That's an obvious application.
Maybe Illusion will support Ageia in the successor to Battle Raper II. Illusion already has basic tearable cloth, but it's not physically simulated.
Should do hair and cloth in the 2.4 release
on
Ageia PhysX Tested
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It sounds like they're looking at demos with an older version of the Ageia API. In the 2.4 release, cloth (even tearable cloth) is supported. The demo of this was shown at GDC, but it may not be in the current crop of games. It's less impressive than one might expect.
Still, I would have expected a bigger improvement in performance on existing stuff. There may be too much of a bottleneck getting in and out of the physics processor, which is the usual problem with coprocessors. I'd expect more improvement in fluids, particles, hair and cloth physics, which usually don't feed back into the gameplay engine and thus can be done concurrently with the main engine work. If you're banging boxes around, the main game engine probably has to wait for the physics engine to get the new box positions, so there's no big win there. Even if you have feedback to the game engine from cloth, you can probably delay it a cycle, so that when the cape gets caught in the door, it doesn't yank on the character until one cycle later.
A mainframe is an especially proprietary architecture.
Actually, no. The IBM 370 architecture is open, as a result of an antitrust decree decades ago. There are plug-compatible peripherals and software-compatible CPUs. There's even a good emulator for PCs. It's actually more open that x86 or PowerPC.
QNX has most of the technical problems of microkernels solved. We used it for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, and we had a number of desktop machines running it for development, so I'm quite familiar with it. I wrote a FireWire camera driver for it (ManualSource code), entirely in user space. Pumping 640x480x30fps video at 30FPS through uses about 3-4% of a 1.5GHZ x86 CPU, despite all the "message passing overhead".
The problem with QNX is its marketing. There's no good entry level option. A development seat costs several thousand dollars, and there's not even an posted price for it. You have to talk to sales reps. Once you've bought a development seat, you can crank out vast numbers of embedded devices using QNX, so it's priced for the volume manufacturer. So few people learn QNX unless they have to.
Most Linux and QNX command line stuff has been ported to QNX. GCC is the main compiler. All the GNU command line tools work. You can even run Samba and Apache. X-Windows can be run, although it's not QNX's native graphics system. So conversion isn't that hard.
For a brief period of two years, QNX tried to open up and get more users. There was an "Open QNX" effort, a "No Charge" version for noncommercial use, and a reasonable level of interest from the open source community. Mozilla was ported to QNX. Then, with no real announcement, QNX cut that program off. You can still get a 30 day free evaluation version, but you have to ask. After 30 days it will still run, but the development environment (Eclipse) turns off.
Then QNX was acquired by Harmon International, the parent company of a range of audio companies. This resulted in 1) a focus on QNX for automotive "infotainment", and 2) abandonment of QNX by Harmon's competitors. Embedded users couldn't figure out where QNX was going, and many gave up. Lately, QNX seems to be making a modest comeback, but it's hard to tell.
To be fair, QNX has survived in a tough market. They've been selling a proprietary OS that can run on x86 desktops for two decades, against Microsoft. Nobody else has stayed in business doing that. Microsoft attempted to acquire QNX at one point, to use it as "Windows CE", but was turned down.
So it's a good technology, but the company drives you nuts.
The grammar checker in Microsoft Word required substantial effort by Microsoft Research. Internally, it is actually parsing and diagramming sentences. Microsoft Research used to offer a downloadable plugin for Word that let you see the diagrams. That's a non-trivial piece of work.
The old UNIX "grammar checker" just looked for some common errors; it wasn't in the same league at all.
Just tell them to edit until all the colored squiggles in Microsoft Word go away. Word's grammar checker isn't perfect, but it's better than most Bonehead English students. Better writers may find Microsoft's interpretation of English overly constraining, but for most, it's better than their native writing.
For style, make your students read the Wall Street Journal every day. The Journal contains decent, and jargon-free, writing on business subjects. Teach your students to write like Journal reporters, and top management will understand what they have to say. Advanced students should read the Economist.
Textbooks? Strunk's "Elements of Style", and "The Associated Press Manual of Style and Libel Guide", two utterly practical books on writing.
"If you have an unprotected broadband connection, your computer is at risk for BTDs - Broadband Transmitted Dangers. BTDs are the hazardous and potentially harmful threats to your computer that can come through your high-speed broadband connection. Some of the most common BTDs include spam, spyware, pornography, viruses, Trojan horses, hackers and identity thieves....
A broadband connection is more dangerous than narrowband because of the huge amount of information that is flowing into and out of your home through a high-speed conduit. In addition, most broadband connections are "always on," meaning there are more opportunities for dangerous elements to enter through your connection. Broadband users have to be more careful and aware than ever....
Many people think that file-swapping services are an easy way to get free stuff like music, images, games and more. What you may not recognize is the very real threat that these services pose to you and your family. There are no quality controls in place on these unregulated services to ensure that you are getting only what you wanted. And worse, you might get a lot more than you bargained for, like spyware that secretly monitors your computer for third parties who may use the information for sales or even malicious purposes....
Hackers and Identity Thieves are criminals that attempt to infiltrate your computer and steal vital and valuable personal information, such as credit card numbers. With an unprotected broadband connection, hackers can walk right into your home and snoop around your personal information. The results can be disastrous - and extremely expensive."
PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan
on
Comparing PC Game Physics
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Ageia has made a breakthrough. Not in the technology, but in the business model.
The real problem with game physics engines is that nobody is making much money. One by one, the physics engine companies have gone out of business or merged. Havok is the last one standing, and they're smaller than they were at peak. Game middleware just isn't very profitable. Havok charged about $60,000 per game title a few years ago, and you can multiply that by the number of games they're in and figure out their revenue. The numbers just aren't that big. Their user base expects
lots of support and handholding, too, so the margins aren't all that great. It's not just Havok. Middleware vendors generally are at a poor point in the food chain.
But look at Ageia. They sell to end users. That has growth potential. This is Ageia's real breakthrough. We'll have to see where this goes.
One early player posted on a discussion forum that he wanted to incinerate a dwarf with the biggest explosion he could make just by surrounding it with grenades, and the resulting explosion dropped the dwarf's weapon back down out of the stratosphere several long seconds later. He did the math and calculated that the weapon was blasted straight up a couple of miles before coming back down.
Been there, done that. At the 1997 Softimage user conference, we showed our physics engine, Falling Bodies. This was the first ragdoll physics system that actually worked right. We had a 3D model of a big mecha about 20m high, which you could keyframe and then let the physics engine take over. Someone playing with it keyframed it on the ground on one frame, and about 20 meters higher in the next frame. Then they started the physics engine. This launched the huge character straight up at about mach 2, and it rapidly shrank into a dot. But the frame counter kept running, and after about twenty seconds, the dot started to get bigger again. The huge character hit the ground, bounced, rolled, slid, and eventually came to rest.
It really does look better if you handle the hard cases correctly.
It looks like eBay is doing some censoring. They still seem to have Google AdWords for almost everything, including many unlikely products ("Perpetual Motion -
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com"). Or even "Bombs -
Looking for Bombs?
Find exactly what you want today.
www.eBay.com" (But not "guns".)
It's interesting to see what they don't have an ad for. "Nuclear bombs" - no eBay ad. Most sex-related keywords - no eBay ad. "Hemp" - no eBay ad. It's neither random nor accidental.
The trouble with those "up to" specs for wireless devices is that they're achieveable only when nobody else is using the spectrum. Pumping HTDV around your house is likely to work only when you're some distance from anyone else using that band.
Six Apart mitigated the attack to the point where it was no longer causing major availability problems, but had been unable to contact Blue. The anti-spam firm is headquartered in Israel, where May 3 was a public holiday.
This is a 24/7 business. A serious online service vendor can't have company holidays. Least of all in the security business.
That was Apple's original line, but the reality was that many iPods stopped working after a year or so. Litigation followed. There's now a battery replacement program, a settlement fund and a trade-in deal.
There's more crossover than you think. Their company makes subwoofers with closed-loop servoing and positional feedback, run by controllers implemented in FPGAs. The Team DAD vehicle uses very similar technology.
That's exactly right. I ran one of the Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot, and we made it to the NQE. It's clear where DARPA is going, and they're getting there faster than they expected. There were 43 autonomous vehicles at the NQE, and all of them more or less worked. Five finished the course, and most of the 23 that started the course probably could have finished with minor improvements. This is way ahead of anything previously seen in robotics.
The big challenge this time is that now real situational awareness is required. Much better sensing will be needed. There are some new technologies out there that can probably do the job. Last year's sensing systems were actually rather marginal.
Here's
the formal solicitation from DARPA, which has more details. Basically, DARPA will provide a "road map", as a file, which indicates all the streets and stop signs. (Traffic light sensing is not required). Then, just before the start, DARPA will provide a "mission file", which specifies the start point, checkpoints to be passed, and the goal. Vehicles must be able to park, unpark, do a 3-point turn, discover that a route is blocked and switch to another route, and merge into traffic. The goals are ambitious, but I expect they'll be achieved within two cycles of this Grand Challenge.
As for applications, Dr. Tether said at the last GC that he now expects to field some of this technology within five years. I expect to see some automated driving for convoy vehicles deployed. The whole convoy might not be autonomous, but autonomous vehicles that can intelligently follow a lead vehicle will be very useful. The escort troops will be in something with armor and firepower, like a Bradley, while the trucks trail along behind. This will be popular with the guys whose current job description is "target".
I've met the Team Dad guys and am impressed with them, but bear in mind that they own an electronics company, with experienced people on tap who can build custom electronics. It's not two guys working alone.
What hepatitis C vaccine? Chiron has one in clinical testing, but it's still experimental and only about 60 people are involved in the study.
None of the hepatitis vaccines are live-virus, so they can't transmit anything. They're all genetically engineered small molecules. Some of the older live virus vaccines (rubella/rubeola and smallpox) aren't wanted in donated blood, but that's only a limitation for a few months. The smallpox vaccine (the first vaccine ever developed) is the most troublesome. A modern smallpox vaccine is under development, but it's only in phase I/II testing.
I've always been a big fan of vaccination. I grew up on a Marine base, was in the Army briefly, and have been vaccinated against almost everything for which there's a vaccine. No big deal; everyone in the military goes through that.
Getting the full vaccination series against hepatitis A and B, as an adult, is a good idea. It's a hassle, because it takes three separate injections (five if you get them as separate vaccines), but the protection is quite good. It's a genetically engineered vaccine, not a live-virus one, so side effects are unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an obvious application. Maybe Illusion will support Ageia in the successor to Battle Raper II. Illusion already has basic tearable cloth, but it's not physically simulated.
I built something like that while in high school, which really dates me.
Still, I would have expected a bigger improvement in performance on existing stuff. There may be too much of a bottleneck getting in and out of the physics processor, which is the usual problem with coprocessors. I'd expect more improvement in fluids, particles, hair and cloth physics, which usually don't feed back into the gameplay engine and thus can be done concurrently with the main engine work. If you're banging boxes around, the main game engine probably has to wait for the physics engine to get the new box positions, so there's no big win there. Even if you have feedback to the game engine from cloth, you can probably delay it a cycle, so that when the cape gets caught in the door, it doesn't yank on the character until one cycle later.
That will get them off your back.
Actually, no. The IBM 370 architecture is open, as a result of an antitrust decree decades ago. There are plug-compatible peripherals and software-compatible CPUs. There's even a good emulator for PCs. It's actually more open that x86 or PowerPC.
The problem with QNX is its marketing. There's no good entry level option. A development seat costs several thousand dollars, and there's not even an posted price for it. You have to talk to sales reps. Once you've bought a development seat, you can crank out vast numbers of embedded devices using QNX, so it's priced for the volume manufacturer. So few people learn QNX unless they have to.
Most Linux and QNX command line stuff has been ported to QNX. GCC is the main compiler. All the GNU command line tools work. You can even run Samba and Apache. X-Windows can be run, although it's not QNX's native graphics system. So conversion isn't that hard.
For a brief period of two years, QNX tried to open up and get more users. There was an "Open QNX" effort, a "No Charge" version for noncommercial use, and a reasonable level of interest from the open source community. Mozilla was ported to QNX. Then, with no real announcement, QNX cut that program off. You can still get a 30 day free evaluation version, but you have to ask. After 30 days it will still run, but the development environment (Eclipse) turns off.
Then QNX was acquired by Harmon International, the parent company of a range of audio companies. This resulted in 1) a focus on QNX for automotive "infotainment", and 2) abandonment of QNX by Harmon's competitors. Embedded users couldn't figure out where QNX was going, and many gave up. Lately, QNX seems to be making a modest comeback, but it's hard to tell.
To be fair, QNX has survived in a tough market. They've been selling a proprietary OS that can run on x86 desktops for two decades, against Microsoft. Nobody else has stayed in business doing that. Microsoft attempted to acquire QNX at one point, to use it as "Windows CE", but was turned down.
So it's a good technology, but the company drives you nuts.
The old UNIX "grammar checker" just looked for some common errors; it wasn't in the same league at all.
Just call 1-800-BAD BEAT. They'll be glad to help you solve the problem.
For style, make your students read the Wall Street Journal every day. The Journal contains decent, and jargon-free, writing on business subjects. Teach your students to write like Journal reporters, and top management will understand what they have to say. Advanced students should read the Economist.
Textbooks? Strunk's "Elements of Style", and "The Associated Press Manual of Style and Libel Guide", two utterly practical books on writing.
A broadband connection is more dangerous than narrowband because of the huge amount of information that is flowing into and out of your home through a high-speed conduit. In addition, most broadband connections are "always on," meaning there are more opportunities for dangerous elements to enter through your connection. Broadband users have to be more careful and aware than ever. ...
Many people think that file-swapping services are an easy way to get free stuff like music, images, games and more. What you may not recognize is the very real threat that these services pose to you and your family. There are no quality controls in place on these unregulated services to ensure that you are getting only what you wanted. And worse, you might get a lot more than you bargained for, like spyware that secretly monitors your computer for third parties who may use the information for sales or even malicious purposes. ...
Hackers and Identity Thieves are criminals that attempt to infiltrate your computer and steal vital and valuable personal information, such as credit card numbers. With an unprotected broadband connection, hackers can walk right into your home and snoop around your personal information. The results can be disastrous - and extremely expensive."
- AOL "Unprotected broadband" promotion.
The real problem with game physics engines is that nobody is making much money. One by one, the physics engine companies have gone out of business or merged. Havok is the last one standing, and they're smaller than they were at peak. Game middleware just isn't very profitable. Havok charged about $60,000 per game title a few years ago, and you can multiply that by the number of games they're in and figure out their revenue. The numbers just aren't that big. Their user base expects lots of support and handholding, too, so the margins aren't all that great. It's not just Havok. Middleware vendors generally are at a poor point in the food chain.
But look at Ageia. They sell to end users. That has growth potential. This is Ageia's real breakthrough. We'll have to see where this goes.
Been there, done that. At the 1997 Softimage user conference, we showed our physics engine, Falling Bodies. This was the first ragdoll physics system that actually worked right. We had a 3D model of a big mecha about 20m high, which you could keyframe and then let the physics engine take over. Someone playing with it keyframed it on the ground on one frame, and about 20 meters higher in the next frame. Then they started the physics engine. This launched the huge character straight up at about mach 2, and it rapidly shrank into a dot. But the frame counter kept running, and after about twenty seconds, the dot started to get bigger again. The huge character hit the ground, bounced, rolled, slid, and eventually came to rest.
It really does look better if you handle the hard cases correctly.
Of course, marketeers hate this, because it puts control entirely in the hands of the receiver. But it's the way things are going.
"Plutonium Sale New & used Plutonium. aff Check out the deals now! www.eBay.com"
It's interesting to see what they don't have an ad for. "Nuclear bombs" - no eBay ad. Most sex-related keywords - no eBay ad. "Hemp" - no eBay ad. It's neither random nor accidental.
The trouble with those "up to" specs for wireless devices is that they're achieveable only when nobody else is using the spectrum. Pumping HTDV around your house is likely to work only when you're some distance from anyone else using that band.
This is a 24/7 business. A serious online service vendor can't have company holidays. Least of all in the security business.
That was Apple's original line, but the reality was that many iPods stopped working after a year or so. Litigation followed. There's now a battery replacement program, a settlement fund and a trade-in deal.
At last, software that really wears out.
The point is that if a heathy person gets the vaccinations against hepatitis A and B, they won't get those diseases.
There's more crossover than you think. Their company makes subwoofers with closed-loop servoing and positional feedback, run by controllers implemented in FPGAs. The Team DAD vehicle uses very similar technology.
The big challenge this time is that now real situational awareness is required. Much better sensing will be needed. There are some new technologies out there that can probably do the job. Last year's sensing systems were actually rather marginal.
Here's the formal solicitation from DARPA, which has more details. Basically, DARPA will provide a "road map", as a file, which indicates all the streets and stop signs. (Traffic light sensing is not required). Then, just before the start, DARPA will provide a "mission file", which specifies the start point, checkpoints to be passed, and the goal. Vehicles must be able to park, unpark, do a 3-point turn, discover that a route is blocked and switch to another route, and merge into traffic. The goals are ambitious, but I expect they'll be achieved within two cycles of this Grand Challenge.
As for applications, Dr. Tether said at the last GC that he now expects to field some of this technology within five years. I expect to see some automated driving for convoy vehicles deployed. The whole convoy might not be autonomous, but autonomous vehicles that can intelligently follow a lead vehicle will be very useful. The escort troops will be in something with armor and firepower, like a Bradley, while the trucks trail along behind. This will be popular with the guys whose current job description is "target".
I've met the Team Dad guys and am impressed with them, but bear in mind that they own an electronics company, with experienced people on tap who can build custom electronics. It's not two guys working alone.
None of the hepatitis vaccines are live-virus, so they can't transmit anything. They're all genetically engineered small molecules. Some of the older live virus vaccines (rubella/rubeola and smallpox) aren't wanted in donated blood, but that's only a limitation for a few months. The smallpox vaccine (the first vaccine ever developed) is the most troublesome. A modern smallpox vaccine is under development, but it's only in phase I/II testing.
Getting the full vaccination series against hepatitis A and B, as an adult, is a good idea. It's a hassle, because it takes three separate injections (five if you get them as separate vaccines), but the protection is quite good. It's a genetically engineered vaccine, not a live-virus one, so side effects are unlikely.