Free very high software for linux

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray-tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file.
The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer(tm) was developed from DKBTrace 2.12 (written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of people (called the POV-Team?) in their spare time. The headquarters of the POV-Team is on the internet (see "Where to Find POV-Ray Files" for more details).
The POV-Ray package includes detailed instructions on using the ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are included with POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when you get the package. These scenes can be modified so you do not have to start from scratch.
In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large library of pre-defined shapes and materials is provided. You can include these shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including the library file name at the top of your scene file, and by using the shape or material name in your scene.
Ray-tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects.
Ray-tracing is a rendering technique that calculates an image of a scene by simulating the way rays of light travel in the real world. However it does its job backwards. In the real world, rays of light are emitted from a light source and illuminate objects. The light reflects off of the objects or passes through transparent objects. This reflected light hits our eyes or perhaps a camera lens. Because the vast majority of rays never hit an observer, it would take forever to trace a scene.
Ray-tracing programs like POV-Ray start with their simulated camera and trace rays backwards out into the scene. The user specifies the location of the camera, light sources, and objects as well as the surface texture properties of objects, their interiors (if transparent) and any atmospheric media such as fog, haze, or fire.
For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera, into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These "viewing rays" originate from the viewer, represented by the camera, and pass through the viewing window (representing the final image).
Every time an object is hit, the color of the surface at that point is calculated. For this purpose rays are sent backwards to each light source to determine the amount of light coming from the source. These "shadow rays" are tested to tell whether the surface point lies in shadow or not. If the surface is reflective or transparent new rays are set up and traced in order to determine the contribution of the reflected and refracted light to the final surface color.
Special features like inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity), atmospheric effects and area lights make it necessary to shoot a lot of additional rays into the scene for every pixel.
Main features:
- Easy to use scene description language.
- Large library of stunning example scene files.
- Standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors and textures.
- Very high quality output image files (up to 48-bit color).
- 16 and 24 bit color display on many computer platforms using appropriate hardware.
- Create landscapes using smoothed height fields.
- Many camera types, including perspective, orthographic, fisheye, etc.
- Spotlights, cylindrical lights and area lights for sophisticated lighting.
- Photons for realistic, reflected and refracted, caustics. Photons also interact with media.
- Phong and specular highlighting for more realistic-looking surfaces.
- Inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity) for more realistic lighting.
- Atmospheric effects like atmosphere, ground-fog and rainbow.
- Particle media to model effects like clouds, dust, fire and steam.
- Several image file output formats including Targa, BMP (Windows only), PNG and PPM.
- Basic shape primitives such as ... spheres, boxes, quadrics, cylinders, cones, triangle and planes.
- Advanced shape primitives such as ... Tori (donuts), bezier patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics, smooth triangles, text, superquadrics, surfaces of revolution, prisms, polygons, lathes, fractals, isosurfaces and the parametric object.
- Shapes can easily be combined to create new complex shapes using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray supports unions, merges, intersections and differences.
- Objects are assigned materials called textures (a texture describes the coloring and surface properties of a shape) and interior properties such as index of refraction and particle media (formerly known as "halos").
- Built-in color and normal patterns: Agate, Bozo, Bumps, Checker, Crackle, Dents, Granite, Gradient, Hexagon, Leopard, Mandel, Marble, Onion, Quilted, Ripples, Spotted, Spiral, Radial, Waves, Wood, Wrinkles and image file mapping. Or build your own pattern using functions.
- Users can create their own textures or use pre-defined textures such as ... Brass, Chrome, Copper, Gold, Silver, Stone, Wood.
- Combine textures using layering of semi-transparent textures or tiles of textures or material map files.
- Display preview of image while rendering (not available on all platforms).
- Halt and save a render part way through, and continue rendering the halted partial render later.

vlorb is a high quality Audio CD to audio file encoder. vlorb is a console frontend for cdparanoia and CDDB. The aim of vlorb is to create high-quality audio files in a simple and effective way, while providing a comfortable feature set.

vlorb uses CDDB to get CD information for making tags and file naming.

vlorb is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The COPYING file (part of the download tarball) contains a copy of it.

Very Simple Network Monitor is a complete rewrite of project PHP Monitoring.
Its by default capable of monitoring via ping, UDP and TCP checks. Has builtin plugin system so customized scripts can be used to monitor whatever you like eg. oracle tablespaces, diskspace whatever; Alarms are also generated via plugins, it has standard EMAIL alarm, but can be customized to have snmp traps, or sms gateways or whatever.
Can store uptime reports in mysql and generated reports and uptimes in % availability per service.
Has one centralised html monitoring page with all alarms together for good overview.
Enhancements:
- reporting bug fixed
- alarm causes nmonitor to be locked bug fixed
- some other minor stuff I cant remember
- removed some typos from INSTALL doc:)

Trophy project is an action car racing game.

Trophy is an action car racing game for Linux. Its 2D (top-view) but aims to provide high quality graphics.

You can shoot, drop bombs, and drive against the other players.

Crystality Plugin consists of XMMS plugin and stdin/stdout plugin. It was written for realtime remastering of sound from mp3 files.
You will need a reasonably good stereo and a good ear to notice quality
improvement, otherwise this is not for you.

This plugin tries to patch mp3 format flaws, not a poor audio hardware! Yes, you should be able to hear well enough (sorry) - for some of my friends plugin is a cool thing, while the others does not hear nothing but echo and stereo expander (well, you will hear every effect if you set it to the maximum, but it will not sound nice).

Crystality was written for 16bit 44.1kHz stereo sound and may give strange results
with other sound formats.

Damian Hodgkiss sent me a quick port for Winamp 2.x. I have not tried it yet, but you can get it (cr-quick-winamp-port.zip).

This plugin does mainly four things (and some minor tricks):

1. Adds some sounds in very high frequency range. Most of the mp3s in The Net are flawed with a 16(15?) kHz cutoff. Even these ones compressed at high bitrates. This spectrum hole is audible and very unpleasant. This plugin helps a bit. Old mp3s made from the vinyl or the magnetic tape may also sound better with these "steroids". For old mp3s youll probably need to set filter to 0.1.

2. Adds some even harmonic distortions (actually nonlinearity), that sounds nice. Valve amps introduce even harmonic distortions (although differnt way) Look at audiophile pages for more info (well, mp3 format is not an audiophile stuff at all, but... welcome to the real world...).

3. Adds simple, but nice 3D echo (concert hall or church like). Most of echo plugins sounds too hard and aggresively for me. This one does not.

4. Extends stereo.

USING:

There are currently two versions of plugin - XMMS plugin and stdin/stdout. Stdin/out plugin is completly independent of XMMS plugin. It even stores its configuration in a separate file (~/.crystalityrc). Stdin/out plugin is alpha code, so some features are missed. You cannot reopen configuration dialog after closing without restarting plugin, there are no "save config", "load config" buttons. Configuration is loaded automatically on startup and saved on exit, either on normal finish or ^C. You can disable GUI with -g option (useful in scripts).

Because this plugin adds some sounds at high frequencies, you will probably need to decrease treble level on your amplifier. Plugin does not perform normalization, so you should slightly decrease signal level in XMMS equalizer (NOT volume slider on the main panel). Setting sliders to the maximum is generally a bad idea (well, except the filter, where that setting is useful).

PERFORMANCE:

It eats about 15% of CPU on my AMD K6-2/400 and optimization is still possible, this is not highly optimized code.

INSTALLATION:

Distribution contains binary version of XMMS plugin library and stdin/stdout plugin executable (Linux i586, glibc 2.1.3). You may copy plugin library file (libcrystality.so) into XMMSs Effect directory and executable (crystality-stdio) to /usr/local/bin or any location you prefer. For default locations simply type:

make install

and thats it.
You may also build crystality from the source.

make buildinstall

typed as root in the source directory should be all you have to do.

This plugin was my first small step in gtk programming, so dont expect any wonders, GUI is actually a quick hack to hardcoded settings. I am not a GUI programmer.

YAZ Proxy application is highly configurable and can be used in a number of different applications, ranging from debugging Z39.50-based applications and protecting overworked servers, to improving the performance of stateless WWW/Z39.50 gateways.
Main features:
- Configurable logging
- SRU/SRW server function, to allow any Z39.50 server to also support the ZiNG protocols
- Load balancing across multiple backend servers
- Session-sharing and pre-initialization to improve performance in servers with expensive session initialization
- Configurable request filtering, to keep bad requests from reaching the server
- XML support -- MARC records can be converted to MARCXML, and XSLT-transformations allow the proxy to support arbitrary retrieval schemas in XML
- Load governor function limits requests from aggressive batch-mode clients
- Efficient multiplexing software enables small memory footprint and very high performance
NOTE: The YAZ Proxy, a complete application, is available under the GPL license. Other licensing terms are available to commercial vendors upon request.

GNU Archimedes is the GNU package for the design and simulation of submicron semiconductor devices. Archimedes is a 2D Fast Monte Carlo simulator which can take into account all the relevant quantum effects, thank to the implementation of the Bohm effective potential method.

The physics and geometry of a general device is introduced by typing a simple script, which makes, in this sense, GNU Archimedes a powerfull tool for the simulation of quite general semiconductor devices.

In the present release, GNU Archimedes is able to simulate electrons and heavy holes in Silicon and GaAs (Gamma and L-valleys) devices (holes are simulated by means of a simplified MEP model), and in the next release, which is in preparation, it will be able to make simulations in 1D, 2D and 3D (this release will be delivered as soon as possible).

The Scientifical and Industrial Motivations
In today semiconductor technology, the miniaturization of devices is more and more progressing. In this context, it is easy to see that numerical simulations play an important role at every level of device manufacture. In fact, the cost of designing and physically constructing prototypes for VLSI semiconductor devices is very high and without the availability of advanced simulators the efforts for devices miniaturization would, likely, be brought to a halt. From assessing the performance of individual transistors, to circuits and systems, and, consequently, with the promise of improved device performance, industries are encouraged to keep on miniaturizing with lower manufacture costs.

But, unfortunately, such simulations are not whithout their challenges... A first consequence of device miniaturization is that simulations of submicron semicondutor devices requires advanced transport models. Because of the presence of very high and rapidly varying electric field, phenomena occur which cannot be described by means of the well-known drift-diffusion models, which do not incorporate energy as a dynamical variable.

That is why some generalization has been sought in order to obtain more physically accurate models, like energy-transport and hydrodynamical models. The energy-transport models which are implemented in commercial simulators are based on phenomenological constitutive equations for the particle flux and energy flux depending on a set of parameters which are fitted to homogeneous bulk material Monte Carlo simulations. So, this is not, certainly, a satisfactory physical description of the internal electronic dynamics in a semiconductor device.

As current device technologies quickly approach the scales whereby quantum effects due to strong confinement of carriers and direct source-drain tunneling will begin to dominate, new simulation techniques are required in order to fully understand and acurately simulate the physics behind the technology operation.

Of all the simulation methods currently employed, ensemble Monte Carlo has always been, both in the accademic and industrial community, the most vigorous and trusted method for device simulation, as it is proven to be reliable and predictive, as one can easily see from the vast bibliography on this subject.

However, as Monte Carlo relies on the particle nature of the electron (in fact we consider an electron like a biliard ball), quantum effects associated with the wave-like nature of electrons cannot fully incorporated into the actual simulators, i.e. the ensemble Monte Carlo have to be lightly (or strongly, it depends on the point of view and on the methods implemented...) modified to take into account the quantum effects, at least at a first order of approximation, which is certainly enough to take into account correctly all the relevant quantum effects present in the present-day semiconductor devices (till 2015 probably...). In order to take into account the wave-like nature of electrons we use a recently introduced quantum theory, the so-called Bohm effective potential theory.

So it is challenging and very interesting to develop such a code for 2D quantum submicron semiconductor devices. This is why I have decided to implement this code, but these are not the only motivations...

The Ethical Motivations
The very sad situation you quickly observe working in a semiconductor industry, but also in all places in which researches about semiconductor devices are made, the only codes for simulation you can find are not free and are proprietary codes.

That is a very bad situation because, at the present time, if you need to develop your own code for the purpose of simulating a device it is IMPOSSIBLE to obtain an advanced one in a short time, and, trust me, this is EXTREMELY BAD for scientific research... (Immagine if you had to re-discover the Newtonian laws every time you need them...) So, you can find a huge amount of papers describing a lot of numerical methods for simulating, in a very advanced way, semiconductor devices (even in the quantum case), but nobody will give you a code on which you can construct your own method (with the unlikely exception that at least one of the programmers is a friend of yours :) ).

Even worst, if you are a semiconductor device designer and you want to simulate "realistically" a new device, you have to pay (trust me, at very high costs!) a BINARY (just a binary and not the code!) from some well-known software industry. This binary will certainly have some bugs (because it is coded by humans which are not perfect...) and you will never have the possibility of fix them on your own. Of course, you can write to the software house and tell them that there is a bug, but, how many time do you will wait for a new release without those bugs? I dont think it will be a short time...

My impression is that, after a long research on the Web for a Free Software dealing with advanced 2D semiconductor device simulation, there was not a free code for the purpose of semiconductor devices simulation (i mean under GPL license). To be sure about it, I asked to the great Richard Stallman (by mail) if it will be worth to do a code like this and he encouraged me to code it, because there wasnt a code like this as free. So I decided to write this code..