Some of the demonstrations there include particle systems whose trajectories are entirely done within the shader. I'm not exactly sure why this would be 2001... I suppose it shows that even back then, some physics functions were possible in the GPU.
Ultimately, GPU's are going to be able to function as highly parallel, highly powered vector processors. Many of the cards are going to be able to handle physics as well as, or better than CPUs, at the expense of possibly graphical power.
What I'm ultimately more interested in is some kind of API for physics, if it's even possible. In that case, graphics companies would have to write drivers that properly load balance physics tasks between CPU and GPU.
Actually, from what I've heard, a lot of the delay in taking a digital picture comes primarily from the Bayer interpolation that's being done in order to introduce full color into all the pixels. I could be wrong. If so, posters please correct me on this.
The author of this report lightly touched on the Foveon x3 sensor. This supposedly allows a sensor to capture full color without having to interpolate between pixels. I really wish the author would have gone into more detail about that, since I have my eye on the Polaroid x530 that's coming out in June.
Uhura: By the 23rd century, Star Trek fandom had evolved from a loose association of nerds with skin problems into a full blown religion.
Preacher: And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship, where there would be no tribble at all
Followers: All power to the engines!
Uhura: As country after country fell after its influenced, world leaders became threatened by the movement's power. So the trekkies were executed in the most befitting: virgins:
Trekkie: Bwaaaaaah!
Executor: He's dead Jim.
Trekkie: Bwaaaaaah!
Executor: He's dead Jim.
This will probably be applied to books soon. I can imagine how it will work: the text will be printed as a mirror image.
The problem with something like this is the case of obviousness. What is obvious and trivial for an engineer (Breaking CSS), is NOT trivial to the average person.
Companies that push the DMCA will not choose to use encryption methods so inherently obvious that it will piss off all the non-engineering folk. Infringing on the rights of 2 million Linux users isn't enough of a catalyst to overthrow the DMCA. Infringing on 20 million, or 100 million people, is.
If you don't believe that 2 million is a relatively small number, look at gay rights in the US. There are more gay people in the U.S than there are Linux users, but that still isn't enough to evoke an amendment protecting gay marriage as a RIGHT. Instead, there are proposed amendments banning it outright.
On the other hand, Divx failed miserably because it infringed on "fair use" to a possibly-much-wider-audience than CSS did. So much so that nobody subscribed to it, and the tech died.
As long as their methods of restriction stay within a small subset (yet smart subset) of people, there's not going to be enough opposition to overthrow stuff like this. They're ultimately playing it smart... At least smart for them.
I know this concept from Perl DBI, but in PHP I haven't seen anyone (phpBB,...) using bind_param. Why is this? Performance? Keeping the code short and simple?
Because mysqli is designed for PHP5 which is not production ready, and MySQL 4.1.2 or greater, which is alpha status.
I am ultimately waiting for these functions to come out in a production sense, so I can start doing SSL connections to my database.
If the person is an adult but is presented in a way that suggests he or she is a minor, it's kiddie porn and you're going to jail.
Ultimately, define presentation... Would it be simply how he / she looks, or what other things she would do... I find that these are / should be ultimately irrelevant.
What if a woman who looks young chooses to do porn? Wouldn't her rights be violated in being of age, and not being able to do that work? It's a very interesting question, isn't it?
Ha! And what were you expecting? An UGLY Lara Croft? The very premise of Tomb Raider was a cute, D-cup chick running around with a bunch of guns, third person.
Wing Commander could have been sooo good. They should have kept all the major actors from the game, who had much more talent than the movie equivalents.
I think the MPAA has a secret conspiracy to keep Mark Hamill from ever making it big again.
...you're *really* good at impersonations? For instance, you could then steal Sean Connery's card, say "Moneypenny" into it with his voice, and get a "authorization squawk" that goes something like, "Oh James."
Seriously though... so much for using this over the net.
I'm not so worried about The Gimp, since I typically use Photoshop.
What I AM worried about, is what sort of long-reaching implications this has for GD. I use GD regularly in order to manipulate images via the web, and something like this would most likely cause JPEG support to be entirely removed from the project until the worldwide patent expires.
They did it with GIF.
This sucks, because usually I've come to expect future versions of software to have MORE functionality, not less. I hope the Joint Photographic Experts Group really does have prior art.
or will the government ban this as some sort of cyber-pedophilia?
The question comes down ultimately not to what the robot is imitating, but ultimately, what is is.
There was a woman I used to talk to online a while back. She was 21. The thing was, in her pictures, she looked 12-13. Really young, skinny, asian girl.
There's a girl I talk to online right now. She's almost fifteen. But then, you'd think she's 18 if you didn't know better. There were a couple trolls a while back who posted pictures of her on slashdot, and they all drooled over her.
If the law is about what's perceived, then having sex with, or looking at naked pictures of the 21 year old would be considered pedophelia, even though she's of age.
On the other hand, if the law is about what's perceived, then having sex with, or looking at naked pictures of that 15 year old would NOT be considered illegal, because you'd be under the perception that she's older. In spite of the fact that she's faaar more womanly than the 21 year old.
Ultimately, a robot that would mock a 15 year old cheerleader is ultimately a 15 year old robot cheerleader. You should be able to do whatever you want to a robot...
... Until level of sentience becomes an issue. Robots with a true-to-human level of intellegence, crafted as 7 year olds for the purpose of a molestation toy is VERY disturbing. Humanity will have to cross that bridge when we reach it.
22nd century morality is a bitch. Makes me glad I live in the 21st... heh.
Have you ever stopped to think about the motivations of the terrorists?
And this is relevant to Iraq... how?
The war against Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. This is evidently clear, in that Saddam Hussein was as close to a secular leader as you can come within the middle east. The chance of Saddam Hussein giving weapons of mass destruction to right wing Islamic terrorist organizations like Al Queda is little to none. Especially considering the fact that they tried to bump off Saddam a couple times.
The war against terror may be religiously inclined. The propaganda that Bush pushes that Iraq is linked to terrorist organizations may be religiously inclined. The actual reasons for fighting this war, are not.
Iraq was fought for oil. Saddam's money-for-food program started an oil exchange in Euros, which threatened the dollar's stranglehold upon the oil market. A euro-based oil market would deflate the dollar by quite a significant margin, as countries abandon their reserves of US dollars. This has nothing to do with religion, but is rather an act of economics.
Iraq and the war on terror. Sure. Just like the US tried to justify Saddam Hussein's removal by his brutality against the Kurds in 1988. Really, if this were a priority, Hussein would have been removed the first time around.
Overthrowing Iraq was the worst thing the US could have done with the war on terror, not the best. Invading the country was a catalyst to terrorist organizations to get more members, not less. A lot more countries hate America now than they did before. If Bush really cared about defusing terrorism, the US would have placed sanctions against Israel long ago.
The war in Iraq is about economic, not religious power. All war is about power, though.
Oh yeah, was the American Civil War religiously inclined, too?:P
...and once the downloads per second curve decreases by a certain amount (say 95% or so), then you send out the decryption key. Everyone installs the patch simultaneously; and zero-day exploits have as targets only those systems that do not subscribe to the patch service, and use traditional methods to procure patches.
Out of curiosity, how would the company be able to "send" the decryption key, whereas all the machines run the patch at the same time. It's not like all the computers in the world run on a static IP. For that matter, what if the user is sitting behind a firewall, etc.
I suppose you could have your patch program preset to check their server at a certain time intervals, where the server sends back a response to check back in xxxx seconds.
Then again, imagine if Microsoft did this, and programmed all Windows machines connected to the net to check windows update at 12:57am for a decryption key. Can we say, DDOS?
I suppose it would be possible to even out the download interval of the decryption key over say... 24 hours. But then again, the witty worm struck 24 hours after the patch was released. I'm sure that with an effort, a virus like witty could be released during the patch timeframe and still affect a great deal of users.
Finally, patches for windows come out as exe downloads looong before Windows Update updates come out. This would have to change, and in the process it'll piss off a lot of network admins.
I could be wrong on some of my points. Feel free to clarify them, if I am.
Stories that have been rejected the first time over are often accepted later on, and appear on the page.
For instance, this particularly story I submitted at Sunday April 11, @05:54AM. It got shortly rejected after. I imagine a couple factors come into play:
CmdrTaco was posting stories on Slashdot around the time I submitted the story. On the other hand, this story was accepted and scheduled by Timothy. I'm sure different editors deem different stories important.
My last accepted story, Court Ruling Points Way To Broadband Regulation was scheduled roughly 7 hours in advance (I believe). There's always the chance that a story like this is scheduled way ahead of time, or that one editor constantly rejects the story until one gets through.
Slashdot is entirely user submission based. An editor hardly ever posts a story him / herself, unless the story is explicitly slashdot related.
The editors are, quite simply, editors. They don't go grousing for material, but rather rely on people to submit stuff for them. A problem logically arises in timing when news stories don't make it through the first try.
I haven't actually taken a look at how Slash works, but maybe it would make sense for editors to have to look through stories rejected by other editors before searching through new ones. This way, stuff that gets rejected by one editor doesn't end up on the front page days later by another submittee, approved by a different editor.
I'm not really complaining about my story not making it on the front page. I just imagine that if this story is really so old, that somebody else also submitted this one before me. Better having fresh news than stale news, right?
Slashdot Mirror
They use plutonium to power their servers.
They also have lightning rods all around their server farms to harness bolts of lightning if and when they do strike.
I looked for the best link I could find on it...
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/Particle_System .html
Some of the demonstrations there include particle systems whose trajectories are entirely done within the shader. I'm not exactly sure why this would be 2001... I suppose it shows that even back then, some physics functions were possible in the GPU.
Ultimately, GPU's are going to be able to function as highly parallel, highly powered vector processors. Many of the cards are going to be able to handle physics as well as, or better than CPUs, at the expense of possibly graphical power.
What I'm ultimately more interested in is some kind of API for physics, if it's even possible. In that case, graphics companies would have to write drivers that properly load balance physics tasks between CPU and GPU.
That would indeed be interesting.
The author of this report lightly touched on the Foveon x3 sensor. This supposedly allows a sensor to capture full color without having to interpolate between pixels. I really wish the author would have gone into more detail about that, since I have my eye on the Polaroid x530 that's coming out in June.
Uhura: By the 23rd century, Star Trek fandom had evolved from a loose association of nerds with skin problems into a full blown religion.
Preacher: And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship, where there would be no tribble at all
Followers: All power to the engines!
Uhura: As country after country fell after its influenced, world leaders became threatened by the movement's power. So the trekkies were executed in the most befitting: virgins:
Trekkie: Bwaaaaaah!
Executor: He's dead Jim.
Trekkie: Bwaaaaaah!
Executor: He's dead Jim.
This will probably be applied to books soon. I can imagine how it will work: the text will be printed as a mirror image.
The problem with something like this is the case of obviousness. What is obvious and trivial for an engineer (Breaking CSS), is NOT trivial to the average person.
Companies that push the DMCA will not choose to use encryption methods so inherently obvious that it will piss off all the non-engineering folk. Infringing on the rights of 2 million Linux users isn't enough of a catalyst to overthrow the DMCA. Infringing on 20 million, or 100 million people, is.
If you don't believe that 2 million is a relatively small number, look at gay rights in the US. There are more gay people in the U.S than there are Linux users, but that still isn't enough to evoke an amendment protecting gay marriage as a RIGHT. Instead, there are proposed amendments banning it outright.
On the other hand, Divx failed miserably because it infringed on "fair use" to a possibly-much-wider-audience than CSS did. So much so that nobody subscribed to it, and the tech died.
As long as their methods of restriction stay within a small subset (yet smart subset) of people, there's not going to be enough opposition to overthrow stuff like this. They're ultimately playing it smart... At least smart for them.
So... this is a news story, about a news story about something that's already posted on Slashdot.
Free karma everyone! Let's celebrate! Please link to the posts you choose to plagerize.
Thank you.
Because mysqli is designed for PHP5 which is not production ready, and MySQL 4.1.2 or greater, which is alpha status.
I am ultimately waiting for these functions to come out in a production sense, so I can start doing SSL connections to my database.
Alex: "IT'S A SIN! IT'S A SIN!"
Dr: "Sin? What's all this about sin?"
Alex Points to the car... "THAT!"
Ultimately, define presentation... Would it be simply how he / she looks, or what other things she would do... I find that these are / should be ultimately irrelevant.
What if a woman who looks young chooses to do porn? Wouldn't her rights be violated in being of age, and not being able to do that work? It's a very interesting question, isn't it?
Wing Commander could have been sooo good. They should have kept all the major actors from the game, who had much more talent than the movie equivalents.
I think the MPAA has a secret conspiracy to keep Mark Hamill from ever making it big again.
Seriously though... so much for using this over the net.
I'll remember that the next time I want an animated graphic... Not that GD *ever* supported animated gifs to begin with. ;)
What I AM worried about, is what sort of long-reaching implications this has for GD. I use GD regularly in order to manipulate images via the web, and something like this would most likely cause JPEG support to be entirely removed from the project until the worldwide patent expires.
They did it with GIF.
This sucks, because usually I've come to expect future versions of software to have MORE functionality, not less. I hope the Joint Photographic Experts Group really does have prior art.
Don't make me come and pummel you and your four digit UID. ;)
The question comes down ultimately not to what the robot is imitating, but ultimately, what is is.
There was a woman I used to talk to online a while back. She was 21. The thing was, in her pictures, she looked 12-13. Really young, skinny, asian girl.
There's a girl I talk to online right now. She's almost fifteen. But then, you'd think she's 18 if you didn't know better. There were a couple trolls a while back who posted pictures of her on slashdot, and they all drooled over her.
If the law is about what's perceived, then having sex with, or looking at naked pictures of the 21 year old would be considered pedophelia, even though she's of age.
On the other hand, if the law is about what's perceived, then having sex with, or looking at naked pictures of that 15 year old would NOT be considered illegal, because you'd be under the perception that she's older. In spite of the fact that she's faaar more womanly than the 21 year old.
Ultimately, a robot that would mock a 15 year old cheerleader is ultimately a 15 year old robot cheerleader. You should be able to do whatever you want to a robot...
... Until level of sentience becomes an issue. Robots with a true-to-human level of intellegence, crafted as 7 year olds for the purpose of a molestation toy is VERY disturbing. Humanity will have to cross that bridge when we reach it.
22nd century morality is a bitch. Makes me glad I live in the 21st... heh.
And this is relevant to Iraq... how?
The war against Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. This is evidently clear, in that Saddam Hussein was as close to a secular leader as you can come within the middle east. The chance of Saddam Hussein giving weapons of mass destruction to right wing Islamic terrorist organizations like Al Queda is little to none. Especially considering the fact that they tried to bump off Saddam a couple times.
The war against terror may be religiously inclined. The propaganda that Bush pushes that Iraq is linked to terrorist organizations may be religiously inclined. The actual reasons for fighting this war, are not.
Iraq was fought for oil. Saddam's money-for-food program started an oil exchange in Euros, which threatened the dollar's stranglehold upon the oil market. A euro-based oil market would deflate the dollar by quite a significant margin, as countries abandon their reserves of US dollars. This has nothing to do with religion, but is rather an act of economics.
Iraq and the war on terror. Sure. Just like the US tried to justify Saddam Hussein's removal by his brutality against the Kurds in 1988. Really, if this were a priority, Hussein would have been removed the first time around.
Overthrowing Iraq was the worst thing the US could have done with the war on terror, not the best. Invading the country was a catalyst to terrorist organizations to get more members, not less. A lot more countries hate America now than they did before. If Bush really cared about defusing terrorism, the US would have placed sanctions against Israel long ago.
The war in Iraq is about economic, not religious power. All war is about power, though.
Oh yeah, was the American Civil War religiously inclined, too? :P
Do tell... how was the war against Iraq religiously inclined?
You should have tried comparing our UIDs before saying something like that.
I could have had a 3 digit UID, you know?
With a yo-yo in my hand, the animal might not hold still. :P
An activity OTHER than browsing slashdot that will guarantee I'll never get laid again.
One word: "outsourcing".
Like really... I mean, parts of the human genome are "obvious" and therefore shouldn't be patented.... no wait...
That's nothing! Michael's Computers has a machine with 17000 3dmarks!
Out of curiosity, how would the company be able to "send" the decryption key, whereas all the machines run the patch at the same time. It's not like all the computers in the world run on a static IP. For that matter, what if the user is sitting behind a firewall, etc.
I suppose you could have your patch program preset to check their server at a certain time intervals, where the server sends back a response to check back in xxxx seconds.
Then again, imagine if Microsoft did this, and programmed all Windows machines connected to the net to check windows update at 12:57am for a decryption key. Can we say, DDOS?
I suppose it would be possible to even out the download interval of the decryption key over say... 24 hours. But then again, the witty worm struck 24 hours after the patch was released. I'm sure that with an effort, a virus like witty could be released during the patch timeframe and still affect a great deal of users.
Finally, patches for windows come out as exe downloads looong before Windows Update updates come out. This would have to change, and in the process it'll piss off a lot of network admins.
I could be wrong on some of my points. Feel free to clarify them, if I am.
Stories that have been rejected the first time over are often accepted later on, and appear on the page.
For instance, this particularly story I submitted at Sunday April 11, @05:54AM. It got shortly rejected after. I imagine a couple factors come into play:
The editors are, quite simply, editors. They don't go grousing for material, but rather rely on people to submit stuff for them. A problem logically arises in timing when news stories don't make it through the first try.
I haven't actually taken a look at how Slash works, but maybe it would make sense for editors to have to look through stories rejected by other editors before searching through new ones. This way, stuff that gets rejected by one editor doesn't end up on the front page days later by another submittee, approved by a different editor.
I'm not really complaining about my story not making it on the front page. I just imagine that if this story is really so old, that somebody else also submitted this one before me. Better having fresh news than stale news, right?