Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: uniovi.es

Stories and comments across the archive that link to uniovi.es.

Comments · 13

  1. Re:Huh? Did I miss a memo? by lbrandy · · Score: 1 · on The Impact of Violent Gaming

    But the information is not easy to find.

    Really? Then why did it take me less then 2 minutes to find a survey article?

    Video game violence: A review of the empirical literature

    This is a 20 page summary, with 80 references for further reading, if you want. While the author(s) concludes that more research must be done, the majority of the studies conducted see negative psychological consequences of violence in video games. Schutte et al, Silvern et al, Cooper et al, Irwin et al, Anderson et al all conducted empircal studies with an outcome of aggressive behavior seen to increase in some capacity. Two studies found none. Several others found other psychological consequences including arousal.

    If you actually cared about being informed before spouting your opinion, it would take you less time to find the information then to educate yourself. Since I know you are too lazy or too bad at basic search features to find it yourself, I will go ahead and point you to page 13 which provides a nice summary.

  2. Re:prior art by humankind · · Score: 1 · on Epicrealm Uses Vague Patents to sue Web Sites

    Excite had their system around before Alta-Vista. It was publicly released in 1995. I'm sure they can show prior art probably back as far as 1993.

  3. Re:Seeing it by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 2, Informative · on Interview With Math Legend Benoit Mandelbrot
    It was a paper printout. The tiny satellite Mandelbrot sets showed up as little dots, and were initially dismissed as dirt from an unclean printhead. This was in the 1970's, actually.

    The printouts are reproduced in a book, but I don't recall which one. Might be in Mandelbrot's own book.

    I *think* this might be one: http://coco.ccu.uniovi.es/geofractal/capitulos/01/ imagenes/MandelbrotOriginal.gif

  4. Re:license issues? by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Deep Inside the K Desktop Environment

    "Propietary", and I'm not trying to be flippant.

    Well, yes, but proprietary is a very large umbrella term -- it can refer to everything from the Windows source code to the patents Apple holds on TrueType kerning. I meant a way of distinguishing between software that is free-as-in-beer to use and distribute, where source can be downloaded and learned from with no NDAs or registrations or anything being signed and the rest of the body of what we generally would call "non-Free", "non-OSI-compliant" software.

    They would be wanting to use millions of man-hours of work without contributing back to the pool, and I don't think that's a reasonable position to adopt.

    It is certainly less efficient, but not all software of this class is like the NPL, where the original author of the work gets special rights to improvements. Povray or xmame, for instance, have non-OSI-compliant licenses, but do not grant special rights to anyone. I guess that I can agree that it might be rather nice if everyone had intercompatible licenses, but I don't agree that the GPL is the "ultimate" license or that it's a good idea to try to force all GUI desktop software for the premier hobbyist OS to fall under a particular license (or pay a penalty fee for not doing so). I'm just not comfortable with it.

    Povray's kind of a disappointment. I completely understand why they can't release it under an open license, and I certainly don't hold those reasons against them, but it's sad that the (best? only?) source-available raytracer still has so many strings attached. Here's to hoping that they can get it all resolved.

    There are a number of GPL-compatible raytracers. It's not really all that hard to write a raytracer -- I did one for a class project once. YafRay is GPLed, CoolRay is GPLed, and Blender has an integrated raytracer (as well as other renderers).

  5. there is competetion by golgafrincham · · Score: 3, Informative · on POV-Ray 3.6 Released

    hm, i'd rather stick with yafray, it's open source, has a nicer language (ok, depends on taste) and is (somewhat) integrated into blender. and the results are simply amazing.

  6. Re:Open Source Projects? by FunkyChild · · Score: 1 · on Perfect Digital Skin

    Here's some discussion (and a prototype) from the YafRay forum:

    http://www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname/forum/vi ewtopic.php?t=750

    http://www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname/forum/vi ewtopic.php?t=464

  7. Re:Open Source Projects? by FunkyChild · · Score: 1 · on Perfect Digital Skin

    Here's some discussion (and a prototype) from the YafRay forum:

    http://www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname/forum/vi ewtopic.php?t=750

    http://www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname/forum/vi ewtopic.php?t=464

  8. Re:Old news... by HacTar · · Score: 1 · on Perfect Digital Skin

    There was a thread about this technique on YafRay forum too.

  9. Blender's improvements aren't limited to 2.28 by rivenwanderer · · Score: 3, Informative · on Slashback: Blender, Paly, Dragon
    There's been efforts to improve documentation, most notably the release of the still-slightly-under-construction 2.0 manual online (so no, they're not deliberately designing a hard-to-use program with the intent to make money on manuals). The shortcomings of the renderer are being addressed by exports to POV-Ray, Renderman-compliant programs such as 3Delight, and, (most interestingly in my opinion), Yafray. Check out this gallery--probably 90% of the scenes were exported from Blender. Right now, this is done via a plugin, but the unofficial/experimental builds are starting to have rudimentary raytracer exports built in.

    Altogether, I think that Blender is a very attractive choice for the 3D hobbyist--someone who enjoys 3D and graphics but is never going to make a living from it. After all, why shell out $1000+ when a little extra effort can get 95% of the features for free? If you plan to have a career in 3D, or have lots of money, it's probably worth it, but as one who's just in it for the fun, the eye candy, and the challenge of making things work, open source offers me four very decent tools to use together: Blender, Wings3D, Yafray, and The Gimp. All of these work to some degree on Windows, Mac, and Linux, sometimes more. There's never been a better time to get into 3D. And aspiring graphic artists shouldn't turn up their noses at such free tools either. Although you could be more immediately useful to a studio by knowing Maya/Max/Softimage/etc, simply using 3D and graphics programs of any kind will teach you tons that can easily extend to whatever programs you use later.

  10. Blender's improvements aren't limited to 2.28 by rivenwanderer · · Score: 3, Informative · on Slashback: Blender, Paly, Dragon
    There's been efforts to improve documentation, most notably the release of the still-slightly-under-construction 2.0 manual online (so no, they're not deliberately designing a hard-to-use program with the intent to make money on manuals). The shortcomings of the renderer are being addressed by exports to POV-Ray, Renderman-compliant programs such as 3Delight, and, (most interestingly in my opinion), Yafray. Check out this gallery--probably 90% of the scenes were exported from Blender. Right now, this is done via a plugin, but the unofficial/experimental builds are starting to have rudimentary raytracer exports built in.

    Altogether, I think that Blender is a very attractive choice for the 3D hobbyist--someone who enjoys 3D and graphics but is never going to make a living from it. After all, why shell out $1000+ when a little extra effort can get 95% of the features for free? If you plan to have a career in 3D, or have lots of money, it's probably worth it, but as one who's just in it for the fun, the eye candy, and the challenge of making things work, open source offers me four very decent tools to use together: Blender, Wings3D, Yafray, and The Gimp. All of these work to some degree on Windows, Mac, and Linux, sometimes more. There's never been a better time to get into 3D. And aspiring graphic artists shouldn't turn up their noses at such free tools either. Although you could be more immediately useful to a studio by knowing Maya/Max/Softimage/etc, simply using 3D and graphics programs of any kind will teach you tons that can easily extend to whatever programs you use later.

  11. Blender's improvements aren't limited to 2.28 by rivenwanderer · · Score: 3, Informative · on Slashback: Blender, Paly, Dragon
    There's been efforts to improve documentation, most notably the release of the still-slightly-under-construction 2.0 manual online (so no, they're not deliberately designing a hard-to-use program with the intent to make money on manuals). The shortcomings of the renderer are being addressed by exports to POV-Ray, Renderman-compliant programs such as 3Delight, and, (most interestingly in my opinion), Yafray. Check out this gallery--probably 90% of the scenes were exported from Blender. Right now, this is done via a plugin, but the unofficial/experimental builds are starting to have rudimentary raytracer exports built in.

    Altogether, I think that Blender is a very attractive choice for the 3D hobbyist--someone who enjoys 3D and graphics but is never going to make a living from it. After all, why shell out $1000+ when a little extra effort can get 95% of the features for free? If you plan to have a career in 3D, or have lots of money, it's probably worth it, but as one who's just in it for the fun, the eye candy, and the challenge of making things work, open source offers me four very decent tools to use together: Blender, Wings3D, Yafray, and The Gimp. All of these work to some degree on Windows, Mac, and Linux, sometimes more. There's never been a better time to get into 3D. And aspiring graphic artists shouldn't turn up their noses at such free tools either. Although you could be more immediately useful to a studio by knowing Maya/Max/Softimage/etc, simply using 3D and graphics programs of any kind will teach you tons that can easily extend to whatever programs you use later.

  12. mirrors by country... by neo8750 · · Score: 4, Informative · on Mozilla 1.1 Beta Out And About
    lets be nice to the main site! .at .au .be .bg .ca .ch .com/.net/.org/.edu .cz .de .dk .ee .es .fi .fr .gr .hk .hu .ie .il .jp .kr .no .pl .pt .ru .se .sg .sk .tw .uk
  13. mirrors by country... by neo8750 · · Score: 4, Informative · on Mozilla 1.1 Beta Out And About
    lets be nice to the main site! .at .au .be .bg .ca .ch .com/.net/.org/.edu .cz .de .dk .ee .es .fi .fr .gr .hk .hu .ie .il .jp .kr .no .pl .pt .ru .se .sg .sk .tw .uk