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Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle'
trawg writes: "Programming legend Michael Abrash has announced that he has joined the Oculus team to work on the Rift VR headset as Chief Scientist, and will be once again working with John Carmack to bring VR to life. His post covers a lot of ground, including the history of his quest for VR, and ends with his explanation of why he thinks the Facebook acquisition is ultimately a good thing — they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'"
Abrash has long maintained a blog about VR tech — it's worth reading if the subject matter interests you.
Keep that in mind. Facebook is not a company of technological excellence (Apple) or software excellence (Google), but simply got lucky for being the social site that everyone went to.
You can finally see the picture. It's a giant middle finger. Flipping you off. Forever.
He was a developer in Quake and has released Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.
And I call Facebook the final straw.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
"Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
The voice of dissent has been a lot louder than the supporters.
I'm a C/C++/VB.NET/PHP programmer and I can safely say that a good programmer can be a good programmer in PHP, it just takes more effort from the programmer to be discplined about good programming practices. And I totally agree that disrepecting a company or individual for the language their product is developed in is ill informed and shows a lack of experience and understanding of the person forming that opinion.
One of the biggest flaws in PHP is being totally typeless and undeclared - which is a flaw that facebook themselves are attempting to remedy. I haven't actually looked into their proposed solutions, but I do at least respect their development team a bit for trying to give back to the community - even if I totally hate what they otherwise stand for as a company.
Heck, at one point, I would of said it's impossible to make a real game in Java (which I don't know) - but look at minecraft's success. It still may not of been the best choice, but it's obviously possible.
He's well known if you're into the low-level machinery of game graphics.
Turn in your geek card.
In addition to what other people have already said, his columns on graphics in the old dead-tree version of DDJ were a must-read.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Also responsible for much of the graphics in NT.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a high school age son of a friend. The kid studies music in school but still had no idea who Bob Dylan was.
This isn't quite that bad but it's close.
After the FB/Oculus news, I looked into alternatives and found about this InfinitEye project from France that claims to do 210 degree of horizontal FOV, fully covering the human peripheral vision (while the Rift only does only 90 degrees). I'd pay attention to this one now.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Would never have been an error in the past sadly.
It's sounding a lot like this acquisition really has a lot less to do with Facebook itself, than just to do with Facebook's money. FB is in a business that can only be monetized so much. It's also a nook where many predecessors have suddenly gone from most-popular-site-eva to a discarded remnant. Geocities, Myspace, etc were also very popular in their day but inevitably doomed.
If Microsoft could start a successful game console, perhaps FB can move into the VR market. I see disastrous things if they try to mix their core business with Occulous, and frankly the privacy implications scare me enough that I'll be keeping my distance for now, but I've still got a small grain of hope that they're really just looking to buy into emerging markets to pad the inevitable decline of their primary LOB.
You might be surprised, but the scope of "graphics programming" is very limited when compared to the entirerty of the software industry.
Making optimizations on a project and putting out a book of tricks hardly qualifies a person to be a software legend. Especially when those tricks are derived from commonly used techniques in much of the embedded system / signal processing development world where resources are extremely limited.
Doesn't mean he's not experienced/good at what he does, but hardly qualifies to be put on the pedastal you seem to be putting him on.
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie on the other hand...
From the article, Abash has been around for 57 years ?
Oculus HR obviously didn't get the memo yet to ignore guys over 30.
Except when there's no evidence of this.
Turn in your geek card.
In addition to what other people have already said, his columns on graphics in the old dead-tree version of DDJ were a must-read.
For people into that sort of thing.
Which is but a select subset of a subset of the Slashdot crowd.
Get over yourself... "turn in your geek card" indeed...
What do we have to to do? Make you an offer you can't refuse?
Kids these days.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
That was a good book. I remember getting it at Barnes and Noble back in 1996. Back then AP computer science was taught in Pascal. But his book was in C so I couldn't use any of the code samples. But it was pretty easy to convert to Pascal. Made a rudimentary asteroids game in 320x240 VGA (with page flipping! Although I felt his way of loading VGA latches and then writing was too complicated so I just drew to a memory buffer and copied to alternating video pages with vsync) with prerendered graphics. It was absolutely awesome. And then I accidentally deleted my hard driveâ¦
Abrash worked at Intel for years on Larrabee, hes not just a video game engineer. Gabe Newell courted him for YEARS to get him away from Intel. How many billionaire CEOs have courted you personally?
Good-bye
"This is the year that virtual reality becomes mainstream" [1-25]
[1] Some guy, (1964.)
[2] Some guy, (1974.)
[3] Some guy, (1979.)
[4] Some guy, (1981.)
[5] Some guy, (1982.)
[6] Some guy, (1983.)
[7] Some guy, (1984.)
[8] Some guy, (1986.)
[9] Some guy, (1989.)
[10] Some guy, (1994.)
[11] Some guy, (1995.)
[12] Some guy, (1996.)
[13] Some guy, (1997.)
[14] Some guy, (1999.)
[15] Some guy, (2000.)
[16] Some guy, (2002.)
[17] Some guy, (2003.)
[18] Some guy, (2006.)
[19] Some guy, (2007.)
[20] Some guy, (2009.)
[21] Some guy, (2010.)
[22] Some guy, (2011.)
[23] Some guy, (2012.)
[24] Some guy, (2013.)
[25] Some guy at Facebook, (2014.)
Graphics Programming Black Book is like the Dragon Book(s) or Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, but for graphics.
And if you don't know about at least one out of those three you may return your diploma back to your university.
Also, as others mentioned in his Graphics Programming Black Book (which I have), he led and popularized the use of Mode X in VGA adapter cards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Having square pixels at 320x240 was significantly easier than having to deal with the odd 320x200 resolution. ... an' git off my lawn! 8)
I've only ever had the online version. Apparently someone recently converted it to Markdown (hopefully the generated epub is better than the one I made from the PDF files a while back).
> Except I'm not a fucking programmer, and especially not a game programmer.
Submitted story starts with: Programming legend Michael Abrash...
It's great that you're not a programmer and all, but then why would you come into a story about programmer and act all incensed that YOU didn't know who he was? Did you miss the very first word in the description: 'Programming' ? Did you think that we would NOT be discussing about a very legendary person in the programming world?
If you wanted an explanation, you could have asked for one. Instead you asked only, "Who?" Tell me, do you have problems detecting sarcasm? This is an actual disorder, and perhaps it would help you to know simply asking 'Who' implies to most normal people that you think Abrash is not worthy of knowing. Especially to programmers, which I may remind you is the first word of the submission.
You must be kidding me.
When I was in high school, I discovered Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming, filled with all kinds of gems. And then, Quake came out and there was his Graphics Programming Black Book.
Between x86 optimization, BSP trees, and assorted C/C++ tricks, Abrash's books were bibles at a time when graphics programming was just taking off.
I remember writing my own ray-tracer and 3d engine based on what I learned in his books.
Then there was his book on Zen of Code Optimization, which was amazing and filled with all kinds of computational optimization techniques for a time when not using a memory register effectively meant your render would stop halfway.
Michael Abrash and John Carmack were legends -- their techniques in optimizing rendering engines and their efforts in making graphics programming accessible to wider audiences were instrumental in enabling high end graphics. In fact, makers of graphics cards were known to design features based on optimization techniques that were used in Quake and other rendering engines.
And there was also something called "demo scene", where people built amazing programming snippets of graphics, media, and art. Between that and Abrash and Carmack's work, graphics got to where we are today.
So, yeah. Your question shows an unfortunate level of ignorance on the origins of the graphics programming industry.
When Quake was being written using a software renderer running only on the Pentium CPU, he wrote the texture mapping triangle rasterizer function in assembler that took advantage of the parallel nature of the Pentium's integer and floating-point units. This gave them the float-point division calculation required for perspective projection calculations for free. Thus software based texture mapping API's were the state-of-the-art of the time.
That led to a whole cascade sequence of strategic moves by SGI, Microsoft, 3Dfx, Nvidia, and 30 other ASIC design companies to build GPU's.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
While you are right about the limited applicability of Abrash's programming techniques, I think it is unfair to reduce his collective contributions to a "book of tricks".
I think the challenge was not merely optimization but also optimization within the limited realm of graphics programming, which had different challenges. You sound like someone who understands the basics needed to successfully optimize hardware and software performance, so I am sure you can appreciate how using a couple of otherwise vacant registers or figuring out the order of correct order of stacks/heaps could play a huge role in performance, at least back in the day.
Abrash's contributions were a combination of old-school tricks (especially his stuff from DDJ), an understanding of graphics programming from an algorithmic standpoint (and how to optimize them within the limitations of the hardware available), and were geared specifically towards optimizing game engines (and corresponding hardware recommendations). Sure, it's not quite the scope and scale of K&R's contributions, but that's like saying Feynman's work pales in comparison to Einstein's and Bohr's, so he was a hack.
Get over yourself... "turn in your geek card" indeed...
No. Seriously. Turn in your geek card.
A geek would be interested even if they werent interested in graphics programming. Thats why Abrash was a writer for Dr Dobbs Programmers Technical Journal, not Graphics Weekly.
I have no interest in writing an operating system, yet Dr Dobbs also covered the porting of BSD to the 386 architecture culminating in 386BSD which I was an avid follower of.
You sir, are a technology brat, not a geek.
"His name was James Damore."
Not a great measure there. Since plenty of hookers can say they have been 'courted' by billionair CEOs.
The hell it is.
The Dragon Book of graphics is Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley and van Dam (and later Feiner and Hughes too). Like CG:PP, the other two books that you mention are books for scientists and engineers. The Black Book is for hackers of the early 1990s.
It's a book which describes a world that no longer exists. We don't have non-pipelined 80386 CPUs, non-existent or slow floating point, VGA data latches, or pretty much anything that the book describes in depth. I remember that world, and I remember it well.
The first edition of the Dragon Book has dated, and doesn't cover a lot of modern compiler practice, but over half of it is still relevant. The Gang of Four book also shows its age, but it still serves its purpose as a dictionary, and as a tool for helping you to think in higher-level structures. Very little in the Black Book is useful today as anything other than history.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'm guessing that the puzzle he just solved was how to finance his retirement account.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Michael Abrash is just a money grubbing little bitch. That is the sole reason he joined up with the sellouts at Oculus VR.