[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 @ 13:05 -0500, Joshua Boyd said:

> > > I never particularly have time to do anything that might take advantage
> > > of these cards.  
> > 
> > I make time these days, and I had to do it to keep from going nuts.
> > 
> > I started getting really burned out and depressed, and never had time to
> > do anything.
> > 
> > I finally started forcing myself to do things I didn't have time for:
> > photo editing, hikes in the woods, playing games, and reading.
> 
> Photo editing, hikes, and reading don't really call for stunning video
> cards.  

I was just referring to having time of course.

> Video games might (if that's what you mean by playing games),
> but I figure a Nintendo or Playstation is a better device for games than
> a tricked out PC.

I would not mind having a console for the types of games they do well
with, but a lot of my favorite types of games are terrible on a console.

Console games are almost always dumbed down compared to PC games.

Unfortunately, now that a lot of games are released for both console and
PC, they are dumbing down the PC versions too.

Oblivion is one example. Great game, but it has severe flaws that are
directly because of it being crammed into the Xbox 360.  

I really like how PC games can be easily modified, and a lot of game
makers are actively encouraging it.

You can do mods to (some) Xbox 360 games, but the process is painful and
it just doesn't work well. Almost no one does it. Also, if you have any
kind of problem, there is almost no way to fix it.

> At the moment, the only thing I ever do that calls for a better than
> early radeon card is tinker with shader programming.  

Do you use OpenGL for that, or are you doing Windows programming?

Is shader programming hard to learn or is it just "yet another 3D
technique" that you get used to?

I have books on OpenGL but haven't done much yet. I generally use fairly
vanilla X11 windows, just enough to get OpenGL up and do everything else
from there.

I just want to learn the basics for now, I don't have any real plans to
use those skills yet.

Of course, I probably wouldn't say no to a job doing it, if an
opportunity came around that would allow me to learn on the job.

> A radeon 9000 was
> just fine for playing and lightly compositing HD video, and my other
> resources are so far behind that it isn't the video cards stopping me
> from doing more with HD.

Understand.

For example, my desktop still has older SCSI drives, and so my dual
cores and 2GB of memory spend too much time waiting on the drives.

I want to get a new SCSI drive, but hate to spend the money just to gain
some speed. They are so expensive, and that's $125 I could use for other
things.

Now that I have PCIe, I could also upgrade the SCSI controller, but a
faster drive would at least max out my 80MB/sec Symbios controller.

> Anyway, I wish I did more photo-editing, but first I'm trying to get my
> photo-sorting problems taken care of.

I finally settled on a system and stuck with it. It's not perfect, but
it helps to have something and stick with it.

My sorting system is very simple, mainly because it was the only thing I
would actually stick with.

I store things with this pathname:

	/files/photos/originals/YYYY/YYMMDD/YYMMDD-<sequence>.<ext>
	/files/photos/scans/YYYY/YYMMDD/YYMMDD-<sequence>.<ext>
	/files/photos/<other person or source>/YYYY/YYMMDD/YYMMDD-<sequence>.<ext>

If I scan something, I have to edit metadata by hand, but otherwise this
has worked out well for me.

Problems with it:

	- filename doesn't indicate camera used or the nature of the
	  non-personal sources
	- I should probably put everything under "originals"
	- If I forget to sort all picture for a given date and add them
	  later, the sequence numbers will change.

For edits, I don't yet have a solid system of organization.  Still
working on that.

> I probably should focus on getting newer workstations first, then on
> upgrading the new ones later.

True.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["There are nowadays professors of
philosophy, but not philosophers." ]