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I realy would not mind living in Barcelona.

Thank you for the hint. I will definitely check it out.
Here's a link for the other users: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx....

Apropos, the documentary that I actually meant to link to is "Critical Mass" (2012). It deals with overpopulation in general but also refers to Calhoun.

It's quite rare to see a bicyclist come to a complete stop . . . or even slow to walking speed at a stop sign and it's common to see them blow through red lights without even slowing down significantly.

A 2007 study of 7,502 cyclists at five random intersections in London concluded that "an average of 16% violated red lights, whilst the remaining 84% obeyed the traffic signals."

A similar study of 2,617 cyclists at seven intersections across in Oregon in 2013 found the red light compliance rate to be 69.1% (89.7% excluding right-turn-on-red which is illegal but generally safer since you're not crossing traffic lanes which was your complaint).

I don't consider 16% and 21% high enough to call "common."

Actually...

Here in Portland a lot of roads downtown lost square footage thanks to wide swaths of green-painted areas which are bike-only, forcing cars to concentrate themselves into fewer lanes, wearing those portions of the road out faster, etc.

Sounds like all the more reason to get more of those wear-inducing cars off the roads and replace them with cyclists. The other side effect of narrowing roads is that it increases safety for everyone (cars, cyclists and pedestrians) since drivers naturally go slower on narrow roads. Make a city street as wide and straight as a freeway and drivers will drive as if it's a freeway.

Also, in many locales, bicycles do require a license anyway (mostly to assist in recovering stolen ones). Wouldn't take much to slap a tax on those bad boys, and without much overhead beyond what's already in place.

I'm fine with a bike tax that goes to dedicated cycling infrastructure, but don't tax a cyclist to pay for shared roads that they are already paying through their general taxes. My locality passed a general bond measure to pay for road repairs, so I'm paying for roads through my property taxes whether I drive or not.

Actually...

Here in Portland a lot of roads downtown lost square footage thanks to wide swaths of green-painted areas which are bike-only, forcing cars to concentrate themselves into fewer lanes, wearing those portions of the road out faster, etc.

Also, in many locales, bicycles do require a license anyway (mostly to assist in recovering stolen ones). Wouldn't take much to slap a tax on those bad boys, and without much overhead beyond what's already in place.

I should have also predicted that you'd double-down on that statement rather than attempting to educate yourself. Did you just see that flash memory was mentioned in an FPGA-related document without actually understanding the context? Because it sure looks like it to me.

Here, I've got a PDF of my own to show you. This one explains quite clearly that there are multiple ways to store configuration data for an FPGA, and that flash-based memory is only one of several options. I'll summarize in the hopes that you or someone else will learn something even without reading the link.

FPGAs are essentially a set of configurable logic circuits, and this obviously requires a set of configuration data to operate as designed. The higher-level nature of the logic circuits makes FPGAs more efficient than a general-purpose CPU for some specialized types of tasks. There are several ways to apply that configuration data on a device:

* Some FPGAs use flash memory or a master computer as a permanent external store, but use SRAM to maintain the internal configuration state. These devices need to be configured after power-up by the external storage (whether flash or something else), and the SRAM needs to be powered to maintain state.

* Some devices use flash memory internally to maintain the configuration state, rather than as a two-step process.

* Some devices uses anti-fuse circuits to maintain configuration state. These devices, once programmed, can't be altered. No flash or other memory is needed for these types, as the circuitry is essentially physically altered in place with the initial programming.

So, in two out of three commonly-used cases, flash memory isn't even used in the FPGA itself. This isn't even counting the early models that could reset their EPROM-based configuration with an ultraviolet light through a quartz window on the chip itself.

Seriously, just admit when you're wrong.

Cultural Anthropology, Government, Interpersonal Communication, Algebra, English I & English II (tech writing) could all be considered pre-reqs for the degree, allowing higher level math and more focus programming.


I think that the curriculum should also include..
1. Logic (enough said)
2. Design Patterns && Software Testing: Teaching your students how to save resources, debug large projects, etc. (Example : http://www.pdx.edu/computer-sc...)

Are you thinking of this well known picture?

Yes! Thank you. It's a nuisance when you can so clearly see something in your mind's eye and know it should be easy to find, but not be able to find it because of not remembering its name. Good work.

Are you thinking of this well known picture?

I don't think you quite understand the magnitude of latencies that USB introduces. Check out here, where they got 1ms, +- 1 ms.
http://psas.pdx.edu/news/2012-07-25/
A full millisecond between a hardware interrupt and output on the other end of the USB. Consider that a $1 8-bit 8MHz micro can do that 3 orders of magnitude faster, and you can see why it is terrible for anything that involves lots of small packets. For instance, if you want to send 10 byte packets over ethernet, doing it with USB-ethernet and not buffering (as would be the case if you wanted to continuously update something, like an audio DAC) would mean that you are limited to 10kb/s on average. Even ISA does better than that.

http://www.pdx.edu/computer-science/hakim-weatherspoon

There is a place called the "Dry Valleys" high in the Antartic mountains that is considered the best terrestrial proxy for Martian conditions. There has been no rain or snowfall there for two million years and it can get cold enough for dry ice to form (whether it does or not I don't know).

Whoa there. I work in the Dry Valleys. It snows there. They are coastal and fairly warm by Antarctic standards. It does not get cold enough for CO2 to freeze. You need to go to Dome C or South Pole to get that cold. I don't study that, so I can't say if it does or not. Also, you described the katabatic winds as if they blow all the time. They don't.

I also work on Mars data and the conditions are drastically different from the Dry Valleys. It's just that the Dry Valleys are the closest we've got here on Earth.

Portland State University's new College of Engineering and Computer Science building was paid for with an $8 million grant, and the school renamed after a returning EE grad Fariborz Maseeh, who made a zillion dollars founding a startup in MEMS. He was also a foreign student, originally from Iran, BTW. Many of the smart folks at Intel and Tektronix are graduates from what is now known as Maseeh. (It should be noted that he went to grad school at UT Austin and MIT).

EE is not the same as CS, but I figure this counts - they're a lot closer in similarity than either is to basket weaving or football.

I once read an article which noted that while Michael Jordan made something like $30,000 a day, he would have to play basketball for several hundred years to catch up to Bill Gates. (I don't recall the actual numbers.) I would be interested to see a comparison of total CS-related employment income vs. total pro sports income, especially when you could the Bill Gates, Larry E, Larry P, etc. I would expect that it shows that there is a potential for CS grads to contribute back to the schools that exceeds anything the football jocks can do. But it's mostly spread thinner among more people.

Portland State University's new College of Engineering and Computer Science building was paid for with an $8 million grant, and the school renamed after a returning EE grad Fariborz Maseeh, who made a zillion dollars founding a startup in MEMS. He was also a foreign student, originally from Iran, BTW. Many of the smart folks at Intel and Tektronix are graduates from what is now known as Maseeh. (It should be noted that he went to grad school at UT Austin and MIT).

EE is not the same as CS, but I figure this counts - they're a lot closer in similarity than either is to basket weaving or football.

I once read an article which noted that while Michael Jordan made something like $30,000 a day, he would have to play basketball for several hundred years to catch up to Bill Gates. (I don't recall the actual numbers.) I would be interested to see a comparison of total CS-related employment income vs. total pro sports income, especially when you could the Bill Gates, Larry E, Larry P, etc. I would expect that it shows that there is a potential for CS grads to contribute back to the schools that exceeds anything the football jocks can do. But it's mostly spread thinner among more people.

Each of those examples calls for more than just a barometer

Then you can't measure the height of the building with just a barometer. You need also to know temperature, relative humidity, and the lapse rate L that is an estimated, experimental value that varies with locale. Perhaps you could build your own L profile, though.

The model also has other imperfections.

If I were to measure the height of the building, I would use the shadow and return the result in barometer lengths, for lack of a ruler. Air pressure is not a good replacement for an ideal unit of distance, especially when you can't measure top and bottom pressure simultaneously (the shadow method avoids this flaw if you have two hands and a few wooden pegs.) You'd do about as good if you drop the barometer from the roof and count 1001, 1002, 1003 until it hits the ground.

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~pwh/

Pretty tired of seeing this nonsense that the U.S. is the only country on the planet that helps other people being repeated.

Firstly, I do hope you realize that very rarely does the U.S. get engaged in something unilaterally. They are usually part of an international force, with many other nations participating.

Look up places like Timor, MINURSO in the Western Sahara, MONUSCO in the Congo, etc., etc. Read the history of WWII. Look up the number of times other countries have offered to help the U.S. and either been refused (goodness knows why - because the U.S. didn't want to look weak?) or their help has been accepted but you never hear about it.

Remember the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana a year ago? 17 countries offered assistance, including several that could've really helped as they had a lot of experience. BP accepted help from Mexico and Norway. The Biscuit fire in Oregon had firefighters helping out from Mexico, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Did you know about these examples and just choose to ignore them because they don't help your case, or had you never heard of them because, well, for whatever reason?

Saying something like this not only betrays your ignorance/xenophobia but is pretty insulting to the millions of brave non-Americans who continue to fight wars, engage in peace keeping missions, and offer assistance to Americans. They may not worry as much about self-publicizing, but it doesn't mean nobody else does it. I'm not bashing the bravery of American peacekeepers, firefighters, what-have-you by any means. But please don't be so insulting to the rest of the world.

What program? Can the distro as a whole be considered a single program?

"Program" refers to any work distributed under the GNU General Public License. Raenex argues that the distribution as a whole is a "work based on the Program".

How is Adobe Acrobat altered GPL code?

Raenex appears to argue that the wording of GPLv2 treats "collective" or "aggregate" works carelessly. The GPLv2 code in the distribution is altered by having Adobe Reader appended to it in the file system. Raenex refuses to discuss whether GPLv3 fixes this on grounds that I have failed to predict the exact form of an apology acceptable to Raenex.

"This is because they are all separate programs." -- FSF

This appears to have become FSF's intent, but the GPLv2's careless wording means that programs are not truly "separate" if distributed on the same medium. GPLv2 was written back in the day when a program would rarely be distributed to another person on the same medium as a program from another publisher: FSF's GNU tapes had mostly FSF's software on them, not the mixture of GPLv2 software and non-free software seen in some popular Linux distributions or on every Android-powered phone.

Also, would an attorney characterize an organization's interpretation of its own license as bizarre?

Raenex appears to argue that it doesn't matter what the author says, just what the words literally mean. Such characterization is related to what Roland Barthes called "death of the author" in a 1967 essay.

You mean like the nanoputians?

Synthesis of anthropomorphic molecules: the nanoputians.

And I helped make the shell for a sounding rocket (unfortunately, it failed at launch) for these guys. Normally, I'm as blowhard as the next guy, but this is an area in which I actually have significant experience.

Another interesting computer built from electrical relays.

So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal.

Extra Krispy

and

Original Recipe

There have always been protocols between programs run on the command line, but they've been ad-hoc. This approach works fine for simple stuff, but when you get a little complex, it starts being a pain. This is certainly not the first attempt to improve on that ad-hoc IPC model. For example, check out Infopipes, XML Pipeline and Hartmann_pipeline. I don't know if any of those is any good or if they're intended to be used interactively in a shell.

First, because wealth distribution is probably the single best predictor of both general quality of life and levels of violent crime in a country.

You got a citation for the quality of life part?

Sure: http://www.pdx.edu/sustainability/sites/www.pdx.edu.sustainability/files/media_assets/iss/fellow_publications/chs1112f.pdf

But as I said before "quality of life" is a very fuzzy term. It's important to look at more concrete terms such as self reported happiness.

The countries with the greatest economic freedoms...

I don't even know what that means. What makes one country less economically free? How do you quantify that?

The "evil" countries with economic freedom are doing quite well. You may not want to admit it, so here is a god damned citation [gapminder.org]

I don't know what you're trying to show with that citation. It is a correlation of wealth and healthcare in countries. It does not seem to take wealth disparity into account at all. Since socialized medicine correlates so strongly with wealth of nations and also with longevity, it's hard to determine any specific causality. Also what's with calling some countries "evil"? Are you trying to be hyperbolic?

Wealth disparity leads to higher rates of violent crime and lower rates of self reported happiness according to almost every sociological study to ever consider the topic. The correlation is extreme.

Self reported happiness? What kind of hogwash shit is that?

Self reported happiness is when you survey people and ask them to quantify how happy they are as opposed to making up some measurement of supposed quality of life like "how many cars owned" or other arbitrary metric. "Self reported happiness" is a fairly specific measure of quality of life, as opposed to a general term that can mean many different things depending upon what study you're looking at. If you're care to propose a better, specific metric and some reasoning I'd be happy to consider it.

In other words, you failed to cite the stuff and even then feel that you have to qualify the un-cited sources as contradictory bullshit.

No, I'm saying the term you brought up has various meanings and I thought it important to clarify if we're to have a productive discussion going forward instead of a bunch of empty, unscientific rhetoric that fails to define the terminology in use.

Apparently you failed to learn what science is. Go to my citation above and play around.

Your citation above doesn't address wealth disparity at all. One might as well go to the winning horses at the track in the paper today. Do you know what wealth disparity is and what I'm talking about? Did you bother to find out? Nations with similar or dissimilar wealth can have similar or dissimilar rates of wealth disparity. It's a related but independent measure. Countries wealthier than the US per capita often have lower rates of wealth disparity.

Contrary to popular belief, Americans are fucking very well off in spite of your rantings based on economic "hes too rich" jealousy.

You seem to have an opinion that is unlikely to be swayed by facts or research or science. You seem intent on attributing a completely unsupported motivation and ignoring what I actually write. If you bother to respond, please actually read my comments and look up the terms you don't understand.

Ah, yes. The start with a blank source code, then debug it till it works approach. No real understanding of how anything works, but somhow you get through... Try building it from scratch useing relays, then your a man !!! http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/

The subduction zone is off the coast. How would an earthquake there affect Portland, Oregon, which is 80 miles inland?

See http://nwdata.geol.pdx.edu/DOGAMI/IMS-16/

The real answer to your question is to not teach programming. Get them started on some abstract mathematics. It will serve them far better than learning to become the newest web flunkie on the planet.

If you must teach some kind of programming, go with a typed functional language, like Haskell or ML. Focus on these concepts, as they bring out the relation between proof and computation (every computation is a "constructive" proof):

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/springschool95.pdf

As it is now, Universities generally set up some sort of portal through which students can access all the publishers they're subscribed to. Generally, these portals blow. My standard procedure is to google what I'm looking for, then when I find the exact title, issue, page, head to my college library portal.

Have you looked at scholar.google.com? In the preferences, you can tell it what libraries you have electronic access through, then when you search for articles, if it's available through your school's library, a link appears next to it. Log in once, and it seems to persist from then on.

I've found this a great way to get direct access to works. And if you notice the pattern of how it proxy's into the source site, you can often figure out how to adjust a URL, adding the proxy info for your school, to get the PDF, even if google scholar doesn't know your school has access.

For example, the content I was interested in was at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/09/18/0909115106.full.pdf+html

by adding the .proxy.lib.pdx.edu to the address, I was able to get the pdf:
http://www.pnas.org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/content/early/2009/09/18/0909115106.full.pdf+html

even though the option didn't show up from Google Scholar.

Another open source Avonics system is from the Portland State Aerospace Society. http://psas.pdx.edu/AvionicsTeamHome/

Probably not as relevant as the Paparazzi team since they tend to fly straight up and straight down :) But if you are looking for alternative architectures (distributed processing) this might be of interest.

First school I pulled up (I just happen to have Portland State University bookmarked) proved you dead wrong.

"...Mathematics majors planning to teach secondary mathematics in Oregon and to be licensed through Portland State University should complete a BA/BS in mathematics to apply for the one-year postbaccalaureate Graduate Teacher Education Program through the School of Education...."

http://www.mth.pdx.edu/programs/BS-major.asp

Try House as a basis - it's got a compiled, type-safe language that runs within a couple of percent of C's execution speed (Haskell) as a basis. It should be practical enough and has all the type-safety that an OS needs.

You don't need a JIT compiler or an interpreted language to have a secure kernel - you just need a well-designed, type-safe language (which C is not). You can start, for example, from Haskell, as these guys are doing. Haskell is a compiled language, with minimal boxing and, thus, gives all the speed you want without the idiocy of buffer overruns and invalid pointer references. Its performance is within a couple of percent of C.

Well it has been done in Haskell.
http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/

Perl, Ruby and Python don't have direct access to machine pointers.

1.) There is TCP/IP over Infrared (IrDA) and comes standard on Windows and works also in Linux.
  http://web.pdx.edu/~mendyke/ip7780.html

2.) there are many laser link systems out there.
    I even worked on one.
    http://www.dnull.com/zebraresearch/company-mail.html

3.) The 802.11 standard also includes the 802.11 Infrared (IR) Physical Layer. 802.11 IR defines 1Mbps and 2Mbps operation by bouncing light off ceilings and walls to provide connectivity within a room or small office. This infrared version of the standard has been available since the initial release of the 802.11 standard in 1997.

4.) Spectrix Corporation of Mundelein, Illinois had a proprietary solution for this. I think they are out of business now.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QZrrXcs1R9gC&pg=RA1-PA207&lpg=RA1-PA207&dq=%22Spectrix+Corporation+%22&source=bl&ots=kMxMofcTd7&sig=qd4QvwoREWQloJKwnpmp63j-Z-I&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result

If you explore the link above from the book "Wireless Computing" By Ira Brodsky Published by John Wiley and Sons, 1997. This book goes in a lot of detail about many IP over optical solutions available at that time.

Some MUDs, like New Moon, have quests.

They give more XP than beating other players up. You have to find something funny in the game and fix it.

The problem is that many of them require exacting syntax. For example, "search box" will work while "search boxes" will not.

It reminds me of those old Sierra *'s Quest games.

Last I heard, Bill prefers ed to his own vi.

REVIEW: You don't even try to use vi?
JOY: I'm used to having a 24-line terminal with no ability to scroll back. The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.

Of course, that was a long time ago, when vi was only 10 years old. Here's the interview from Unix Review. In the interview, he likens vi to a piñata.

On a more serious note, he does — gasp — criticize vi and say that it needs features and is a little complicated. It's an interesting historical read.

You've pretty much described the form of many Haskell programs:

1. Acquire data, command-line arguments, etc.. in the IO monad using hGetContents or similar
2. Process data using some pure computation
3. Return the result to the IO monad, and then output it

With laziness, Haskell can defer the IO until it's actually needed, so you can use this approach to process large amounts of data that don't fit in memory all at one time.

I wrote a ray tracer that essentially functions this way: It reads in a text file describing the scene as a lazy string, then it feeds the string into a scene parser that accepts a string and returns a scene, then it invokes a ray intersection test on the scene for each pixel, using OpenGL to output the result.

The nice part of all this is that the scene parser and ray intersection routines are all pure: they do no IO whatsoever, nor do they write to global data structures. Side effects are all contained in the relatively short IO code that reads from the files and handles the OpenGL calls.

I've still got concerns about how one would deal with large programs, persistence, etc., but those were secondary, and I never got as far as checking them out the last time I looked at Haskell.

I don't know about very large programs, but I've written a ~3500 line ray tracer and the code hasn't become unwieldy. It's broken up into a lot of small modules. The compiler is definitely very slow; that might be an issue if you had a project that was tens or hundreds of thousands of lines.

There's an easy way to do persistence. Whenever you create a new data type, just add "deriving Show" to the end of the definition, and then you can convert it to a string with the "show" function. There's a corresponding "reads" function that turns a string back into the object. (I'm not sure if you have to do a "deriving Reads" as well or what; in my ray tracer, I manually overrode the standard read routines so I could parse a particular common graphics format instead.) Once the object is in string form, you can dump it to disk and retrieve it later. (A binary format may be more space efficient, but I'm less familiar with manipulating binary files in haskell.)

If you want to get programmers to use Haskell, you should make sure that they are exposed to that book.

It actually hasn't been published yet; it's scheduled to come out in November. It's being published by O'reilly, which is (in my mind, at least) a big deal since O'reilly traditionally doesn't do books about functional programming languages. I hope the language will be taken more seriously as a result.

https://projects.cecs.pdx.edu/~jgmorris/icfpc08/index.cgi/ticket/9

I like POV-Ray for many of the same reasons; the syntax is very friendly and the available primitives give a lot of flexibility. Most of the fastest real-time ray tracers just support triangles, though, because it makes them simpler and you don't have the overhead of deciding which ray-intersection function to use with each primitive.

I think a typical game developer isn't likely to care if they can make exact spheres and cones and such; the majority of real-life objects aren't perfect quadrics, and are most conveniently represented as triangle meshes. Some might be interested in the added flexibility, though. It'll be interesting to see if any popular ray tracing APIs are going to support anything besides triangles.

POV-Ray itself isn't likely to be competitive with real-time ray tracers any time soon. It just isn't designed for speed. I've been writing my own ray tracer in haskell (link) that implements a lot of the same primitives as POV-Ray, (spheres, cones, boxes, differences, intersections, discs, triangles, planes) and uses a good, modern acceleration structure (BIH). It's not really any faster than POV-Ray, though, and doesn't support the vast majority of POV-Ray's obscure features.

Why are people always trying to reinvent the fucking wheel?

Because raytracers are useful, and there aren't that many free raytracers with good performance, a reasonably complete set of features and support for distributing the workload across hundreds of processors.

That raytracer looks like shit. It is about the same quality that POV-Ray was at 20 years ago.

That's because they didn't use antialiasing for that teapot render. They do support anti-aliasing, according to the documentation.

Besides, the SPD teapot scene isn't supposed to look awesome, it's supposed to show that your rendering algorithm is functioning properly.

Povray is great, but it isn't particularly fast, and it until the current beta releases they haven't even supported multi-core parallelism in the standard distribution, much less MPI.

Also, tachyon is, according to the changelog, at least 13 years old. Not as old as povray perhaps, but not incredibly modern either.

If you want to see pretty renderings, check out pbrt. If you want to see performance, download a demo of arauna. Both are considerably more modern. If you just want to complain about terrible renderings and pointless projects, then you should check out my ray tracer.

There are a bunch of different ones discussed on this forum. Arauna and Radius are two. There's also mine, but it's neither fast nor featureful.

Here I was, planning to mod this discussion, but I can't believe what you just wrote.

I... wonder why nobody has proposed some kind of govt subsidized antivirus program... why not buy out ESET or similar and allow all US residents (or the world, for good will) to get a good free antivirus?

You're kidding, right?

Please, tell me you are kidding!

Why in the name of GFSM or whatever deity you care to insert would anyone in their right mind do or propose this? It boggles my mind since what you propose is already available! And has been for years.

To forestall certain trollish and flamish responses (oo, woe is me to think this might work), if this really was a good idea, one could promote these services far more cost effectively than actually funding/buying them.

But of course it is a terrible idea, for any of the following reasons:

1. The US government would not likely do any such thing, given that these services are in competition with American corporations.
2. The money would be far better spent funding better OS research and development, for example the Programatica project and its work on House and Osker (PDF WARNING)
3. The money would be better spent on improving existing alternatives to Windows. Personally, I like Ubuntu (YMMV), but I don't know that they need the money (sure, everyone would like more $$, but Canonical has pretty deep pockets, no?).

But for now it simply doesn't matter - too many users are ignorant of the fact their OS comes from a vendor who simply doesn't give a damn and/or wants to squeeze yet more $$$ from the pockets of its beloved customers, whom it loves and respects dearly (either for its own bank accounts or those of its incestuously intertwined corporate "partners")....

Here I was, planning to mod this discussion, but I can't believe what you just wrote.

I... wonder why nobody has proposed some kind of govt subsidized antivirus program... why not buy out ESET or similar and allow all US residents (or the world, for good will) to get a good free antivirus?

You're kidding, right?

Please, tell me you are kidding!

Why in the name of GFSM or whatever deity you care to insert would anyone in their right mind do or propose this? It boggles my mind since what you propose is already available! And has been for years.

To forestall certain trollish and flamish responses (oo, woe is me to think this might work), if this really was a good idea, one could promote these services far more cost effectively than actually funding/buying them.

But of course it is a terrible idea, for any of the following reasons:

1. The US government would not likely do any such thing, given that these services are in competition with American corporations.
2. The money would be far better spent funding better OS research and development, for example the Programatica project and its work on House and Osker (PDF WARNING)
3. The money would be better spent on improving existing alternatives to Windows. Personally, I like Ubuntu (YMMV), but I don't know that they need the money (sure, everyone would like more $$, but Canonical has pretty deep pockets, no?).

But for now it simply doesn't matter - too many users are ignorant of the fact their OS comes from a vendor who simply doesn't give a damn and/or wants to squeeze yet more $$$ from the pockets of its beloved customers, whom it loves and respects dearly (either for its own bank accounts or those of its incestuously intertwined corporate "partners")....

Is it just me or do in-game raytracing folks seems to miss a rather dirty point?

You're kind of missing the point; yes, the ray-tracing crowd already knows that ray-tracing is slow, though it's not as slow as public perception (influenced by non-realtime renders like Pov-RAY) would have you believe. What the ray-tracing crowd sees (and they have been seeing this from a long ways off) is where the computational complexity lines cross, where it suddenly becomes cheaper to use ray tracing. Sure, ray tracing on modern hardware is pretty slow; maybe my (several year old) dual-core AMD64 3800 could be made to render ray-traced graphics comparable to an N-64 rather than a Wii, but the great thing about ray tracers is that they don't slow down much when you throw more geometry at them. Rendering a scene with a million triangles only takes twice as long as rendering a scene with a thousand. Once hardware is fast enough to do low-complexity scenes at a good resolution and framerate, it takes only a very small hardware improvement to render extremely high-complexity scenes. The real limitations soon become "how many triangles can we squeeze into physical memory on one machine?" and "how fast is the memory bus?", not "gosh, I wish these ray-intersection tests were faster."

Keep in mind that a 96x performance improvement sounds like a lot, but that's only about ten years if Moore's law holds, and the article points out that Intel already has demos running at 90fps at HD resolutions. (I haven't seen them myself, so I don't know if they're rendering complex scenes with shadow rays and textures or what, but a current quad core processor ought to be able to do complex scenes at quite a bit better than 256x256@15fps, with a well-written renderer. (Not mine; I would be thrilled if it was that fast.)

There are, certainly, some performance issues that need to be worked around; rebuilding an acceleration structure when something moves is expensive (BIH trees are better at this than KD-trees, but they're still O(nlogn)), so more care must be taken to treat static and dynamic parts of the scene differently. Lots of lights can bog a scene down, and certain shapes of scenes are worse than others. Mixing large and small triangles is bad for BIH trees. These are all things that have to be understood in order to make a fast game, at least until the hardware gets fast enough that no one cares about framerates anymore.

I expect maybe we'll see some sort of raytraced game on par with tuxracer this year, and a real high-budget game maybe in one or two years, and then ray tracing will be mainstream in about five, when the average person will have a fast-enough machine to handle it.

Although not a flash game, how about a good old fashioned Multi User Dungeon (MUD)? One of the best (IMNSHO) is http://eclipse.cs.pdx.edu/ New Moon. It's been around for years (since 1993) and has all the best of what makes a MUD a MUD: quests, exploring, player-player interaction, AI non-player chars, skills based and a lot of fun.

Aren't such issues also relevant to raytracing?

Yes, very much so. (Not the same issues exactly, but similar ones.) In order for a ray-tracer to be efficient it needs to sort the scene into some sort of acceleration structure. Regular grids, BSP trees and octrees have been used in the past, but currently the most popular acceleration structures are KD-trees (like a bsp tree but axis-aligned) and BIH-trees (also similar to a bsp tree but with subtle differences difficult to describe succinctly). KD-trees are generally faster for static scenes. (Interesting trivia: balanced trees yield awful performance. Trees built using the surface-area heuristic are much faster.) Ray-intersections against BIH trees tend to be a little slower (often around 30%), but they can be built much faster (several orders of magnitude iirc) using an in-place sort remarkably similar to quicksort. Performance of rebuilding an acceleration structure is fairly unimportant for static scenes, but for games it can be the bottleneck.

For the game designer, this is relevant because it means he/she can't just move stuff around willy-nilly. If the scene can be, for instance, partitioned into a heirarchy of static objects (maybe represented by KD-trees) that can all move freely around within a top-level BIH tree, then the game will run much faster than if all the geometry is stuffed into a single tree that has to be re-sorted (n log n) every frame. (My own not-very-fast ray tracer could be modified to do something like this, since I treat bih-trees and kd-trees as primitive objects, just like triangles and spheres.)

I believe that the transition to ray tracing is inevitable (not just because it looks better but also because in a lot of cases it's just plain faster), but it does have some bottlenecks that aren't well known or widely understood.

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Remember kids, free software is a matter of freedom, not price.

My school has one of those, too. Link: here.

I hate it, because it looks like an ordinary credit card w/ picture ID. The school name is on it but not prominently; It doesn't look like a real ID, which I would prefer :(

I've never activated the account feature, which is optional, thankfully.

prior art-ish Applie IIe circuit

http://web.pdx.edu/~heiss/technotes/aiie/tn.aiie.0 6.html

Whoopie.

Because Fenner's patent used a tristate buffer instead of an open collector NPN transitor they own this kind of joystick?

geesh.