[PLUG] Blender, Povray, or ...

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Wed Jul 8 16:33:02 UTC 2009


Warning: irrelevant information below :)

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Rich Shepard<rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
>
>   Was the animation with a parachute? That would slow it down.
>

As we all know, non-visual binaries have higher density than text
files, or images.  Executables and libraries are much like a 2x4:
unhampered, they fall like a rock. (video, of course, falls at a rate
between images and executables, having the surface area of the
individual frame's resolution, but with a whole *stack* of them.)

Anything with higher density than a bitmap naturally needs a parachute
when being delivered from the Cloud, lest they be corrupted on
landing.  (Really big images, while not needing a parachute, take a
long time to transfer because of that whole "drifting around like a
feather" thing.)

(Sidebar on damage-detection: md5 effectively extract the "black box"
(the md5sum) out of the delivered data, and detect the presence of any
anomolous activtivity during touch-down.  shai, pgp, etc. simply
provide different kinds of blackbox--some are more robust than others.
 If the md5 box gets banged up, it *might* not be reliable anymore,
but the pgp boxes are a lot more resistant to damage.  At the very
least, you'll always know if a pgpbox was broken on landing, whereas
with a md5box, you're never *certain* that the box survivde while the
binary failed, but it's still a pretty good assumption.)

Advanced systems pair enormous images *with* the binaries -- cutting
out the necessity for the parachute entirely -- of course, if you're
unaware, your local system may not realize that the 'chute is actually
important, and not grant it the care required.  This is why you
sometimes download a game and see visual glitches in the
splashscreen--they're just holes in the 'chute.

Finally, fibre networks are substantially faster because they are
effectively transfering files in a vacuum: nothing but light is
involved (no atmosphere from WiFi/3G, nor any pesky copper), and
without resistance, everything falls at the same rate -- 'chute or no.

:)

--Rogan



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