision control system that would allow me to use the Visual C++ IDE as well as Unix command line tools? I'm dreading getting onto the GUI stuff. What happens when you want OpenGL in your GUI? What happens when you want to blit hi-def images to the screen in a GUI multi-platform at 60 fps? All tough questions I think. --
The implications about life elsewhere in the universe from a bit of water on a meteorite are obviously a bit of nonsense. But scientists need to make statements like this in order to get funding. Drawing the conclusion that this is evidence that life evolved elsewhere is quite patently nonsense and the scientists involved know it. We have known for a long time now that there is water - and far more complex molecules - all over the universe. --
> After all, got to stay ahead of current trends. If you want to stay ahead you'd be better off writing one that using one. It's not hard. I'd send you mine (one of the first I ever saw on the web anywhere) but I accidentally used some quirks of the compiler I was using (KAI C++) and it won't compile with any other compiler:-( It really is very educational to write one because it will give you great insight into where the 'magic' of quantum computing appears. --
Hilbert did a fantastic job of picking his original set of problems. For example, when he asked for an algorithm to determine if there exist integer solutions to any polynomial equation it just seemed like a pretty ordinary outstanding problem to most people - an obvious thing to ask. But it turned out to be undecidable. This was a whole new category of answer that mathematicians simply hadn't anticipated - the idea that not only was the problem unsolvable - but that it was provably so. The solution to this problem had much much wider implications than the problem originally suggested. This was true of many of Hilbert's other problems. He was a genius for picking such rich and complex problems. It remains to be seen whether this new set will inspire as much great mathematics. --
Grover's algorithm is *years* old. I wrote a simulation of it at least two years ago and it was old then. I think a search on a handful of bits has already actually been implemented on a real quantum device. The coollest algorithm is Peter Shor's integer factorisation algorithm - there's a really cool interaction between number theory and physics that allows this algorithm to be expressed very elegantly in quantum hardware. --
Re:They can't sue 1000's of people can they...?
on
Dialectizer Shut Down
·
· Score: 1
Hey!...the US has the DMV which beats any bureacracy in Europe hands down:-) --
In protest I think that as many of us who have servers of our own should offer to run the dialectizer on our own machines. The US is a country run by fear of lawyers. I can't believe you Americans put up with it. --
> I can see why they might have been a bit irritated as we seem to have de-emphasized graphics That's like saying Ferrari have de-emphasised speed! I'm glad you're having fun though - good luck with the boxes! --
> just wish they weren't following the > propreitary lead of nvidia. Well there's an obvious reason why they are. I know many ex-SGI people. They all say SGI has turned into the worst place to work. Many of them went to work for nvidia. There are certainly fewer people who know anything about 3d left at SGI. They had no choice but to turn to nvidia. It's very sad - they were once *the* coolest company. --
Why do you think it's interesting to discuss things with people who are good at identifying which squiggly figure follows in sequence from a bunch of other squiggly figures? Expertise is of course a different matter. --
I've downloaded many Metallica tracks through napster. I also happen to own every Metallica album (I'm not buying any more however.). It's easier to use napster than rip the tracks from a CD - just as it's easier for me to rip my own albums from my.mp3.com. --
Many times I have downloaded open source for 'Linux' from some site or other and it's compiled first time under IRIX or FreeBSD and yet people still insist on say 'Linux version' on their web sites. Sometimes people might be missing out on a bigger audience for their work:-) --
Assuming QM you can *prove* that there is no way to eavesdrop whatsoever. What the quantum cryptology people have just done is a bit like Diffie-Helman key distribution. Although we think this is secure we really have no *proof* that cracking Diffie-Helman is hard. In this case we have a proof, following from the fundamental principles of QM, that there is no way (well actually I mean extremely unlikely and you can make the probability as low as you like) an eavesdropper can get any useful information whether they interact with the particles or not. Of course I say "assuming QM...". But I'd place quite a bit of money on the 'spooks' *not* being the first to discover violations in QM. --
There seems to be a bit of a fad for the paranormal at the moment. NASA and British Aerospace investigating warp drives and antigravity and IBM into this telekinesis experiment. Nothing will come of it of course. Unfortunately the popular science press are keeping alive the strange notion that the 'mind' has something to do with wavefunction collapse. It is only a minority fringe within the theoretical physics world who think that this has any validity.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to run some Windows programs but not have a windows partition. I have tried before to install Windows DLL's on a Linux partition with mixed results - certainly nothing usable. Anyone else had much success? Please don't make me install a FAT32 partition! What about with Wine under FreeBSD?
--
Look at a graph of computers/head in the classroom vs. educational standards across countries around the world. Given the incredibly low educational standards we see in the US and the high standards in countries with only a basic information technology infrastructure I think it's pretty clear that there is a negative correlation (I don't have references to hand - check out many newspaper articles and Scientific American over the last year or two).
--
At least one games console currently available has a 4-way vector processor (everyone probably knows which machine but I'm under NDA...). This can be used for collision detection or anything else you fancy. This is more useful, it seems to me, than a collision detector. The downside is that they can be tricky beasts to program and writing an optimising compiler is hard.
--...for a given quantity of energy is given in this paper: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/9907500 I'm not sure we'll actually be hitting those limits within the next century or so but it's an interesting paper nonetheless.
--
Remember how for about a year or so manufacturers advertised that they were selling computers with 200Mb hard drives but when you looked in the small print it said "With XXX installed" where XXX was some disk 'doubler'? I guess we're going to get a year of companies misleadingly trying to sell 1/2 Gigabyte PCs claiming they're Gigabyte PCs. You have been warned!
--
True. I work at a major motion picture visual effects company and we do a lot of work now with floating point colour data in order to get a nice high dynamic range. In fact we used some fairly hairy compression schemes to get our data into 16 bits (per channel) for those off the shelf tools that don't support floating point. For compositing we use Shake which is very happy with floating point data and we'd be pretty excited if Gimp did this too. But I don't see it happening for a long time. For 99% of people it will be unlikely that they could even view stuff that benefits from floating point. But if you have a long and complex imaging pipeline with lots of image processing it makes a big difference. Not just for those darks either - it's fantastic for motion blurring bright lights or realistically simulating lens flares and defocus.
--
Someone needs to merge that 16 bit branch into the main source tree. 8 bits really isn't enough for, say, visual effects work - but being stuck out on a limb is a bit annoying when the main development is happening somewhere else. Please merge it back in someone!
--
I recently put together a paper using TeX and included some tiff images. I was worried about how I was going to submit it to the journal as it ended up being several hundred megs of postscript. And then I tried ps2pdf on it and the file size was reduced by about 90%! I couldn't believe how good ps2pdf was! But free OCR software doesn't seem to exist if you want to create pdf from scanned documents. If it did you'd have a free alternative to the pdf's IBM offers on its patent server (which I believe are searchable - but I may be mistaken).
--
They look like pretty low quality textures to me. Do games players eventually adapt and evolve some kind of upconverting filters in their eyes so that this stuff looks photoreal to them - like the way people at SGI used to be able to filter out the dithering in their old machines and the way Sony people filter out anti-aliasing on their game machines.
--
It used to be fun to share CDs with friends so that you could discover new types of music (I don't mean to rip them, I mean to *listen* to them). Now you're going to have to have a biometric scan before playing your music. Is the lending of music (and an important part of our culture) going to come to an end?
--
I work in movie visual effects and this is traditionally a Unix based culture. But with SGI completely letting the industry down we have to turn to Windows. Even before getting onto building GUIs we need to manage our basic projects. I use CVS with Makefiles under Unix. But that doesn't really sit well with Visual C/C++ which stores projects in mysterious (at least to me) binary files. What is a good cross platform revision control system that would allow me to use the Visual C++ IDE as well as Unix command line tools? I'm dreading getting onto the GUI stuff. What happens when you want OpenGL in your GUI? What happens when you want to blit hi-def images to the screen in a GUI multi-platform at 60 fps? All tough questions I think.
--
The implications about life elsewhere in the universe from a bit of water on a meteorite are obviously a bit of nonsense. But scientists need to make statements like this in order to get funding. Drawing the conclusion that this is evidence that life evolved elsewhere is quite patently nonsense and the scientists involved know it. We have known for a long time now that there is water - and far more complex molecules - all over the universe.
--
> After all, got to stay ahead of current trends. If you want to stay ahead you'd be better off writing one that using one. It's not hard. I'd send you mine (one of the first I ever saw on the web anywhere) but I accidentally used some quirks of the compiler I was using (KAI C++) and it won't compile with any other compiler :-( It really is very educational to write one because it will give you great insight into where the 'magic' of quantum computing appears.
--
Hilbert did a fantastic job of picking his original set of problems. For example, when he asked for an algorithm to determine if there exist integer solutions to any polynomial equation it just seemed like a pretty ordinary outstanding problem to most people - an obvious thing to ask. But it turned out to be undecidable. This was a whole new category of answer that mathematicians simply hadn't anticipated - the idea that not only was the problem unsolvable - but that it was provably so. The solution to this problem had much much wider implications than the problem originally suggested. This was true of many of Hilbert's other problems. He was a genius for picking such rich and complex problems. It remains to be seen whether this new set will inspire as much great mathematics.
--
Grover's algorithm is *years* old. I wrote a simulation of it at least two years ago and it was old then. I think a search on a handful of bits has already actually been implemented on a real quantum device. The coollest algorithm is Peter Shor's integer factorisation algorithm - there's a really cool interaction between number theory and physics that allows this algorithm to be expressed very elegantly in quantum hardware.
--
Hey!...the US has the DMV which beats any bureacracy in Europe hands down :-)
--
In protest I think that as many of us who have servers of our own should offer to run the dialectizer on our own machines. The US is a country run by fear of lawyers. I can't believe you Americans put up with it.
--
> I can see why they might have been a bit irritated as we seem to have de-emphasized graphics That's like saying Ferrari have de-emphasised speed! I'm glad you're having fun though - good luck with the boxes!
--
> just wish they weren't following the > propreitary lead of nvidia. Well there's an obvious reason why they are. I know many ex-SGI people. They all say SGI has turned into the worst place to work. Many of them went to work for nvidia. There are certainly fewer people who know anything about 3d left at SGI. They had no choice but to turn to nvidia. It's very sad - they were once *the* coolest company.
--
Yup. You're quite right. Unix networking is great and much of it is open source. But what about end user applications? Is this really offtopic?
--
Why do you think it's interesting to discuss things with people who are good at identifying which squiggly figure follows in sequence from a bunch of other squiggly figures? Expertise is of course a different matter.
--
I've downloaded many Metallica tracks through napster. I also happen to own every Metallica album (I'm not buying any more however.). It's easier to use napster than rip the tracks from a CD - just as it's easier for me to rip my own albums from my.mp3.com.
--
Many times I have downloaded open source for 'Linux' from some site or other and it's compiled first time under IRIX or FreeBSD and yet people still insist on say 'Linux version' on their web sites. Sometimes people might be missing out on a bigger audience for their work :-)
--
Assuming QM you can *prove* that there is no way to eavesdrop whatsoever. What the quantum cryptology people have just done is a bit like Diffie-Helman key distribution. Although we think this is secure we really have no *proof* that cracking Diffie-Helman is hard. In this case we have a proof, following from the fundamental principles of QM, that there is no way (well actually I mean extremely unlikely and you can make the probability as low as you like) an eavesdropper can get any useful information whether they interact with the particles or not. Of course I say "assuming QM...". But I'd place quite a bit of money on the 'spooks' *not* being the first to discover violations in QM.
--
There seems to be a bit of a fad for the paranormal at the moment. NASA and British Aerospace investigating warp drives and antigravity and IBM into this telekinesis experiment. Nothing will come of it of course. Unfortunately the popular science press are keeping alive the strange notion that the 'mind' has something to do with wavefunction collapse. It is only a minority fringe within the theoretical physics world who think that this has any validity.