Allrighty, I know, if I am going to get irritated by the ignorance of human beings, I shouldn’t read Slashdot. A recent article detailed China’s desire to
mine the moon for minerals. Never mind that it is absurd (can we name a single element so precious that it would justify the cost of rocket launches to bring it back from the moon. I would have expected someone to bring up that. But no, instead we get gems like the following.

Any of those more versed in physics than myself care to comment on what lowering the mass of the moon could do? I am sure not enough would be mined to raise the mass of the earth enough to cause problems, but wouldn’t a great enough reduction in lunar mass decrease the force of gravity between the earth and the moon, thus (possibely) destabilizing the orbit?

Sigh. Or how ’bout:

Presumably when they talk about “mining the moon” they are talking about going there to mine Helium 3. This is an isotope of helium which, if available in abundance, would be a perfect fuel for clean fusion power generation.

Except of course that nobody has built a working, controllable fusion reactor.

Economically this just doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to imagine the level of technology to make it make sense. Even the most difficult to mine natural resources of this planet will be cheaper to recover
than any resource from the moon or asteroids. Lunar mining is a pipe dream.

I was reading a Slashdot article this morning entitled A Music Industry Case Study, and was suddenly struck by the apparent absurdity of the term the Music Industry.

People never discuss “the Drawing Industry” or the “Sculpture Industry”. Why is music singled out in being labelled an Industry?

My online dictionary defines “industry” thusly:

in.dus.try
('in-(.)d*s-tr{e-})
Etymology: MF i[industrie] skill, employment involving skill, fr. L 
   i[industria] diligence, fr. i[industrius] diligent, fr. OL 
   i[indostruus], fr. i[indu] in + i[-struus] (akin to L 
   i[struere] to build) -- more at INDIGENOUS,  
   STRUCTURE]
1) n, diligence in an employment or pursuit
2) a) n, systematic labor esp. for the creation of value
   b) n, a department or branch of a craft, art, business, or
      manufacture; esp.: one that employs a large personnel and 
      capital esp. in manufacturing
   c) n, a distinct group of productive enterprises
   d) n, manufacturing activity as a whole

It appears that definition 2b comes the closest to an explanation.
The reason that we call the Music Industry an industry is that it employs vast amounts of capital and personnel to bring you the latest Britney Spears album. The music industry is a huge lumbering behemoth, supporting a wide array of musicians at levels far below minimum wage in an effort to find the few acts which they will promote into success.

Most of the people I know who are musicians have day jobs. Most don’t really complain that much about the lack of jobs or
money. They enjoy what they do. They’d do it for free. They’d do it if it cost them money (which it sometimes does, either directly or indirectly in the form of lost wages they could be receiving if they abandoned their musical aspirations).

People repeat the glib phrase “it’s all about the music”, but it obviously must be true, because to a first approximation, nobody makes any money at it. Frankly, I think music would be a lot better if we gave up the hope that it would be an industry, and accept it for what it is: art.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that most people believe that it is more important to have an immediate and distinct opinion rather than an actual informed opinion. This was brought home to me in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, when various newsgroups like
sci.space.shuttle were flooded with premature speculations and cries for the heads of NASA management, long before any sober consideration of the facts was possible.

Of course if you are looking for this kind of thing, there is no better place than Slashdot. Case in point, the recent article Slashdot | Pixar Eclipses Sun with Linux/Intel
The resulting flood of messages runs a wide gamut, but many fo the articles which were moderated up held little information, or even actual misinformation.

SuperDug comments:

I was under the impression…

That Sun had tried renderman (or whatever they call it) to run on 32 bit processors and it was a horrible disaster. Something about how it seemed more feasible and cost efficient to use Sun until the days in which the competiting 64 bit processors became cheaper.

I could have sworn that the software couldn’t run at all in 64 bit. I’m just wondering if they didn’t take a step down when they converted 64-bit optimized code to run on regular high cache 32-bit pentiums.

First of all, Sun doesn’t own or develop RenderMan. Pixar Animation Studios does. Until a few
years back, Sun platforms made up the bulk of RenderMan sales. The availability of cheap Intel
boxes and the maturing of Linux as an inexpensive operating system have made it a choice which
a large number of RenderMan customers now use.

RenderMan is a very portable system, the history of which goes back at least 15 years. It has been ported to 64 bit machines, including the DEC Alpha and the Sparc.

TheRaven64 opines:

I’m actually a little surprised they use general purpose CPUs for this kind of task. I’d have thought that a load of custom DSPs might be faster, and probably cheaper – How about 1 DSP per pixel (About 10 million?). I’m sure that would really zip along, if they could sort out the memory access issues inherent in this kind of application. Ray tracing is perfect for parallel execution, since each pixel really is independent of each other pixel, and each frame is likewise independent.

This is a particularly silly opinion because it sounds plausible unless you actually know anything about the scale and scope of what actually producing a movie entails. Pixar used to manufacture special purpose computer graphics hardware. They lost money and they stopped. In its place they created a new portable rendering system, and then have ridden 15 years of Moore’s law to make it 1000 times faster, merely by expending the time of a mid-range software guy to spend a few weeks porting to each new architecture. If the commentor could describe how Pixar could construct
custom hardware with releases every 18 months that double in speed cheaper than that, then I’d like to hear from him.

As for the old parallel raytracing comment, people who make this comment have never tried to write rendering software, particularly software that can handle the large scenes which are typical of movie production. In principle such an application is trivially parallelizable, but the reality has lots of details which are hard to manage.