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Radiosity isn't *the* solution to rendering either. There are a whole range of lighting effects we see in daily life, and even radiosity only simulates some of them. For example, caustics (the funny patterns of light on the bottom of the pool). Even more general approaches to simulating light are being researched, but I don't really know if any of them are in use commercially yet.

Also, in case you were wondering, Quake/Unreal/etc actually use radiosity rendering as part of the map making process, then store the results in "light maps" which are basically textures that control how light or dark a wall is instead of its color. Pre-computing the lighting allows real-time rendering of nice levels with radiosity effects, but it has several problems. Firstly, light maps take up a lot of memory (there's one for each wall, while most other textures are used on more than one wall and are tiled repeatedly), so they are stored at a pretty low resolution to minimize memory usage. This produces a blocky "stair-step shadow" effect that you've probably seen if you've played Counter-Strike. Secondly, since all the lighting is pre-computed, you can't change it easily. If you want a light to turn on and off, you have to store two light maps for every wall affected by that light: one with it on and one with it off. This is why in most games where you can shoot out lights, there are only a select few that you can shoot out. This approach has even more trouble with moving objects or moving lights (flashlights, car headlights, explosions, muzzle flashes). Real-time OpenGL or DirectX style lighting is usually used for these types of lights and moving objects, but then you don't get the nice shadows and other lighting effects that radiosity gives you.

Radiosity isn't *the* solution to rendering either. There are a whole range of lighting effects we see in daily life, and even radiosity only simulates some of them. For example, caustics (the funny patterns of light on the bottom of the pool). Even more general approaches to simulating light are being researched, but I don't really know if any of them are in use commercially yet.

Also, in case you were wondering, Quake/Unreal/etc actually use radiosity rendering as part of the map making process, then store the results in "light maps" which are basically textures that control how light or dark a wall is instead of its color. Pre-computing the lighting allows real-time rendering of nice levels with radiosity effects, but it has several problems. Firstly, light maps take up a lot of memory (there's one for each wall, while most other textures are used on more than one wall and are tiled repeatedly), so they are stored at a pretty low resolution to minimize memory usage. This produces a blocky "stair-step shadow" effect that you've probably seen if you've played Counter-Strike. Secondly, since all the lighting is pre-computed, you can't change it easily. If you want a light to turn on and off, you have to store two light maps for every wall affected by that light: one with it on and one with it off. This is why in most games where you can shoot out lights, there are only a select few that you can shoot out. This approach has even more trouble with moving objects or moving lights (flashlights, car headlights, explosions, muzzle flashes). Real-time OpenGL or DirectX style lighting is usually used for these types of lights and moving objects, but then you don't get the nice shadows and other lighting effects that radiosity gives you.

This may provide the political leverage to toughen up US spam laws. If EU ISPs (like Virgin.net") start advertising in the US, that would put pressure on Congress.

Are these the same UK creatives that gave the UK 1 channel of television for like 30 years?

Well, the UK had independent channels in the 1950s and a second ad-free channel in 1964.

So no (and creatives tend not to be the ones deciding national television policy).

Are these the same UK creatives that gave the UK 1 channel of television for like 30 years?

Well, the UK had independent channels in the 1950s and a second ad-free channel in 1964.

So no (and creatives tend not to be the ones deciding national television policy).

http://www.historicairphotos.com/g_uk/image2_lge.j pg
http://www.carolyn.topmum.net/tutbury/fauld/fauldc rater.htm
http://freespace.virgin.net/kehla.barnes/disaster. htm

Links for the lazy ones.

Whatever you say, a-j-e.baugh@virgin.net here's a nice plate of spam

Hmm, while I'm happily replying to myself here I made a fairly pleasant icon for Thunderbird. At 64x64 it's designed for my WindowMaker dock but should work for other uses.

The digest file can be found here.

I've made an ebuild for the other gentoo users out there. Yownload from the link above.

• Greg Egan
• Iain (M.) Banks
• Alistair Reynolds
• Ken MacLeod
• Richard Morgan
• Peter F. Hamilton
• Plus one of the old masters back at work: M. John Harrison

There's two ways to view things like this. Either as a tool to enhance something (if you can't sing, for example), which is the intended use... Or to be used as an instrument in its own right.

The latter gets my vote a lot more. Before you get upset and hope it never takes off, just think: Mellotrons haven't replaced orchestras, drum machines haven't replaced drummers, and samplers haven't replaced every other instrument in the history of time. They all sound good in their own right, not as clones of other things.

Of course, there are already published opinions on this one.. :-}

That must be the reason for the lackluster book A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.

Terry Nation once did an after-the-virus show for the BBC called Survivors. Aside from destroying civilization, the virus also allows rabid dogs to escape from quarantine. In one episode, people are attacked by these dogs, and themselves go mad, wanting only to spread the infection. Oddly enough, this never seems to happen in North America, even though rabies is endemic here.

iThis and iThat... When will we see i.R.Baboon? on a Mac? (i.e. something like an Encarta competitor)

SBC Communication's claim of ownership for a common Web site formatting tool is based on a pair of patents, U.S. Patent No. 5,933,841, having a grant date of August 1999, and U.S. Patent No. 6,442,574, which issued three years later in 2002. Both patents cover a "structured document browser" having an invention date at least as early as May 1996, which is the filing date for both the original application that matured into the '841 patent and the continuation application that resulted in the '574 patent. The claimed browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized with embedded codes specifying the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to a set of icons which, when selected, will result in the browser displaying a section of the document structure corresponding to the selected icon, while preserving the user interface.

Didn't just about every Windows 3.x and Macintosh OS 6.x application with a settings/preferences/options window do just this? In, say, 1989?

Maybe someone, somewhere remembers Hypercard? This guy does.

Didn't ProComm Plus for Windows 3.1 have a BBS list with the features described above?

You could do the same thing in NextStep, especially in their network browser. See Dummies guide to NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP or NeXTstation - Timeline & Specifications.

Someone at MuseumTour.com should jump on the prior-art side of this argument...

-Don

High-end SETI and planet searching will probably require very large, orbital telescopes in the billion dollar range. At that level, you can start receiving unintended signals (TV broadcasts etc.) from light years away.

But perhaps the biggest problem SETI faces are universal timescales. Human civilization in detectable form has existed for barely 100 out of 4.6 billion years. We really have no clue what happens to most civilizations on the other side of that timescale:

• A civilization can destroy itself. Hopefully, we are already past this stage.
• A civilization might be destroyed by some cosmic event that cannot be technologically prevented and occurs regularly (e.g. supernovae).
• A civilization might enter a state of artificially maintained cultural stagnation and isolation (Dark Age)
• A civilization might decide to become totally undetectable, and do nothing but receive information.
• A civilization might cease to exist in a physical form that is relevant to us ("transcension").

Sure, this may sound silly, but we really have no knowledge about the development of civilizations. The civilizations that are actually broadcasting signals right now (or rather, some years ago -- damn relativity) may be far away and few. So let's start looking.

Shortly before Lincoln was elected it began to become clear that the number of "free" states was going to out pace the number of slave states so the slave states wanted to pass legislation changing the location of the Masson-Dixon line (the line above which the US was "free" and below which it was "slave").

The Mason-Dixon line is the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland (and other parts of Maryland's border). It was surveyed in the 1700s, before the American Revolution.

While Pennsylvania was a free state and Maryland a slave state (but one of the few that did not secede), no one was looking to move the Mason-Dixon line.

However, the term "Mason-Dixon line" did come to be use colloquially but inaccurately to mean the extended and winding line between free and slave states.

That sounds like an awefully small yeild. I recall reading somewhere that it was the lowest possible yield they could acchive, but I've not been able to find that page again. I did however find this (curtesy of this page);

Back in the 1960s, American designers put together probably the coolest - yet also most suicidal - battlefield weapon ever built. It was a nuclear bazooka, capable of being operated by a pair of soldiers, and intended to be unleashed against Soviet battalions as they headed for Worthing-on-Sea.

The bazooka was given the patriotic codename 'Davy Crockett', presumably to encourage its operators to risk using it. Basically a scaled-up rifle grenade launcher which could either be hand-carried or mounted on a jeep, the initial Davy Crockett model had a maximum range of only two kilometres, later doubled to four. The minimum range was a suicidal 400 metres.

The tripod-mounted launcher fired a W-54 plutonium implosion bomb, the smallest nuclear weapon ever fielded by US forces. The egg-shaped atomic bomb weighed a portable 25 kilograms and had a selectable yield of either 10 or 20 tonnes. In blast terms that makes it only four times as powerful as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing device, but its wider radiation effects would inflict considerable fatalities. The Davy Crockett warhead had a timer fuse to be primed by its operators, who would have had to work out the time taken to reach its target.

One early firing of the Davy Crockett at the Nevada Test Site was witnessed by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. From 1961 onwards 400 bazooka warheads were manufactured and deployed. However non-nuclear test firings of the Davy Crockett revealed the design had a targeting flaw and it was retired in 1971.

The W-54 bomb had another application, as an Atomic Demolition Munition (ADM). Planted in hidden chambers beneath Germany - to destroy or block access to Warsaw Pact forces - it could be carried on handles by an individual or a team using mounted poles. ADMs were only finally retired from service in 1989.

Hey, thanks! Not being sarcastic, I had no idea.. looking at this I didn't realize how many of his films I did like.

I forgot about Dead Ringers, The Dead Zone, and Scanners, too. I used to watch Dead Ringers daily..

"Fuck off, you freaks! I'm telling my mother you talk dirty, and I happen to know for a fact that you don't even know what 'fuck' means!"

Two come to mind for me.

Peter F. Hamilton. I really enjoyed his Confederate Universe series. Looking at your list above you probably would too.

John Varley. Very entertaining. Also notice my sig. :)

But I wasn't talking about motion blur. I'm talking about TAA

I thought TAA and motion blur were the same thing, as this page seems to imply. Is there a difference?

I meant that it should be offered as a choice in the video card drivers. Much like Nvidia etc. offer enforced spatial anti-aliasing (FSAA)

The OpenGL rendering model introduces a big difference between spatial effects and temporal effects. The coordinates passed to OpenGL are three-dimensional (x, y, z), not four-dimensional (x, y, z, t)[1]. In OpenGL's coordinate space, coordinates of individual polygons within a rendered scene can be considered continuous. Only the rasterizer breaks this continuity, and a video card can choose traditional rasterization or FSAA rasterization because it has access to the (x, y) coordinates for interpolation within a pixel. On the other hand, OpenGL time is discrete, and each frame is considered a separate scene. There's no way to automatically map which polygons in one scene correspond to which polygons in another scene, so there's no way to interpolate an edge's coordinates along the fourth dimension.

[1] 't' (the time dimension) has nothing to do with 'w' (the homogenizing factor in homogeneous coordinates).

Dear lord, that poor bastard must've been subject to so many Simon & Garfunkel jokes.

>The only other author I can think of right offhand that created anything like Herbert's Dune universe in scope is Tolkien and Middle-Earth.

I might introduce you to Peter F. Hamilton. His Night's Dawn Universe is IMHO as rich as the Dune Universe.

I second that.

Virgin.Net has 1p a minute (at home rates, hotels will be higher). No CD required, I use it as an emergency dial-up when my cable modem goes down.

They offer 56k dial up, news, mail and the usual web browsing stuff.

Perhaps we should check inside it

Oh sorry, it's over here.

Also, I recommend this link

Dude, yellow on a dark red background? They should forget about putting lasers on jets and just send people that link if they need to blind someone...

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/24/142724 2&mode=thread&tid=162

Makes point D of this comment that I posted earlier all the more relevant.

Also, I recommend this link for the BOFH stories. This has more than the "official" site. The BOFH stories are hilarious. Will take you a couple of days to read it all, but it is SO worth it! :)

Some of the 'official' story seems to be incorrect. I was involved in making the C64 version. The original C64 BASIC version was given to a friend of mine who added music and graphics and optomised it so it was playable on a 1Mhz machine.
I also question the PC version being the first as I was playing it on the '64 in 1985. For a more detailed history see my tetris page Neil

Maybe Arte Johnson got some mod points?

VBR = Variable Bit Rate, before someone asks...

Answers to more of your MP3 questions

I enjoyed B5, despite the hoops you had to jump through to see it all in the UK.

I always thought JMS would do a good job with the Reality Dysfunction trilogy by Peter F Hamilton, if it was ever televised.

The books are pure space opera, with a bit of moral and social theme. But the universe and characters are just great. Giving the whole thing a Strazinsky (sp?) twist would work nicely.

Anyone else care to give there take on this?

Alex

I enjoyed B5, despite the hoops you had to jump through to see it all in the UK.

I always thought JMS would do a good job with the Reality Dysfunction trilogy by Peter F Hamilton, if it was ever televised.

The books are pure space opera, with a bit of moral and social theme. But the universe and characters are just great. Giving the whole thing a Strazinsky (sp?) twist would work nicely.

Anyone else care to give there take on this?

Alex

You might just know about the sausage; but you do not know that the first university in the world was founded in Bologna.

Then again, there is some debate over whether the thylacine is truly extinct.

Check this picture


Or this other one

More on The Register

Dude, you need to read Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy. It will absolutely blow you away.

actually, the british do have a constitution. More info on the Magna Carta and the English bill of rights is available at http://freespace.virgin.net/old.whig/docs.htm

I came to know about Red Bull in '94 or '95 as something sold in Europe. And finally had chance to drink it in the U.S. last year.

It tasted surprisingly familiar to me. I am from Japan and energy drinks like Red Bull had been around all my life.

So, I am not surprised that Red Bull came from Thailand.

I did a little research and found this. According to other pages I found, the first energy drink was Lipobitan something in 1962 in Japan.

No wonder Red Bull tasted familiar. It has been part of the Japanese life to see commercials of energy drinks on TV everyday. The memories of those commercials are in the oldest layer of my memory. (I was born in '64, so Lipobitan predates me.) There are many kinds of those drinks in Japan. Some of them are only available in pharmacies, and could cost something like $20-$50. The strongest one I remember having (in 1989 or so) cost about $20 and it was only like 50ml. But the drink kept me going working for a disco with a flu and having not slept the night before.

I'm glad that drinks like Red Bull are available in many countries now. I'm drinking a can right now in Germany :)

You're correct. There were eight Crusades, all in all. The one depicted in the movie would have been the ninth (and thus the last).
--

The OMRLP stood in the recent elections in the UK - and many of their members had 'interesting' ministerial positions...(you will have to scroll down a bit)
Keeper of the Wedding Shenanigans Home Page

When I came over to Canada in 1994, I was told it was similar. I guess it's got worse recently, but my viewing has decreased in that time.

I didn't find anything that stated how many minutes per hour ITV spends on commercials, but you might find the followng of interest

http://www.netreach.net/~kaufman/ratingsAds.html
http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/usa_can /cult/other.htm#tv/a

Yes, but it's traffic laws that prevent people like Jason Humble from doing it again.

Sorry for the barely-relevant link. Google let me down (thought at least it didn't send me goat-hunting).
--

All kidding aside, you can't scorn the Betamax. It was, and arguably still is, leaps and bounds ahead of VHS.

Remember, Sony failed only because their license fees for the technology were so expensive. The reason? The MPAA sued Sony over the VCR and how it would cut into movie royalties. Sony was therefore at a disadvantage, trying to finance both their lawsuit and a possible verdict against them with the royalties on Beta VCRs.

JVC came in with VHS in 1977, which was a cheapo rip-off of Beta that was just different enough to not infringe on any of Sony's patents. The MPAA lawsuit was won by Sony, but the battle for the shelf under peoples' TV sets was won by VHS.

Betamax is simply a 1/2" version of Sony's legendary 3/4" U-Matic format. U-Matic was designed as an industrial format for TV stations and the like. To this day, if you have a 3/4" U-Matic videocassette, I'd be surprised if there are many TV stations in the world that couldn't play it.

Factoid: "Beta" means "closer" in Japanese; Beta VCRs were so-named because the video tracks laid down by the rotating head assembly were closer than those of the bigger and older U-Matic predecessor.

U-Matic was eventually replaced by Betacam, which is a Betamax VCR mechanism that runs the tape a lot faster for better picture quality. Betacam and Betacam SP have been *the format* for TV stations, ENG cameras, editing, etc. Finally, the torch has now mostly been passed to the D-Betacam, a digital version of the venerable Betacam which shares its heritage with the home Betamax and the U-Matic before.

And, of course, before those, was the Sony AV-3600 and other open-reel 1/2" VTRs. (I'm the proud owner of a 1975 AV-3600. Razor-sharp picture, though the AV-3600 was a low-end black-and-white model.)

Most importantly, though, if you're upset by the impotent plastic noises that your $200-at-Fry's VCR makes, you can take a look at how Ed Cushman watches TV. Sadly, I don't think you can rent a Quadruplex videotape at Blockbuster. (As recently as 1988, when I was in high school and volunteering at a low-budget community TV station, we had a Quad. It was loads of fun.)

• Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia (with pics from a fully 3d version of the game called DM Nexus, and a DM forum)
• Dungeon Master Web Lots of animated gifs from the game, including characters and monsters (as seen above).

You know, like the Bastard Operator From Hell, only teaching Computer Science. It sure sounds like something right out of an episode of the BOFH...