There are many people in the outside world with access to both the UNIX SYS V and Linux source code. It would be quite straightforward for any of these people to find this infringing code, if it in fact exists.
Sadly, I'm not one of those people. I'd be more than happy to provide programming support for somebody that is, though. Write me at thad@hammerhead.com
The biggest problem with high-altitude tethered aerostats is that the tether is invisible to aircraft. Typically, they aren't even lit. And, of course, the balloons move with the wind somewhat, so you can't even be sure what location to avoid. Therefore, you'd have to have a pretty wide area to avoid.
That said, the US has several tethered aerostats along its southern border, used to monitor weather, to check for low-flying smugglers and to broadcast propaganda to Cuba. The internation border is, of course, an area with strict flying restrictions already, so it isn't too much of a burden.
Unfortunately, these balloons in England are planned (perhaps that's too strong a word. Shilled?) to be in the middle of fairly populated and high-traffic areas. Cordoning off all of these areas would be a problem, and unlikely to be 100% successful. Right now, people violate airspace accidentally all the time -- but it's usually not that big a deal -- it's just air. Running into one of these tethers would likely be a big deal -- you'd probably lose both the plane and the balloon.
Perhaps the balloons could be flown far higher somewhat offshore? The US flies its aerostats at 50,000 ft (about 16 km). From that altitude, the amount of ground area seen by the balloon would be almost 100x as great. Private planes typically don't fly very far offshore, so the risk of hitting the tether would be lower -- and in the case that there is a collision the wreakage would fall into the sea instead of a city.
Perhaps GPS will solve this problem. If all private planes had perfect GPS systems with all airspaces clearly marked and rigged to alarms, then this might work smoothly with the current plan. You'd probably have to legislate that all planes have certificated (or whatever the term is in England) GPS's -- but they would be broadly useful devices in any case.
Anyway, in the end, the idea of flying relays has been promoted innumerable times -- and it never happens. Cable is, in the end, cheaper, faster, more reliable, and safer. It's not as sexy as this system (although sexiness is in the eye of the beholder -- or should I say stockholder) but it gets the job done.
You see, everybody hates spam, and 99% of the people who get spam from a company causes them to hate that company. No business owner in their right mind would abuse the trust and good will of their current customers. Any business that started spamming its customers would soon go out of business -- and that's a good thing!
I think that the group of people that the article is written by, and for, are the animation industry. For them the golden era was Transformers, Thudercats and He-man, because it was the high-water mark of television animation employment. The fact that these were not-even-thinly-disguised 22-minute commercials is irrelevant to that argument.
One problem people are complaining about is that spammers will deploy OCR or other technology to answer the challenged. I believe that this is much harder than it sounds, OCR is hard even in the best cases. With 10,000 fonts in 100 sizes with lots of noise, it would be extremely difficult to do OCR correctly. People that bright aren't spamming.
What would also help is a pledge in the email, that by sending this mail you agree that this is not unsolicited commercial email. This would be used to sue the spammer if he is indeed spamming. Of course this would only work for spammers from the civilized world, but that is still the majority of the spam.
One of the fascinating articles that John Young linked to in his invaluable Cryptome a few years ago was a PDF of some new portable missles -- sadly, I've lost the original file.
In this there was a tube-launched missle that worked much like a water rocket. The front half of the missle was the warhead, and the back half was filled with a relatively (compared to water) high-density gel. At the front of the gel section, in about the middle of the missle, was a small explosive.
On launch, the explosive would fire, generating gas that would propel the gel out of a nozzle in the back of the rocket at high velocity. The final speed of the missle was on the order of 300 knots -- quite slow for a rocket.
The big upside of this, though, was that it could be fired indoors stealthily. There would be no huge cloud of smoke at the launch point -- there would be very little indication where the rocket had come from except for a large mess of jelly on a wall.
One shocking result of the synesthesia research reported in Scientific American this month is that a color-blind person who saw numbers as colors, saw colors that he couldn't actually visually see. This happens because in typical red-green colorblindness, the problem is with the pigments in the eye -- the brain processing areas for color still work just fine. So this person was seeing real colors from the brain crosstalk stimulating those color processing regions.
Charmingly, he called them 'martian colors', as they didn't correspond to anything in his real life.
Now, I'm wondering what address checks from spam customers get sent to. If that physical mailbox was overwhelmed by, oh, free catalogs or something, then Alex wouldn't be able to get paid. That would be terrible, wouldn't it? A tortious interference with Alyx's business it would be, no question. How is Alyx going to make a living if each check from the customer is lost among a sea of snail-spam?
This is so clearly the right way to go, that one has to really wonder what Intel was thinking when they only released a unreasonably slow hardware emulator. I suppose the integration with the operating systems is a bit of a mess, and a moving target at that, but there would have to have been a number of engineers at Intel and HP that would have seen the tremendous performance difference from the beginning. It's not as if software emulation had never been done before.
This, tragically, does hurt AMD quite a bit. I had read multiple rumors about Intel having something up their bunny-suited sleeves, but most of these rumors had Intel supporting x86-64 -- that is -- copying AMD for the first time. This announcement takes away one of the unique advantages of the Opteron/Athlon64 without following AMD's lead.
There are a number of other advantages to the x86-64 architecture and implementations, and I do hope that AMD has a winner here, but it's not going to be the slam-dunk it looked like yesterday. The AMD prices, the Hypertransport links between the processors, the NUMA memory systems, the on-chip memory controller, the human-readable assembly language -- these are all good things. We'll see if they are enough.
The prices for the Opteron chips seem reasonable, and the nforce3 and new VIA chipsets should make it possible to build reasonably priced motherboards -- so why would the Opteron be out of reach for power-hungry computer users?
Just because it says 'server' on the box the chip comes in?
People who say that it is pointless to do an inspection while in space have limited imagination about what damage those inspections might find, and what might be done in response to that damage. While it is worthwhile to examine that 10,000 (say) most likely failure modes and come up with the best way to respond to each (including, perhaps, just administering last rites), doing an inspection to look for unanticipated damage is a really good idea.
The test-flight community is awash with stories of pilots who through skill and ingenuity (and luck) managed to recover airplanes with catastrophic damage. There's nothing like impending death to focus one's mind -- and in the case of the shuttle there might be millions of engineers around the world thinking of creative solutions if the problems are known.
In the Apollo 13 near-disaster, a failure of the magnitude that occured was not planned for, because it was assumed that something like that would lead to the prompt and certain death of the crew and loss of the ship. But, due to extremely insightful prompt action on the part of the crew, and the dedicated work of tens of thousands of engineers within NASA, the crew just barely survived.
The case mentioned above of describing the futility of noticing that the welds had failed on a 747's wing spars is incorrect, and demonstrated by a classic case. A test pilot was flying a n early Czech aerobatic monoplane, and the right wing started to fold up because the main wing spar had failed. Now, there was no checklist item for 'spar failure recovery', it is assumed that that is one of those things that cause planes to invariably crash.
What the pilot did was immediately roll the plane inverted. With the loads in the other direction, the spar held. Obviously you can't land the plane inverted, so he held it inverted until he was just over the runway, then rolled the plane upright, and landed just as the wing was folding up.
Inspect! Information is almost always better than no information. It's really important.
At PDI, we did some of the very early, but not the earliest, morph animation. The earliest developers/users were Tom Brigham at NYIT and Doug Smythe at ILM.
One thing we did, though, as our tool was used over and over again back in '90 and '91 was to push the use of the word 'morph'. We were working on things like the Michael Jackson Black or White video, things that really pushed the technique into many people's eyeballs. ILM was pushing the word 'morf'.
A Stanford student did a survey of the use of the word 'morph' in the news media, and it exploded from almost unused to being used in thousands of articles over the period that we were striving to push the word out, and as we were doing those videos. It was fun to coin a word, and have it become accepted.
If this was the old IBM, I would think that this 'attack' from SCO might actually be orchestrated by IBM. They would fight it for a while, and in the process spread a considerable amount of FUD, then buy SCO -- at which point they would own the corporate Linux market. The old saying was that you never got fired by buying IBM -- if there was a taint on other corporate Linux systems you might push people to buy IBM.
I do think that IBM has changed their spots to a large extent, though, and I'd be surprised if this was the actual strategy.
Yesterday my partner in crime at Hammerhead walked in the door carrying 1.6 TB of Maxtor disks. Four IDE disks went into a normal ATX box (ok, we upgraded the power supply and fans) and the other four were external USB disks. The sight of somebody carrying 1.6 TB of disks though was a "Yes, it's 2003" moment.
The more sad thing was that the 800GB raid we built with the first four disks is already 50% full...
The article mentions that Intel may do away with the USB ports in the Grantsdale systems, that PCI express may get rid of USB entirely -- but if it does have USB it will have at least 8 ports.
OK, that's pretty weird. But why would they get rid of a popular, reasonably high-performance, and cheap interface like USB? Is Firewire 800 going to take it's place? SATA? Is everything going to be wireless?
I was reading a history of computers, and how devastated the programmers were at the first vacuum tube (as opposed to relay) computers. See, the vacuum tubes were silent -- how were they going to debug their programs?
thad
AvWeek is reporting transition to turbulent flow
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Aviation Week and Space Technology (which doesn't have a free web site, alas) reports this week that Columbia has had a problem in a few of its flights with a premature transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The Shuttle reentry profile nominally has the airflow under the wing transitioning to turbulent flow around Mach 9, but on a recent Columbia flight it happened much sooner, around Mach 19.
Turbulent flow mixes the air near the surface much more, causing far greater transfer of heat to the Shuttle. There was some 'slumping' of tiles in that previous flight, temperatures reached ~2000 degrees, right at the limit of what the tiles can take.
This happens because Columbia's wing was far less smooth than the other (remaining) orbiters.
If there was significant roughness added by the foam/ice/whatever gouging the wing, that would increase the heating even more.
Another problem they were concerned with was an asymmetric transition to turbulent flow, which would cause the drag on one wing to be higher than the other, yawing the shuttle -- but it seems that there is more than enough control authority in the elevons and RCS system to counteract that if it happens.
Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to claim that they are having issues. Announcing that they would be releasing products at particular times, and then delaying that release, several times in each case, points to serious problems -- either with the production of the products or with their ethics. I'd love to believe that AMD and NVidia are working as hard as they can and just haven't been able to make things work, but at this point you can't rule out the possibility that they've been pre-announcing products to unfairly distort the marketplace.
AMD could release Athlon 64 to the Linux community today and they'd snap it up. That would also guarantee that Microsoft worked hard to make their schedule for releasing 64-bit Windows -- they'd be mortified that they'd be left behind.
It's a great, involving book about truly horrible weapons. My favorite bit from the book is that early on Bohr is asked about what it would take to separate enough U-235 to make a bomb, and he said that you'd have to turn the entire country into a factory to do it.
When given a tour of massive Oak Ridge and Hanford projects after production was under way, a Manhattan project scientist said "See! We did it!" And Bohr said, "well, yes, but you did turn the entire country into a factory..."
There were only three nominees for Animated Film last year because there were only nine films submitted into the category, and the rules say that you need at least eight films to have three nominations, and fifteen films to have five nominations.
I'm more than a little surprised that Stuart Little 2 didn't make the list of five. It falls into a no-man's land between animation and visual effects, I had hoped to that it would get a chance in animation. I don't get to nominate in that category, though.
I'm really quite surpsised that Minority Report didn't get a nomination in Visual Effects.
I have heard from several places that Intel's PR flacks have been flogging this story mercilessly, so it's not too surprising to see it show up in Slashdot. Twice.
To get the inaccuracy out of the way -- RenderMan has been running on Linux for several years now, and I would be surprised if Linux wasn't the dominant platform for RenderMan for quite some time, outside of Pixar of course.
I am really surprised, though, that at this point in time they'd go from 64-bit to 32-bit machines, especially as 64-bit PC-like machines are just becoming available. Why not go with Itanium or the new Hammer? Each of Pixar's movies to date have been gloriously more complex and hard-to-render than the last one -- and while I know that they go to fairly extreme lengths to keep the memory footprint down I would think that they'd be bumping up against the 4GB limit already. If not now, then quite soon.
Perhaps this is just a stopgap to get Nemo finished, even 1024 servers is a fairly small cost. Certainly it would be compared to the RenderMan licenses:)
Every RenderMan user except for Pixar has to look to get the maximum rendering power per CPU, as the licenses are $5,000 and up, while the CPUs are far far cheaper than that. I suppose Pixar's figure of merit is rendering power per dollar or rendering power per BTU (for cooling limited situations), or even render power per ft^2. Still, the 32-bit machines are a baffling choice to me.
thad
ps. My company has a render garden (too small to be a render farm) of a dozen or so Athlons.
Read the paper, it's good, short, well written, and has some important insights. The most amazing statistic from the paper is that the doubling time for the virus was about 8 seconds. Within ten minutes it had covered the entire 'net.
I'm still waiting for the paper describing why systems like Bank of America's ATM's were shut down. Whatever the case, we are sure to see more worms like this in the future, with the possibility of serious damage.
> Linux has replaced a significant number of NT machines at Digital Domain, both on the desktop and in the renderfarm. The machines are not being bought to replace Irix machines, they are being bought instead of Windows machines. And they are being bought for Linux itself, not because Linux is cheaper (each machine has a W2K license because they are dual-boot in case we need a huge LightWave render, and we pay for RedHat, so they are more expensive!).
IIRC, there used to be a very strong pro-NT camp at Digital Domain. They were tireless and strident in their belief that anything Unix could do, NT could do better, claiming that the success of Titanic, for example, was due to NT. Or some such rot.
Fortunately, most of them decamped to form a company called Station X. There they continued to sing the praises of NT right up until the time they went out of business.
Digital Domain has been in the vanguard of those using Linux in visual effects for quite some time; and has been an inspiration to me and others in the industry. As they write quite a bit of their own software, they were able to adopt Linux sooner than most other companies who relied on commercial systems -- although now almost all of the commercial visual effects packages run well on Linux.
We worked on the movie Showtime, and I think it was among the better of Shatner's performances. He was playing himself, trying to show Robert Deniro and Eddie Murphy how to be TV cops, like he was in TJ Hooker. He's just halarious, showing how to dive onto the hood of a car, stuff like that. When he tells Rene Russo that DeNiro is "the worst actor he's ever seen", well, it was the high point in the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many people in the outside world with access to both the UNIX SYS V and Linux source code. It would be quite straightforward for any of these people to find this infringing code, if it in fact exists.
Sadly, I'm not one of those people. I'd be more than happy to provide programming support for somebody that is, though. Write me at thad@hammerhead.com
Why hasn't anybody done the checking?
thad
And who builds the wing and tail surfaces for the Pegasus? You guessed it -- Burt Rutan.
thad
The biggest problem with high-altitude tethered aerostats is that the tether is invisible to aircraft. Typically, they aren't even lit. And, of course, the balloons move with the wind somewhat, so you can't even be sure what location to avoid. Therefore, you'd have to have a pretty wide area to avoid.
That said, the US has several tethered aerostats along its southern border, used to monitor weather, to check for low-flying smugglers and to broadcast propaganda to Cuba. The internation border is, of course, an area with strict flying restrictions already, so it isn't too much of a burden.
Unfortunately, these balloons in England are planned (perhaps that's too strong a word. Shilled?) to be in the middle of fairly populated and high-traffic areas. Cordoning off all of these areas would be a problem, and unlikely to be 100% successful. Right now, people violate airspace accidentally all the time -- but it's usually not that big a deal -- it's just air. Running into one of these tethers would likely be a big deal -- you'd probably lose both the plane and the balloon.
Perhaps the balloons could be flown far higher somewhat offshore? The US flies its aerostats at 50,000 ft (about 16 km). From that altitude, the amount of ground area seen by the balloon would be almost 100x as great. Private planes typically don't fly very far offshore, so the risk of hitting the tether would be lower -- and in the case that there is a collision the wreakage would fall into the sea instead of a city.
Perhaps GPS will solve this problem. If all private planes had perfect GPS systems with all airspaces clearly marked and rigged to alarms, then this might work smoothly with the current plan. You'd probably have to legislate that all planes have certificated (or whatever the term is in England) GPS's -- but they would be broadly useful devices in any case.
Anyway, in the end, the idea of flying relays has been promoted innumerable times -- and it never happens. Cable is, in the end, cheaper, faster, more reliable, and safer. It's not as sexy as this system (although sexiness is in the eye of the beholder -- or should I say stockholder) but it gets the job done.
thad
You see, everybody hates spam, and 99% of the people who get spam from a company causes them to hate that company. No business owner in their right mind would abuse the trust and good will of their current customers. Any business that started spamming its customers would soon go out of business -- and that's a good thing!
thad
I think that the group of people that the article is written by, and for, are the animation industry. For them the golden era was Transformers, Thudercats and He-man, because it was the high-water mark of television animation employment. The fact that these were not-even-thinly-disguised 22-minute commercials is irrelevant to that argument.
thad
One problem people are complaining about is that spammers will deploy OCR or other technology to answer the challenged. I believe that this is much harder than it sounds, OCR is hard even in the best cases. With 10,000 fonts in 100 sizes with lots of noise, it would be extremely difficult to do OCR correctly. People that bright aren't spamming.
What would also help is a pledge in the email, that by sending this mail you agree that this is not unsolicited commercial email. This would be used to sue the spammer if he is indeed spamming.
Of course this would only work for spammers from the civilized world, but that is still the majority of the spam.
thad
One of the fascinating articles that John Young linked to in his invaluable Cryptome a few years ago was a PDF of some new portable missles -- sadly, I've lost the original file.
In this there was a tube-launched missle that worked much like a water rocket. The front half of the missle was the warhead, and the back half was filled with a relatively (compared to water) high-density gel. At the front of the gel section, in about the middle of the missle, was a small explosive.
On launch, the explosive would fire, generating gas that would propel the gel out of a nozzle in the back of the rocket at high velocity. The final speed of the missle was on the order of 300 knots -- quite slow for a rocket.
The big upside of this, though, was that it could be fired indoors stealthily. There would be no huge cloud of smoke at the launch point -- there would be very little indication where the rocket had come from except for a large mess of jelly on a wall.
Pretty wild.
thad
One shocking result of the synesthesia research reported in Scientific American this month is that a color-blind person who saw numbers as colors, saw colors that he couldn't actually visually see. This happens because in typical red-green colorblindness, the problem is with the pigments in the eye -- the brain processing areas for color still work just fine. So this person was seeing real colors from the brain crosstalk stimulating those color processing regions.
Charmingly, he called them 'martian colors', as they didn't correspond to anything in his real life.
thad
Now, I'm wondering what address checks from spam customers get sent to. If that physical mailbox was overwhelmed by, oh, free catalogs or something, then Alex wouldn't be able to get paid. That would be terrible, wouldn't it? A tortious interference with Alyx's business it would be, no question. How is Alyx going to make a living if each check from the customer is lost among a sea of snail-spam?
thad
This is so clearly the right way to go, that one has to really wonder what Intel was thinking when they only released a unreasonably slow hardware emulator. I suppose the integration with the operating systems is a bit of a mess, and a moving target at that, but there would have to have been a number of engineers at Intel and HP that would have seen the tremendous performance difference from the beginning. It's not as if software emulation had never been done before.
This, tragically, does hurt AMD quite a bit. I had read multiple rumors about Intel having something up their bunny-suited sleeves, but most of these rumors had Intel supporting x86-64 -- that is -- copying AMD for the first time. This announcement takes away one of the unique advantages of the Opteron/Athlon64 without following AMD's lead.
There are a number of other advantages to the x86-64 architecture and implementations, and I do hope that AMD has a winner here, but it's not going to be the slam-dunk it looked like yesterday. The AMD prices, the Hypertransport links between the processors, the NUMA memory systems, the on-chip memory controller, the human-readable assembly language -- these are all good things. We'll see if they are enough.
thad
The prices for the Opteron chips seem reasonable, and the nforce3 and new VIA chipsets should make it possible to build reasonably priced motherboards -- so why would the Opteron be out of reach for power-hungry computer users?
Just because it says 'server' on the box the chip comes in?
thad
People who say that it is pointless to do an inspection while in space have limited imagination about what damage those inspections might find, and what might be done in response to that damage. While it is worthwhile to examine that 10,000 (say) most likely failure modes and come up with the best way to respond to each (including, perhaps, just administering last rites), doing an inspection to look for unanticipated damage is a really good idea.
The test-flight community is awash with stories of pilots who through skill and ingenuity (and luck) managed to recover airplanes with catastrophic damage. There's nothing like impending death to focus one's mind -- and in the case of the shuttle there might be millions of engineers around the world thinking of creative solutions if the problems are known.
In the Apollo 13 near-disaster, a failure of the magnitude that occured was not planned for, because it was assumed that something like that would lead to the prompt and certain death of the crew and loss of the ship. But, due to extremely insightful prompt action on the part of the crew, and the dedicated work of tens of thousands of engineers within NASA, the crew just barely survived.
The case mentioned above of describing the futility of noticing that the welds had failed on a 747's wing spars is incorrect, and demonstrated by a classic case. A test pilot was flying a n early Czech aerobatic monoplane, and the right wing started to fold up because the main wing spar had failed. Now, there was no checklist item for 'spar failure recovery', it is assumed that that is one of those things that cause planes to invariably crash.
What the pilot did was immediately roll the plane inverted. With the loads in the other direction, the spar held. Obviously you can't land the plane inverted, so he held it inverted until he was just over the runway, then rolled the plane upright, and landed just as the wing was folding up.
Inspect! Information is almost always better than no information. It's really important.
thad
At PDI, we did some of the very early, but not the earliest, morph animation. The earliest developers/users were Tom Brigham at NYIT and Doug Smythe at ILM.
One thing we did, though, as our tool was used over and over again back in '90 and '91 was to push the use of the word 'morph'. We were working on things like the Michael Jackson Black or White video, things that really pushed the technique into many people's eyeballs. ILM was pushing the word 'morf'.
A Stanford student did a survey of the use of the word 'morph' in the news media, and it exploded from almost unused to being used in thousands of articles over the period that we were striving to push the word out, and as we were doing those videos. It was fun to coin a word, and have it become accepted.
thad
If this was the old IBM, I would think that this 'attack' from SCO might actually be orchestrated by IBM. They would fight it for a while, and in the process spread a considerable amount of FUD, then buy SCO -- at which point they would own the corporate Linux market. The old saying was that you never got fired by buying IBM -- if there was a taint on other corporate Linux systems you might push people to buy IBM.
I do think that IBM has changed their spots to a large extent, though, and I'd be surprised if this was the actual strategy.
thad
Yesterday my partner in crime at Hammerhead walked in the door carrying 1.6 TB of Maxtor disks. Four IDE disks went into a normal ATX box (ok, we upgraded the power supply and fans) and the other four were external USB disks. The sight of somebody carrying 1.6 TB of disks though was a "Yes, it's 2003" moment.
The more sad thing was that the 800GB raid we built with the first four disks is already 50% full...
thad
The article mentions that Intel may do away with the USB ports in the Grantsdale systems, that PCI express may get rid of USB entirely -- but if it does have USB it will have at least 8 ports.
OK, that's pretty weird. But why would they get rid of a popular, reasonably high-performance, and cheap interface like USB? Is Firewire 800 going to take it's place? SATA? Is everything going to be wireless?
thad
I was reading a history of computers, and how devastated the programmers were at the first vacuum tube (as opposed to relay) computers. See, the vacuum tubes were silent -- how were they going to debug their programs?
thad
Aviation Week and Space Technology (which doesn't have a free web site, alas) reports this week that Columbia has had a problem in a few of its flights with a premature transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The Shuttle reentry profile nominally has the airflow under the wing transitioning to turbulent flow around Mach 9, but on a recent Columbia flight it happened much sooner, around Mach 19.
Turbulent flow mixes the air near the surface much more, causing far greater transfer of heat to the Shuttle. There was some 'slumping' of tiles in that previous flight, temperatures reached ~2000 degrees, right at the limit of what the tiles can take.
This happens because Columbia's wing was far less smooth than the other (remaining) orbiters.
If there was significant roughness added by the foam/ice/whatever gouging the wing, that would increase the heating even more.
Another problem they were concerned with was an asymmetric transition to turbulent flow, which would cause the drag on one wing to be higher than the other, yawing the shuttle -- but it seems that there is more than enough control authority in the elevons and RCS system to counteract that if it happens.
thad
Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to claim that they are having issues. Announcing that they would be releasing products at particular times, and then delaying that release, several times in each case, points to serious problems -- either with the production of the products or with their ethics. I'd love to believe that AMD and NVidia are working as hard as they can and just haven't been able to make things work, but at this point you can't rule out the possibility that they've been pre-announcing products to unfairly distort the marketplace.
AMD could release Athlon 64 to the Linux community today and they'd snap it up. That would also guarantee that Microsoft worked hard to make their schedule for releasing 64-bit Windows -- they'd be mortified that they'd be left behind.
thad
It's a great, involving book about truly horrible weapons. My favorite bit from the book is that early on Bohr is asked about what it would take to separate enough U-235 to make a bomb, and he said that you'd have to turn the entire country into a factory to do it.
When given a tour of massive Oak Ridge and Hanford projects after production was under way, a Manhattan project scientist said "See! We did it!" And Bohr said, "well, yes, but you did turn the entire country into a factory..."
There were only three nominees for Animated Film last year because there were only nine films submitted into the category, and the rules say that you need at least eight films to have three nominations, and fifteen films to have five nominations.
I'm more than a little surprised that Stuart Little 2 didn't make the list of five. It falls into a no-man's land between animation and visual effects, I had hoped to that it would get a chance in animation. I don't get to nominate in that category, though.
I'm really quite surpsised that Minority Report didn't get a nomination in Visual Effects.
thad
I have heard from several places that Intel's PR flacks have been flogging this story mercilessly, so it's not too surprising to see it show up in Slashdot. Twice.
:)
To get the inaccuracy out of the way -- RenderMan has been running on Linux for several years now, and I would be surprised if Linux wasn't the dominant platform for RenderMan for quite some time, outside of Pixar of course.
I am really surprised, though, that at this point in time they'd go from 64-bit to 32-bit machines, especially as 64-bit PC-like machines are just becoming available. Why not go with Itanium or the new Hammer? Each of Pixar's movies to date have been gloriously more complex and hard-to-render than the last one -- and while I know that they go to fairly extreme lengths to keep the memory footprint down I would think that they'd be bumping up against the 4GB limit already. If not now, then quite soon.
Perhaps this is just a stopgap to get Nemo finished, even 1024 servers is a fairly small cost. Certainly it would be compared to the RenderMan licenses
Every RenderMan user except for Pixar has to look to get the maximum rendering power per CPU, as the licenses are $5,000 and up, while the CPUs are far far cheaper than that. I suppose Pixar's figure of merit is rendering power per dollar or rendering power per BTU (for cooling limited situations), or even render power per ft^2. Still, the 32-bit machines are a baffling choice to me.
thad
ps. My company has a render garden (too small to be a render farm) of a dozen or so Athlons.
Read the paper, it's good, short, well written, and has some important insights. The most amazing statistic from the paper is that the doubling time for the virus was about 8 seconds. Within ten minutes it had covered the entire 'net.
I'm still waiting for the paper describing why systems like Bank of America's ATM's were shut down. Whatever the case, we are sure to see more worms like this in the future, with the possibility of serious damage.
thad
> Linux has replaced a significant number of NT machines at Digital Domain, both on the desktop and in the renderfarm. The machines are not being bought to replace Irix machines, they are being bought instead of Windows machines. And they are being bought for Linux itself, not because Linux is cheaper (each machine has a W2K license because they are dual-boot in case we need a huge LightWave render, and we pay for RedHat, so they are more expensive!).
IIRC, there used to be a very strong pro-NT camp at Digital Domain. They were tireless and strident in their belief that anything Unix could do, NT could do better, claiming that the success of Titanic, for example, was due to NT. Or some such rot.
Fortunately, most of them decamped to form a company called Station X. There they continued to sing the praises of NT right up until the time they went out of business.
Digital Domain has been in the vanguard of those using Linux in visual effects for quite some time; and has been an inspiration to me and others in the industry. As they write quite a bit of their own software, they were able to adopt Linux sooner than most other companies who relied on commercial systems -- although now almost all of the commercial visual effects packages run well on Linux.
thad
We worked on the movie Showtime, and I think it was among the better of Shatner's performances. He was playing himself, trying to show Robert Deniro and Eddie Murphy how to be TV cops, like he was in TJ Hooker. He's just halarious, showing how to dive onto the hood of a car, stuff like that. When he tells Rene Russo that DeNiro is "the worst actor he's ever seen", well, it was the high point in the movie.
thad