MoCap

Motion capture, Motion Tracking or Mocap, is a technique of digitally recording movements for entertainment, sports and medical applications.

Motion tracking or motion capture started as an analysis tool in biomechanics research, and expanded into education, training, sports and recently computer animation for cinema and video games as the technology has matured. A performer wears markers near each joint to identify the motion by the positions or angles between the markers. Acoustic, inertial, LED, magnetic or reflective markers, or combinations of any of these, are tracked, optimally at least two times the rate of the desired motion, to submillimeter positions. The motion capture computer software records the positions, angles, velocities, accelerations and impulses, providing an accurate digital representation of the motion.
In entertainment applications this can reduce the costs of animation which otherwise requires the animator to draw each frame, or with more sophisticated software, key frames which are interpolated by the software. Motion capture saves time and creates more natural movements than manual animation, but is limited to motions that are anatomically possible. Some applications might require additional impossible movements like animated super hero martial arts or stretching and squishing that are not possible with real actors.
In biomechanics, sports and training, real time data can provide the necessary information to diagnose problems or suggest ways to improve performance, driving ever faster motion capture technology.

The procedure:
In the motion capture session, the movements of one or more actors are sampled many times per second. High resolution optical motion capture systems can be used to sample body, facial and finger movement at the same time.
A motion capture session records only the movements of the actor, not his visual appearance. These movements are recorded as animation data which are mapped to a 3D model (human, giant robot, etc.) created by a computer artist, to move the model the same way. This is comparable to the older technique of rotoscope where the visual appearance of the motion of an actor was filmed, then the film used as a guide for the frame by frame motion of a hand-drawn animated character.
If desired, a camera can pan, tilt, or dolly around the stage while the actor is performing and the motion capture system can capture the camera and props as well. This allows the computer generated characters, images and sets, to have the same perspective as the video images from the camera. A computer processes the data and displays the movements of the actor, as inferred from the 3D position of each marker. If desired, a virtual or real camera can be tracked as well, providing the desired camera positions in terms of objects in the set.

Intel® Itanium® 2 Processor

Intel® Itanium® 2 Processor
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Increase your productivity with ongoing platform innovation that is truly inspired, and access a world of optimized solutions for less cost than proprietary platforms make possible.


Product Information

Download Dual-Core Intel® Itanium 2 processor product brief (PDF 472KB)
Download Intel® Itanium® 2 processor product brief (PDF 122KB)
Quick reference guide (PDF 102KB)
View specification chart
View processor numberΔ details
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Description

New Dual-Core Itanium® 2-based servers provide new levels of flexibility, mainframe-class reliability, proven performance, and cost-effective scalability for your most data-intensive computing needs offering more reasons than ever to choose cost-effective Intel standards-based architecture over RISC-based and mainframe systems.The new Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor 9000 series delivers double the performance of yesterday's processor¹, Intel® Cache Safe Technology and Enhanced Machine Check Architecture for increased availability and reliability, hardware-assisted Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, and 20 percent lower power consumption¹.

Features and Benefits

Dual-Core Processing and EPIC TechnologyThe Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series provides two complete 64-bit processing cores on one processor providing double the performance of yesterday's processor. EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) technology is the cornerstone of the Intel Itanium architecture. It provides a variety of advanced implementations of parallelism, predication, and speculation, resulting in superior Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) to help address the current and future requirements of high-end enterprise and technical workloads.

Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT)The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor includes hardware-assisted virtualization support that helps reduce virtualization complexity, improve virtualization performance, and increase operating system compatibility.

Intel® Cache Safe TechnologyThis new technology enables high-end systems to operate even in the event of errors in the L3 cache that can bring systems down. Intel Cache Safe Technology minimizes cache errors and helps ensure mainframe-caliber availability.

Outstanding Energy Efficiency¹The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor uses up to 20 percent less power than yesterday's Intel Itanium 2 processor, enabling as much as 2.5 times higher performance per watt, lowering energy requirements while providing significant performance improvements.



Demo the technology
Get Inside Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT)
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Products in action
Benefits for your enterprise
64-bit computing
Performance benchmarks
High Performance computing



1 Performance measured using OLTP (NT/SQL), SPECjbb2005, SPECCPU, Linpack, and SAP-SD. Intel Internal Measurement (March, 2006) comparing system configurations of Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor 1.6 GHz with 24 MB L3 cache to Intel® Itanium® 2 processor 1.6 GHz with 9 MB L3 cache. Actual performance may vary. See www.intel.com/performance/server/itanium2.Δ Intel processor numbers are not a measure of performance. Processor numbers differentiate features within each processor family, not across different processor families. See http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/index.htm for details.Download product brief for more information on Intel® Itanium® 2 processors.

Init Runlevels

The idea behind operating different services at different runlevels essentially revolves around the fact that different systems can be used in a different ways. Some services cannot be used until the system is in a particular state, or mode, such as ready for more than one user or has networking available.
There are times in which you may want to operate the system at a lower mode, such as fixing disk corruption problems in runlevel 1 so no other users can possibly be on the system or leaving a server in runlevel 3 without an X session running. In these cases, running services that depend upon a higher system mode to function does not make sense because they will not work correctly anyway. By already having each service assigned to start when its particular runlevel is reached, you ensure an orderly start up process and can quickly change the mode of the machine without worrying about which services to manually start or stop.
Generally, Red Hat Linux operates in runlevel 3 — full multi-user mode. The following runlevels are defined in Red Hat Linux:
0 — Halt
1 — Single-user mode
2 — Not used (user-definable)
3 — Full multi-user mode
4 — Not used (user-definable)
5 — Full multi-user mode (with an X-based login screen)
6 — Reboot
The default runlevel for a system to boot to and stop is configured in /etc/inittab. For more information on /etc/inittab, see the section called SysV Init.
Feel free to configure runlevels 2 and 4 as you see fit. Many users configure those runlevels in a way that makes the most sense for them while leaving the standard runlevels 3 and 5 alone. This allows them to quickly move in and out of their custom configuration without disturbing the normal set of features at the standard runlevels.
If your machine gets into a state where it will not boot due to a bad /etc/inittab or will not let you log in because you have a corrupted /etc/passwd (or if you have simply forgotten your password), boot into single-user mode.
If you are using LILO, you can enter single-user mode by typing linux single at the LILO boot: prompt.
If you are using GRUB as your boot loader, you can enter single-user mode using the following steps.
In the graphical GRUB boot loader screen, select the Red Hat Linux boot label and press [e] to edit it.
Arrow down to the kernel line and press [e] to edit it.
At the prompt, type single and press [Enter].
You will be returned to the GRUB screen with the kernel information. Press the [b] key to boot the system into single user mode.
A very bare system will boot, and you will have a command shell from which you can fix things.
If this does not work, you will need to boot by typing linux init=/bin/bash at the LILO boot: prompt. This places you at a shell prompt; note that no filesystems other than the root filesystem are mounted, and the root filesystem is mounted in read-only mode. To mount it in read-write mode (to allow editing of a broken /etc/inittab, for example) do:
mount -n /proc
mount -o rw,remount /Init Runlevels

Windows Unattended Installation

Windows Unattended Installation
By Michael Guyett

Nothing is more fun than installing Windows on a computer. Sitting there watching the screen waiting for the install program to prompt you for all the information it needs from you. A typical installation usually takes around 30 to 45 minutes. Now imagine you need to do four installations, now ten, now twenty. You can see where this could take a long time. If you charge per hour, 20 computers could cost your clients a pretty penny.

Let's say you need to get Windows installed on a machine in a remote location, and there aren't any tech savvy users to do the process for you. This is where unattended installations come in handy. All you have to do is create an answer file. Then you can email the file to them, or even just snail-mail them a floppy with it, and presto, your user can do the install without knowing anything about the computer. Luckily for us, Microsoft was kind enough to put in tools to help you automate the process.
Getting Started
#The first tool you need is setupmgr.exe. This is the program that lets you answer all of the installation questions ahead of time, and save them to a disk. This is the most import part of the unattended installation.
Setupmgr.exe is found on the Windows Install CD. It is located in Support\Tools\DEPLOY.CAB open this file up, select all the files, then go to the file menu and choose extract. Extract the files to a directory where you can find them, I usually use c:\Windows\Deploytoolsmd c:\windows\deploytoolsexpand -f:* deploy.cab c:\windows\deploytools
The Quiz
Now run setupmgr.exe. Choose 'Create a new answer file'. Now choose: Windows X Unattended Answer file. You might have to choose what type of computer your setting up, for example, Windows 2000 setupmgr will ask if you are setting up 2000 Pro, or 2000 server. Next you get to choose the type of unattended installation, for our purposes, we're going to choose fully unattended.
Now just follow the wizard, answering the questions as you want them to be answered. Finish the wizard and save the file. If the wizard asked for a CD-Key, you just need to rename the answer file to winnt.sif. If you didn't get asked to put in the CD-Key you need to do so manually. Open the answer file in notepad (I believe it is unattend.txt). Under [UserData] put in the following header and key:
ProductID=”xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx”
Replace the x's with your actual CD-Key. Now save the file as winnt.sif

Clue #1: When you extracted the files from Deploy.Cab it created a "unattend.doc" file. In this document are all the additional options you can include in the winnt.sif file. If you need something special done on install, you might take a look and see if it too can be automated.

Clue #2: If you saved the file as the default option "unattend.txt" you will need to rename the file. Make sure in Tools>Folder Options>View you have unchecked the option "Hide extensions for known file types" or else you could end up saving your file as "winnt.sif.txt" on accident!
Now copy the winnt.sif file to a floppy, boot the computer from the Windows CD and put the floppy in the drive only after the computer begins booting from the CD. Windows Setup will automatically look for the file on the floppy.

Tada! You have successfully automated your installation of Windows. Look at this sample Winnt.sif answer file.

References:Winnt.sif Answer File sample.

Intel Virtualization Technology

Intel® Virtualization Technology is part of a collection of premier Intel designed and manufactured silicon technologies that deliver new and improved computing benefits for home and business users, and IT managers. Others in the market today include Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology and Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology, with plans for Intel® Active Management Technology and LaGrande Technology that focus on management and greater security underway.

Virtualization enhanced by Intel Virtualization Technology will allow a platform to run multiple operating systems and applications in independent partitions. With virtualization, one computer system can function as multiple “virtual” systems. With processor and I/O enhancements to Intel’s various platforms, Intel Virtualization Technology can improve the performance and robustness of today’s software-only virtual machine solutions.

Intel Virtualization Technology will provide a foundation for widely-deployed virtualization solutions

# Intel Virtualization Technology-based Virtualization under development by leading providers of virtualization infrastructure

# Intel Virtualization Technology forms the foundation of a roadmap of Intel technologies focused on improved virtualization and safer computing

Provides headroom for more robust hardware-assisted virtualization solutions:

# When combined with the right software Intel Virtualization Technology can improve the reliability and supportability of virtualization solutions, enabling improved consolidation and fail-over for servers

# For client platforms, Intel Virtualization Technology helps optimized software provide a foundation for highly available and more secure client virtualization partitions

#Intel platforms supporting Intel Virtualization Technology started shipping in 2005 for desktop and 2006 for mobile platforms and Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers and workstations.

# Later in 2006, Intel® Itanium® processor-based servers supporting Intel Virtualization Technology will start shipping