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Actually, check this out. It's a project where they are rendering by calculating how the photons move from the light and hit the "camera".

I added "www." to the URL, it works.
Try this...

The link to the image should be http://www.cpjava.net/raytraces/DRUN.GIF (The www is necessary and was left out of the link in the article.)

People are already cracking jokes about how the fact that it's in Java will mean that it will run a lot slower than it could. While I love to pick on Java as much as the next person, I am curious how much it actually makes a difference for raytracing - does anyone know? My experience with numerically-intensive algorithms is that Java is 2-4x slower than C. You can get it within 2x of the speed of C if you ignore object-oriented programming and you're really good at Java optimization, but that's it. And it will run much slower on some architecetures because Java guarantees certain floating-point operation semantics at the expense of speed.

If I were writing a new numerically-intensive program from scratch that I wanted to use for a cross-platform distributed computing project, I'd probably do it in Numerical Python (NumPy) - my experience has been that it can be within a factor of 2-3 of the speed of C, but it's much more concise, requiring half as many lines of code as Java or C to do the same thing. And these days Python is just as cross-platform as Java - it definitely runs great on Mac, Windows, and Unix.

Here

Emailed this to the editor, but something must've gone wrong.

The URL to the photo soup image is missing the 'www'. The image can be seen here (you may want to do a 'Save Target As', as the mime-type seems to be a bit off).