Actual Open GL shaders are pretty easy to write. They're C-like, and there is only a handful of library functions.
The complexities of Open GL programming all come in the glSoMany() calls - if you can find a 2D framework that can render quads for you, using shaders you supply, you're home free.
Since you have literal image processing needs, I think it may make sense to stick to actual, raw GL. Using a more general purpose vector programming language that compiles to GL code, you may have a lot more boilerplate to deal with. My guess is it's the boilerplate that makes CUDA/OpenCL seem daunting.
There's a striking uniformity to those quotes: "welcome... commitment to defending Android... its partners." It's almost as if they were given a template and asked to customize it.
It's hard to image that they're really all that happy, though. Will all be partners be treated equally when Google owns one of them? Won't Moogle get privileged access to Android architects and programmers? Won't Moogle be preferred for future Lead Devices?
I suppose this is a commendable attempt to turn around a too-long tradition of increasingly high prices for increasingly low-quality products, but it might have been better to release a high-quality product, first. Even Delphi 2006, where they actually took quality seriously for the first time this century, has had two service packs and a double handful of "hot fixes" since it was released.
But look at what they're giving away, and you may wonder if free is still too expensive. A simple C# "static void Foo()" becomes "class procedure Foo; static;" In the name of not breaking a handful of code (ie, avoiding a modest, one-time pain for that tiny handful of developers who used "static" as an identifier) they inflict on-going pain on all developers. Not a good design decision!
I wish them luck - they'll need it. Time was when Turbo Pascal and Delphi were real productivity boosters, a Windows programmer's secret weapon. But Delphi stagnated while Borland put all their effort into poorly-executed ports (to Linux, and then to.NET) and now the productivity edge lies with C# and.NET, not Delphi and it's tired old VCL.
It's been said for the last 3 years that digital cameras are replacing "film" cameras. I don't think that's happening.
That's a bit of an overstatement. As you note, "digitals are great for snapshots, web-related stuff, and the like" - they're starting out by filling the ephemeral niche. If what you want is photos for a web page, which makes more sense - develop, print, and scan, or download an already digital image?
It seems that the digital camera is an add-on- you don't replace a good camera with a digital, you simply use both.
But "good cameras" are not and never have been the bulk of the market. If they were, we wouldn't see all those junky disposable cameras at supermarket checkouts, or on tables at weddings.
It's amazing how good the quality of old-fashioned film cameras is. The level of control over your subject through aperture, focus, lenses, exposure time, film usage, and more hasn't been duplicated in the digital world. The quality of 35mm has not been matched in the digital space yet, not to mention medium format!
Right. I'd never give up my SLR with interchangeable lenses for a viewfinder. But I'm an outlier and so, evidently, are you. Most people are perfectly happy with a cute little autofocus viewfinder.
In fact, the one big argument against digital that will ring true with most people is the one you didn't even mention. Durability. 'We' have photos from the American Civil War, 140 years ago. The last time we visited my parents, my kids looked at some photos of their grandpa when he was their age.
Digital media don't age as well. Even if there's still legible data on your old 8" floppies, good luck finding a machine that can read them. And that's only twenty years or so. Similarly, you probably can't find a program that understands the propietary format your hand scanner used ten years ago. Unless you transfer your snapshots from machine to machine and format to format every decade or so, they're just not going to be there for your great-grandchildren. Unlike the photos my Dad had sitting in a box on a shelf for decades.
Undoubtedly the biggest plus is that I'm not spending two plus hours a day in stop-and-go traffic, the way I would be if I were commuting to a Silicon Valley job. That's a lot of my life that's not wasted; that's worth a lot of the downside tradeoffs. The second big plus is that I'm home with my (home-schooled) kids: I get to see them day by day, I'm there for them for events &c. The third big plus is that I'm home, with a kitchen and (in the summer) my garden: No lousy restaurant meals, I can cook what I like, with nice fresh ingredients. Finally, of course, there's no Office Politics.
But there are downsides. As a on-site employee or contractor, on-site is on-clock: If you're there, it's billable time, even if you're really reading Slashdot or conducting an flirtation via email. But when I (at least) am working at home, I feel I have to be scrupulously honest about billing time. I have a little bound record book that I log start and stop times in, in ink, so that I have something to show the IRS and/or customers if I'm ever challenged. This isn't a very big deal - but it's amazing how often the distractions mount up so that it takes 'till ten or eleven to log an eight hour workday!
And, as has been mentioned, kids and/or SO's can be a distraction. Most projects do involve an awful lot of Same Old Same Old that you can do even with a houseful of happy kids (or talk drifting over from other cubicles!) but there's always the fun stuff that does require concentration. My kids, at least, are awfully good about being quiet when I'm on the phone or in a tough part, but all-in-all I do really hate working in a corner of the living room, and wish I had my own office with a door I could close.
But the hands down biggest drawback is that people want you in their office, both to see that you're actually working and for the interaction. Insisting on telecommuting knocks out 90% (or even 99%) of the possible contracts, leaving you with the small stuff that someone thinks someone working alone can do in six months or less (anything bigger and Time To Market considerations start to urge them to throw more staff at it) and the relatively few customers who are willing to work with a telecommuter. That can lead to your having to take just about anything that comes along, which can be dull and (which is worse) which can lead to career stagnation.
In my case, this filtering coupled with the fact that there's not a huge demand for Delphi programmers to start with, leads to a really exaggerated boom-and-bust cycle. I don't have busy months and slow months; I have good and bad years, with year-on-year income ratios as high as eight. This is emotionally fatiguing;-) and means that I have to be awfully conservative, fiscally - I'd be a lot wealthier right now if I hadn't had to keep so much of my net worth in cash during the '90's.
It's hard in general for a contractor to pick up a new speciality - people want to pay you to do what someone else has already paid you to do, not what you say you've learned on your own - and it's even harder when you add that telecommute filter. I keep thinking of bagging it, but so far at least, the pluses still outweigh the minuses. YMMV.
I get the NYT 6 times a week and The Economist. (Hey, you and I may call it a magazine, but they call it a newspaper, so I'll include it here.)
One part of why I read newspapers is that the front page of the NYT - or the week's headlines section of The Economist - has more information than a whole half hour news program. There are two implications of this: One is that there's plenty more info available on the stories I find interesting. The other is that I'm not forced to sit through a linear narrative of the stuff I'm not interested in; I can read the headline or the first pp and move on. I'm in control.
I'm in control with Web news as well, but there are no annoying waits with a newspaper. The text is more legible, too, and I don't keep having to scroll. That is, ink on paper still has technological advantages that electric paper and broadband may take a decade or more to eradicate.
Of course, another reason to read newspapers is that they present much more than just the headlines that you can get off TV or the Web. The inside pages are full of stories that may not be flashy enough to make the evening news but are nonetheless interesting to read. (The Economist is particularly good on international news.) What passes for a long essay online is a couple of columns in the Times - and the Times routinely runs full-page and multi-page articles that are often the results of weeks of work.
There's a quality issue, too. One of the great strengths of the Web is that anyone can publish. Of course, that's also one of its great weaknesses: in a medium full of rumors, lies, gossip, and half-truths, you are by and large forced to rely on internal cues like the quality of the writing and presentation to decide how much to believe what you read online. A major newspaper has been around for decades and plans to be around for centuries; if they goof, they admit it. You can generally trust their facts. Also, the quality of the writing is usually pretty good, the result of a competive culture.
Katz makes much of the fact that newspapers are dailies; that the news they present is old news. He's being silly. Some of us have better things to do than check the headlines several times a day. We want to know what's happening in the world, but it doesn't change what we do day to day, and so it's just fine to catch up on it when it's convenient for us - with a meal, in the case of the NYT, or while I exercise, in the case of The Economist.
For that matter, at least as far as I'm concerned, he's got it flat out backwards when it comes to the relationship between the dailies and the instant news feeds. One of my peeves with the NYT, in fact, is that they do increasingly see themselves as the more-detail adjunct to the headline servers. Too often, the first I'll hear of something is the front page follow-up ('Survivors Grieving After Poor Maintenance Downs Another Jet') in the morning paper.
the question of pollution. They will be producing water and carbon dioxide, humans produce much more than their share of carbon dioxide already, proliferation of this fashion of fuel cell would increase that. I'm all for the longer lasting battery but you have to weigh it's TOTAL cost against its apparent cost
It sounds like you are assuming that the methanol that gets put into one of these fuel cells would be a fossil fuel. I'm no industrial chemist, but that strikes me as awfully unlikely. I'd expect it to be produced from biowaste via some sort of composting process, which means the CO2 produced was in the atmosphere a few months or years ago....
Heck, downstream a few decades, we may have modified chlorophyll molecules that can produce pure methanol directly from sun and air.
I have a bit of a bias, here: as a programmer and a homeschooling dad, I've long wanted to write a good Intro To Programming book. I thought Mindstorms(TM) might be a good medium for that. But it's not: Doing anything with Mindstorms(TM) is as much (or more!) mechanical engineering as programming.
At first I thought, oh, that's OK. That still involves problem solving and working with constraints, yes?
But what constraints! Forget any notion of building Rodney Brooks-like robots: You get three sensor inputs. Even if you were willing to spring for lots of extra-cost sensors, and used some clever multiplexing schemes, you'd be hard pressed to build an insect that could even know whether its legs were up or down, forward or back.
And seemingly simple robots have a way of using up the parts that come in the standard set. Once you've built a track following robot, what do you do with it? You've used up both motors. Similarly, once you've built an arm that can raise/lower open/close its claw, you've used both motors, both touch sensors, and most of the gears and structural pieces.
Slashdot Mirror
Actual Open GL shaders are pretty easy to write. They're C-like, and there is only a handful of library functions.
The complexities of Open GL programming all come in the glSoMany() calls - if you can find a 2D framework that can render quads for you, using shaders you supply, you're home free.
Since you have literal image processing needs, I think it may make sense to stick to actual, raw GL. Using a more general purpose vector programming language that compiles to GL code, you may have a lot more boilerplate to deal with. My guess is it's the boilerplate that makes CUDA/OpenCL seem daunting.
How can it be that no one has ever noticed this before? Someday, maybe this guy will get lucky and invent sex.
Most seem happy enough.
There's a striking uniformity to those quotes: "welcome ... commitment to defending Android ... its partners." It's almost as if they were given a template and asked to customize it.
It's hard to image that they're really all that happy, though. Will all be partners be treated equally when Google owns one of them? Won't Moogle get privileged access to Android architects and programmers? Won't Moogle be preferred for future Lead Devices?
I suppose this is a commendable attempt to turn around a too-long tradition of increasingly high prices for increasingly low-quality products, but it might have been better to release a high-quality product, first. Even Delphi 2006, where they actually took quality seriously for the first time this century, has had two service packs and a double handful of "hot fixes" since it was released.
.NET) and now the productivity edge lies with C# and .NET, not Delphi and it's tired old VCL.
But look at what they're giving away, and you may wonder if free is still too expensive. A simple C# "static void Foo()" becomes "class procedure Foo; static;" In the name of not breaking a handful of code (ie, avoiding a modest, one-time pain for that tiny handful of developers who used "static" as an identifier) they inflict on-going pain on all developers. Not a good design decision!
I wish them luck - they'll need it. Time was when Turbo Pascal and Delphi were real productivity boosters, a Windows programmer's secret weapon. But Delphi stagnated while Borland put all their effort into poorly-executed ports (to Linux, and then to
In fact, the one big argument against digital that will ring true with most people is the one you didn't even mention. Durability. 'We' have photos from the American Civil War, 140 years ago. The last time we visited my parents, my kids looked at some photos of their grandpa when he was their age.
Digital media don't age as well. Even if there's still legible data on your old 8" floppies, good luck finding a machine that can read them. And that's only twenty years or so. Similarly, you probably can't find a program that understands the propietary format your hand scanner used ten years ago. Unless you transfer your snapshots from machine to machine and format to format every decade or so, they're just not going to be there for your great-grandchildren. Unlike the photos my Dad had sitting in a box on a shelf for decades.
But there are downsides. As a on-site employee or contractor, on-site is on-clock: If you're there, it's billable time, even if you're really reading Slashdot or conducting an flirtation via email. But when I (at least) am working at home, I feel I have to be scrupulously honest about billing time. I have a little bound record book that I log start and stop times in, in ink, so that I have something to show the IRS and/or customers if I'm ever challenged. This isn't a very big deal - but it's amazing how often the distractions mount up so that it takes 'till ten or eleven to log an eight hour workday!
And, as has been mentioned, kids and/or SO's can be a distraction. Most projects do involve an awful lot of Same Old Same Old that you can do even with a houseful of happy kids (or talk drifting over from other cubicles!) but there's always the fun stuff that does require concentration. My kids, at least, are awfully good about being quiet when I'm on the phone or in a tough part, but all-in-all I do really hate working in a corner of the living room, and wish I had my own office with a door I could close.
But the hands down biggest drawback is that people want you in their office, both to see that you're actually working and for the interaction. Insisting on telecommuting knocks out 90% (or even 99%) of the possible contracts, leaving you with the small stuff that someone thinks someone working alone can do in six months or less (anything bigger and Time To Market considerations start to urge them to throw more staff at it) and the relatively few customers who are willing to work with a telecommuter. That can lead to your having to take just about anything that comes along, which can be dull and (which is worse) which can lead to career stagnation.
In my case, this filtering coupled with the fact that there's not a huge demand for Delphi programmers to start with, leads to a really exaggerated boom-and-bust cycle. I don't have busy months and slow months; I have good and bad years, with year-on-year income ratios as high as eight. This is emotionally fatiguing ;-) and means that I have to be awfully conservative, fiscally - I'd be a lot wealthier right now if I hadn't had to keep so much of my net worth in cash during the '90's.
It's hard in general for a contractor to pick up a new speciality - people want to pay you to do what someone else has already paid you to do, not what you say you've learned on your own - and it's even harder when you add that telecommute filter. I keep thinking of bagging it, but so far at least, the pluses still outweigh the minuses. YMMV.
One part of why I read newspapers is that the front page of the NYT - or the week's headlines section of The Economist - has more information than a whole half hour news program. There are two implications of this: One is that there's plenty more info available on the stories I find interesting. The other is that I'm not forced to sit through a linear narrative of the stuff I'm not interested in; I can read the headline or the first pp and move on. I'm in control.
I'm in control with Web news as well, but there are no annoying waits with a newspaper. The text is more legible, too, and I don't keep having to scroll. That is, ink on paper still has technological advantages that electric paper and broadband may take a decade or more to eradicate.
Of course, another reason to read newspapers is that they present much more than just the headlines that you can get off TV or the Web. The inside pages are full of stories that may not be flashy enough to make the evening news but are nonetheless interesting to read. (The Economist is particularly good on international news.) What passes for a long essay online is a couple of columns in the Times - and the Times routinely runs full-page and multi-page articles that are often the results of weeks of work.
There's a quality issue, too. One of the great strengths of the Web is that anyone can publish. Of course, that's also one of its great weaknesses: in a medium full of rumors, lies, gossip, and half-truths, you are by and large forced to rely on internal cues like the quality of the writing and presentation to decide how much to believe what you read online. A major newspaper has been around for decades and plans to be around for centuries; if they goof, they admit it. You can generally trust their facts. Also, the quality of the writing is usually pretty good, the result of a competive culture.
Katz makes much of the fact that newspapers are dailies; that the news they present is old news. He's being silly. Some of us have better things to do than check the headlines several times a day. We want to know what's happening in the world, but it doesn't change what we do day to day, and so it's just fine to catch up on it when it's convenient for us - with a meal, in the case of the NYT, or while I exercise, in the case of The Economist.
For that matter, at least as far as I'm concerned, he's got it flat out backwards when it comes to the relationship between the dailies and the instant news feeds. One of my peeves with the NYT, in fact, is that they do increasingly see themselves as the more-detail adjunct to the headline servers. Too often, the first I'll hear of something is the front page follow-up ('Survivors Grieving After Poor Maintenance Downs Another Jet') in the morning paper.
Heck, downstream a few decades, we may have modified chlorophyll molecules that can produce pure methanol directly from sun and air.
At first I thought, oh, that's OK. That still involves problem solving and working with constraints, yes?
But what constraints! Forget any notion of building Rodney Brooks-like robots: You get three sensor inputs. Even if you were willing to spring for lots of extra-cost sensors, and used some clever multiplexing schemes, you'd be hard pressed to build an insect that could even know whether its legs were up or down, forward or back.
And seemingly simple robots have a way of using up the parts that come in the standard set. Once you've built a track following robot, what do you do with it? You've used up both motors. Similarly, once you've built an arm that can raise/lower open/close its claw, you've used both motors, both touch sensors, and most of the gears and structural pieces.
I'm afraid that I lost interest pretty quickly.