Actually programs can use 4d raytracing. It means program can scatter samples in time dimension, which gives blurring. It's only one of techniques for blurring in raytracing.
That idea has been around for quite a while with the goal of efficiently generating multiple ray-traced frames by a single calculation of the intersection of a ray, with a moving object, over a period of several frames, thus simultaneously generating the solution for several frames. See, for example,
And people of faith take a much more extreme attitude than most atheists. They insist that the probability of their god existing is 100% exactly, while the probability of anyone else's god existing is 0% exactly.
That last is an extremely inaccurate statement... which tends to cast doubt on the accuracy of every other claim you might care to make.
For all his putative omnipresence, God is as elusive as the Unicorn. There's no more reason to believe in any God than there is to believe in Unicorns.
Actually there are all sorts of reasons to believe in a "god"... some having nothing at all to do with whether or not "he" actually exists.
I find it somewhat interesting that we expend very little effort in trying to determine the existence of (a) "god". Science conducts investigations of the physical world in such a way that it would only be by sheer accident that the existence of a deity would be determined. And the religious spend no effort trying to determine the existence of a deity because they assume it. Ah well, good thing we have all those philosophy departments at universities.
And where exactly did you come by the certainty that it is irrelevant today whether or not a deity was required 13.7 billion years ago? I would have thought that would be pretty big news. If that turned out to be the case I'd sure like to know.
The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch.22 that religion cannot win.
What if "they" (these gods of which you speak) want us to be strong minded, independent and critical thinkers? Is that a six-year-old mentality? And if not then do they still merit no attention from us? Perhaps you are thinking of a catch-33.
Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.
What is this "beautiful" of which you speak? Let's grow up and forget about such things... we don't need them. Hmmmm, and what about religions that don't include deities? Should we discard them as well? Perhaps we could just call them philosophies and still keep them.
Yeah, I explained to a friend what efficacy figures like 99% meant for birth control. She (yeah I was explaining BC to a woman) freaked - she had never really understood just how bad the odds were (assuming you didn't want kids) when something was 99% - and she is a fairly smart thoughtful person so the average person probably has not got a clue... welcome to parenthood!
I can tell you this: after decades contracting in companies from small to enormous, I cannot recall a single project that failed due to lack of technical ability. It was almost always a management problem - whether project management or higher up. So many times I've said something point blank to the effect of "If you do that it will cost you in the end", and watched the heads nod in understanding and agreement. Then they proceed to do exactly what I warned them against. Then later they bitch about "why is this project so expensive" or something similar. I explain why and they don't like hearing it. Too bad.
Most just remember "Project X, cost three times what we were told it would.", they never remember to blame themselves for not paying attention to the advice they paid to receive. Or there are the ones who try to micromanage everything to save money and meanwhile don't put in the effort required to keep the big picture in mind so they lose hundreds to thousands of times as much much as they saved with their micro-managing.
There is no reason to write tiny apps in assembly anymore.
Well there might be no need to write tiny editor apps in assembly anymore but there are lots of reasons to write tiny apps in assembly. Well, in fact maybe there are reasons to write tiny editor apps in assembly too, for low power firmware controlled devices for example... not hard to think of a few examples of those.
Though we asked for some kind of diagram or screenshot that might demonstrate what kinds of detail John was referring to, we weren't able to get anything quite yet
Uh, yeah... the whole article is a lot of text with an amazing amount of hand waving and very little useful information.
John and David Kirk also agree that mixing and matching traditional rasterization rendering with ray tracing is not only possible
Considering the idea has been around for at least two decades that's a pretty safe bet.
does see the future general purpose computational power of the GPU being utilized for physics
That's going to be a big relief for all the science people who have already been doing that for a few years.
Not to mention that $400 a week is a pretty damn cheap nanny... kinda gives the impression of a wanna be rich person calling their babysitter a nanny. Oh and a 914 isn't a "real" Porsche either.
It's fun to think that "telepathy is the next stage of human evolution", but there are no obvious physics to support the SciFi interpretation of telepathy. (Especially when you get into telekinesis, which requires WAY more energy than the human body can produce!) What physics does allow us is slightly more boring, but none the less an interesting concept to explore.:-)
Mmmm well it could be there will be some support in some of the enormous body of "non-obvious physics"... you know, all the stuff we don't know yet...:) Maybe directly applying force on something isn't the most efficient way to get it to move.
I would settle for a dedicated scroll wheel that would pan the physical screen up/down a larger virtual screen. You can achieve pretty much the same thing now but a dedicated wheel would make it much easier and for me probably be the better choice than a large screen that sucked significantly more battery power than the current screen.
Not just skilled but young(ish) as well. I think there is a tremendous amount of age discrimination in IT these days. I have very talented friends that are getting out because they can see the writing on the wall... the companies want a youth culture and frankly so do the young IT guys... working alongside, or worse, having to supervise, somebody 20-30 years their senior seems to weird them out.
yet we're still clinging tenaciously to the old safety blanket of a mesh of tesselated triangles and projecting textures onto them.
Tessellation is also frequently used in ray-tracers as it makes things much simpler and faster.
Converting it all to mesh approximations of what was sculpted was, and still is, pretty much just a hack to get things to run at acceptable real-time speeds.
It also makes things much simpler for ray-tracers. Really. Intersecting a line with an arbitrarily curved surface is demanding, in terms of cycles and in terms of getting the calculation correct in the first place.
The article is right that ray-tracers must examine every poly, just like raster renderers. Ray-tracing is not, as some have said, O(ln N) where N is the number of primitives. The article's comments that aliasing is a big problem for ray tracing ignores decades of work in ray-tracing to overcome this problem. The article then goes on to talk about radiosity (although not naming it that) and it being even more computationally intensive and says rasterization is better because it can approximate these soft effects - well, so can ray-tracing. The rest of the article is similar... nothing is really *wrong* but I think it's not entirely unbiased either.
Either way I'd still like to get me a machine with one of the NVidia/ATI computation engines to play with though.:D
The article says that the data suggests (within a 2% margin of error) that space is flat and that that conclusion is based on the energy density of the universe. But if the universe goes through another period of inflation - where space itself expands - then won't the energy density of the universe effectively drop potentially putting it into the set of values where space must have negative curvature? And if it is at/near critical density now then wouldn't it have been > critical density before the last period of inflation?
I could be a little bias, because I have a degree in software engineering.
Ya think?
Apropos of nothing I worked briefly with a software engineer from Waterloo... he had no idea of what a stack frame was (in the context of procedure calls) or how you might use the call stack to debug a program.
I would agree with your assessment of CS at Waterloo. Both Calgary and Carleton have done some innovative things so it isn't a surprise you are happy with the people from there.
I don't know what your definition of "good undergrad program" is so I can't disagree with your opinion that there isn't one in the entire country... but I certainly think there are many good undergrad programs in Canada.
I believe the first full coop program offered in Canada was actually at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), rather than Waterloo. One of the reasons Waterloo is highly regarded (or was, when I was there) is that they put a lot of effort into telling people that they were highly regarded.
When I was there, which was some time ago, more than one (math(cs) faculty member told me that getting the good teaching award was seen as a sign that you weren't spending enough time on your research. I didn't find it hard to believe.
Here is a test shot of a 4 nm tall aluminum cylinder rendered at 150 femtoseconds per second of animation:
Aluminum nanocolumn vibration (Quicktime, 14 MB)
Ahhhhh spheres, every ray tracer's favorite primitive!:D
Slashdot Mirror
Actually programs can use 4d raytracing. It means program can scatter samples in time dimension, which gives blurring. It's only one of techniques for blurring in raytracing.
That idea has been around for quite a while with the goal of efficiently generating multiple ray-traced frames by a single calculation of the intersection of a ray, with a moving object, over a period of several frames, thus simultaneously generating the solution for several frames. See, for example,
Spatio-Temporal Coherence in Ray Tracing", Chapman, J. et. al., Graphics Interface 91 http://books.google.ca/books?id=hbJ20d4NgiUC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=%22spatio-temporal%22+coherence&source=web&ots=jpQARDC-US&sig=mEJNEIgfR9YvaUXNTXvO1PsYcPE&hl=en
which discusses solving the ray and moving object intersection problem.Just set your shutter speed and you'll get all the blur you want. Even digital photographers have known that for many years.
And people of faith take a much more extreme attitude than most atheists. They insist that the probability of their god existing is 100% exactly, while the probability of anyone else's god existing is 0% exactly.
That last is an extremely inaccurate statement... which tends to cast doubt on the accuracy of every other claim you might care to make.
For all his putative omnipresence, God is as elusive as the Unicorn. There's no more reason to believe in any God than there is to believe in Unicorns.
Actually there are all sorts of reasons to believe in a "god"... some having nothing at all to do with whether or not "he" actually exists.
I find it somewhat interesting that we expend very little effort in trying to determine the existence of (a) "god". Science conducts investigations of the physical world in such a way that it would only be by sheer accident that the existence of a deity would be determined. And the religious spend no effort trying to determine the existence of a deity because they assume it. Ah well, good thing we have all those philosophy departments at universities.
And where exactly did you come by the certainty that it is irrelevant today whether or not a deity was required 13.7 billion years ago? I would have thought that would be pretty big news. If that turned out to be the case I'd sure like to know.
The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch .22 that religion cannot win.
What if "they" (these gods of which you speak) want us to be strong minded, independent and critical thinkers? Is that a six-year-old mentality? And if not then do they still merit no attention from us? Perhaps you are thinking of a catch-33.
Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.
What is this "beautiful" of which you speak? Let's grow up and forget about such things... we don't need them. Hmmmm, and what about religions that don't include deities? Should we discard them as well? Perhaps we could just call them philosophies and still keep them.
Yeah, I explained to a friend what efficacy figures like 99% meant for birth control. She (yeah I was explaining BC to a woman) freaked - she had never really understood just how bad the odds were (assuming you didn't want kids) when something was 99% - and she is a fairly smart thoughtful person so the average person probably has not got a clue... welcome to parenthood!
I can tell you this: after decades contracting in companies from small to enormous, I cannot recall a single project that failed due to lack of technical ability. It was almost always a management problem - whether project management or higher up. So many times I've said something point blank to the effect of "If you do that it will cost you in the end", and watched the heads nod in understanding and agreement. Then they proceed to do exactly what I warned them against. Then later they bitch about "why is this project so expensive" or something similar. I explain why and they don't like hearing it. Too bad.
Most just remember "Project X, cost three times what we were told it would.", they never remember to blame themselves for not paying attention to the advice they paid to receive. Or there are the ones who try to micromanage everything to save money and meanwhile don't put in the effort required to keep the big picture in mind so they lose hundreds to thousands of times as much much as they saved with their micro-managing.
There is no reason to write tiny apps in assembly anymore.
Well there might be no need to write tiny editor apps in assembly anymore but there are lots of reasons to write tiny apps in assembly. Well, in fact maybe there are reasons to write tiny editor apps in assembly too, for low power firmware controlled devices for example... not hard to think of a few examples of those.
Actually it is the first thing CS majors should learn too - that or using a Turing Machine simulator and then assembler.
Depth of field is a function of aperture, and has nothing to do with either lenses or refraction.
Ummmmm, aperture of what (if there are no lenses or refraction involved)?????
Though we asked for some kind of diagram or screenshot that might demonstrate what kinds of detail John was referring to, we weren't able to get anything quite yet
Uh, yeah... the whole article is a lot of text with an amazing amount of hand waving and very little useful information.
John and David Kirk also agree that mixing and matching traditional rasterization rendering with ray tracing is not only possible
Considering the idea has been around for at least two decades that's a pretty safe bet.
does see the future general purpose computational power of the GPU being utilized for physics
That's going to be a big relief for all the science people who have already been doing that for a few years.
Not to mention that $400 a week is a pretty damn cheap nanny... kinda gives the impression of a wanna be rich person calling their babysitter a nanny. Oh and a 914 isn't a "real" Porsche either.
It's fun to think that "telepathy is the next stage of human evolution", but there are no obvious physics to support the SciFi interpretation of telepathy. (Especially when you get into telekinesis, which requires WAY more energy than the human body can produce!) What physics does allow us is slightly more boring, but none the less an interesting concept to explore. :-)
Mmmm well it could be there will be some support in some of the enormous body of "non-obvious physics"... you know, all the stuff we don't know yet... :) Maybe directly applying force on something isn't the most efficient way to get it to move.
I'd add that (according to gf anyhow)
4. the touchpad seems to be getting less and less sensitive as time goes by.
That depends on who you are - having average/large size hands for a male I would agree with you, otoh my girlfriend has no trouble at all with it.
I would settle for a dedicated scroll wheel that would pan the physical screen up/down a larger virtual screen. You can achieve pretty much the same thing now but a dedicated wheel would make it much easier and for me probably be the better choice than a large screen that sucked significantly more battery power than the current screen.
I think your last sentence hits the nail right on the head.
The key there is SKILLED.
Not just skilled but young(ish) as well. I think there is a tremendous amount of age discrimination in IT these days. I have very talented friends that are getting out because they can see the writing on the wall... the companies want a youth culture and frankly so do the young IT guys... working alongside, or worse, having to supervise, somebody 20-30 years their senior seems to weird them out.
yet we're still clinging tenaciously to the old safety blanket of a mesh of tesselated triangles and projecting textures onto them.
Tessellation is also frequently used in ray-tracers as it makes things much simpler and faster.
Converting it all to mesh approximations of what was sculpted was, and still is, pretty much just a hack to get things to run at acceptable real-time speeds.
It also makes things much simpler for ray-tracers. Really. Intersecting a line with an arbitrarily curved surface is demanding, in terms of cycles and in terms of getting the calculation correct in the first place.
The article is right that ray-tracers must examine every poly, just like raster renderers. Ray-tracing is not, as some have said, O(ln N) where N is the number of primitives. The article's comments that aliasing is a big problem for ray tracing ignores decades of work in ray-tracing to overcome this problem. The article then goes on to talk about radiosity (although not naming it that) and it being even more computationally intensive and says rasterization is better because it can approximate these soft effects - well, so can ray-tracing. The rest of the article is similar... nothing is really *wrong* but I think it's not entirely unbiased either.
Either way I'd still like to get me a machine with one of the NVidia/ATI computation engines to play with though. :D
The article says that the data suggests (within a 2% margin of error) that space is flat and that that conclusion is based on the energy density of the universe. But if the universe goes through another period of inflation - where space itself expands - then won't the energy density of the universe effectively drop potentially putting it into the set of values where space must have negative curvature? And if it is at/near critical density now then wouldn't it have been > critical density before the last period of inflation?
I believe the privacy laws in Canada have required Google to blur the faces of anyone in the images.
I could be a little bias, because I have a degree in software engineering.
Ya think?
Apropos of nothing I worked briefly with a software engineer from Waterloo... he had no idea of what a stack frame was (in the context of procedure calls) or how you might use the call stack to debug a program.
I would agree with your assessment of CS at Waterloo. Both Calgary and Carleton have done some innovative things so it isn't a surprise you are happy with the people from there.
I don't know what your definition of "good undergrad program" is so I can't disagree with your opinion that there isn't one in the entire country... but I certainly think there are many good undergrad programs in Canada.
I believe the first full coop program offered in Canada was actually at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), rather than Waterloo. One of the reasons Waterloo is highly regarded (or was, when I was there) is that they put a lot of effort into telling people that they were highly regarded.
When I was there, which was some time ago, more than one (math(cs) faculty member told me that getting the good teaching award was seen as a sign that you weren't spending enough time on your research. I didn't find it hard to believe.
Here is a test shot of a 4 nm tall aluminum cylinder rendered at 150 femtoseconds per second of animation: Aluminum nanocolumn vibration (Quicktime, 14 MB)
Ahhhhh spheres, every ray tracer's favorite primitive! :D