Then there's the problem of shadowing/shading you pointed out. In a pure ray tracer, everything has that unnatural shiny/bright look. This is because you trace rays from the screen back to the light source. Works fine for direct illumination but the real world has lots of indirect illumination that gives the richness of shadows we see. For that you need something else like radiosity or photon mapping, and that has different costs.

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why ray tracing can't handle indirect illumination. Wouldn't the traced ray modify the intensity and color of the (eventually found) light source with each bounce? Or is the problem that when you cast one ray per pixel you only get the contribution from a single light source in the end?

Well, considering that the critical mass of pure plutonium-239 is about 10kg, I would say the risk of 8g of thorium going critical is fairly small. That's not to say I believe this will ever work though.

The quoted statement doesn't make sense either. Subcritical only means that there is no self-sustaining nuclear reaction, not that there are no reactions taking place. I haven't RTFA but it sounds like whoever wrote it didn't understand what was going on.

This feature alone makes it way better than facebook for me. It's so easy to send messages only to close friends, or colleagues, etc. And I can easily choose to only view messages from specific groups as well. With facebook it always feels like everything you write or do is visible to everyone. And everything someone else does is visible to me, which is not optimal either.

Yep, same here. I pay a high price for premium channels and yet I can't see much of what I want to see. And when / if they finally do air it here, it's not in HD. While I can get an HD version of it the same day it airs in the US. A case of the pirated alternative being a better product. I still keep paying for the channels though, even if I rarely use them. Maybe I shouldn't though (the whole "vote with your wallet" thing).

Do you need consent in a public location? Honest question, I'm not from the US. In Sweden you can film, record audio and take as many pictures as you like in any public place including inside buildings.

When the limit is reached, there will still be coin to be made from mining (though it wouldn't really be mining) from transaction fees. When mining become prohibitively expensive people will stop mining, which will decrease the difficulty and make it (slightly) profitable again. Either that or people don't stop mining and operate at a loss. Neither scenario has any impact on the usability of bitcoin.

Yup, agreed. Doesn't mean it doesn't have a future though. Might not be likely, but not impossible either.

got it, thanks!

If anyone has an invite I'd gladly accept it at wallin.gustav at gmaildotcom. Thanks!

Hm, my bank never took a cut from my debit card. The credit cards I have don't either, unless I don't pay the bills the same month I made the purchases. Where do banks do this?

Here in Sweden, there have actually been plans (don't know the status) to add a fee to cash withdrawals. This is to reduce cash circulation, in an attempt to minimize robberies (no cash in stores, not much to rob).

Yes, this is correct. However, Bitcoin is still in its infancy. Nobody could reasonably expect it to have a well established "market ecosystem" this early on. This is an argument why Bitcoin is not fit for major use at this time, not that it will never be.

As the number of hands played goes to infinity, the player who makes the best decisions with regards to his odds of winning, the size of the pot etc is going to win. When talking about cashgames it is said that one needs to play on the order of 100k hands (which isn't that much when talking about online poker) to be sure whether his strategy and skill is good enough to win.

Sure, if you play a few tournaments during a lifetime then luck will be a significant factor. If you play every tournament of the WSOP, WPT, EPT every year skill is likely to determine your results.

I'm curious, since this is never specified: are these average outputs per year?

For some reference, here in Sweden we have 1252MW of wind power installed, average over the past 30 days is ~320MW actual output. I haven't been able to find the yearly average.

Hi,

As I already said, no we will not be running X on all the nodes. One of them will run it, with a few cores reserved for the purpose (this is the way we do it today and we have no significant issues with the arrangement). But like I say, we may very well decide to use one of the boxes from the old cluster for this task, seems like a good idea. But I still think we'd like the same distro to make the administration bit easier.

One of our most used softwares is practically closed source (to get access to the source you have to pass a series of security screenings as well as motivate why you really REALLY need the source, it's almost impossible for non-US citizens). This software does not implement GPGPU functionality at this point, and whether or when it will be supported is unknown to us. Therefore, getting GPUs at this point would probably not be the best idea. It has been discussed, and we might look at getting boxes that can be upgraded with GPUs in the future.

As for being an administrator, I volunteered for it so I'm not "unsuspecting" :) I have my reasons for wanting to do it, won't go into them here. But it will not count towards the time I have for research, that is already reserved specifically for research. We will be at least 3 people sharing the load on this too, I don't really see a problem with it.

Yes, we have looked at the other clusters around here. The problem with them is that we have to pay for them per unit of processing time per specific project. These will be used for larger jobs that our local cluster cannot handle, the local one will mainly be used for developing software to run on the larger ones as well as running smaller simulations and verifying algorithms. This is very useful to us, since it would be a pain to plan small things like that ahead of time. And we do need more processing power than we have today, even smaller jobs of the type we do require some power.
Our current setup works fine for this and it has been of great use, but it is getting old and is beginning to be a limitation. So now that we're considering upgrading we wanted to do some research first, hence the question.

Thanks very much for your advice, I will keep your comments in mind. Maybe we can find someone else who wants to run a cluster for a similar purpose. Though we really do like having one reserved just for us as well. This is a general opinion in the department, and it would probably be hard to convince everyone to do it any other way. Any additional comments are of course welcome!