But..."grainy" means overly sharp. So you're saying the glossy screen is much sharper, but that the matte screen's problem in comparison is that it's too sharp...
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I'm sure it would be hard to dump Paint.NET. It's the third least bloated piece of software I've ever seen. The second if Irfanview, of course, which is the best image viewer on any platform and has been since the 90s, and the first is mars.exe, that voxel-based 3-d "Martian surface" demo from the mid-90s that was like 4 kilobytes (http://www.whisqu.se/per/docs/math37.htm).
Homo sapiens emerged from Africa. By your argument, we should call everyone in the US an African American. I don't personally have a problem with that, but I suspect that wasn't your intent.
3) There IS basically ZERO students loans programs in the US. Every American can easily get student loans to pay for any college. Most can get a large portion of those loans subsidized by the federal government.
No, it's not meant to be for your own good. Mass vaccination policy is in place for the good of the population. If 95% of people get vaccinated for Pluto's Spotted Canker Sores, then 5% of the population remains a nice breeding ground for it, allowing the disease to sustain itself and mutate into more dangerous varieties. This is somewhat similar to the avian flu threat we face today, which is largely caused by the lack of genetic diversity in chicken populations. The uniformity of chicken immune systems acts like the uniform lack of vaccine in humans, allowing new disease strains to come into being and multiply in a friendly environment before spreading to the rest of us.
So you're saying there is no market pressure on nvidia because everyone keeps playing WoW and are happy with their current gfx card? How exactly is the lack of need for better gfx going to create a market for raytracing? In this situation the only reason to switch to raytracing is when your gfx card brakes down and you already own a cpu with 128 cores.
Also, the cpu is not idle in games, there are other things to do besides rendering, like collision detection and AI. Hey, someone read my weird rant. Good for me.
Yes, the scenario I describe is one in which no graphics stagnate, removing demand for higher end discrete graphics cards until eventually CPUs catch up and can meet gaming needs without a GPU. If everyone can get the same experience pegged at 60 fps with just the CPU, why pay nVidia for a graphics card?
In case you didn't notice, I hate this scenario. I think ray tracing is never going to be technically competitive. I also think that my story is weak because it ignores that nVidia will be working on graphics chips for new consoles that will be based on technology that can be easily ported to PCs. Stepping back from my extreme example, however, I imagine the market moving in that direction, with the result being that for the first time consoles could have graphics comparable to PCs for most of their product cycle, and possibly even beat PC graphics when they're new. If you think this has already happened, you haven't been paying attention.
Let's say that as you drive the car out of the dealer's lot, a timer labeled "end of life for car" starts counting down from 4 years. This sucks for you. Pouring gasoline all over the car and lighting it on fire is the equivalent of what SES Americom is doing. Yes, that makes them more money, but it would be better for the world if they would instead sell the damn car to someone else who would use it for those four years. It's amazing if their insurance doesn't deduct the remaining value of the satellite after the initial launch debacle from the payout.
Why is splashing the satellite a "dirty trick"? It is good business sense. Perfectly good business sense, when just judging on profit, almost always involves dirty tricks.
Just anecdotal, but that's all their poll was, too. In my department, people read a lot of journals cover-to-cover (often online), but I've never known anyone to do so with Nature other than board undergrads trying to ignore me while I teach a class.
This is exactly what I meant in my original post. Academics don't just go browsing Nature - they read an occasional article (whenever there's an article in the field).
Also, Nature and Science produce huge impact factors, but in my field, at least, the cover story in Nature is always an article that shows up as a more detailed article in something like PRL. My group had the cover of Nature not so long ago, and this was true of our article, too. I didn't mean to get in a pissing match about Nature though, I meant to point out that browsing the Nature web page to kill time was likely not an activity that the academic powerhouses partake in.
The problem with ray tracing, as Carmack said, is that it will always be much slower than raster-based graphics with a given amount of computing power. He pointed out that there's nothing impressive about Intel's demo of a game from two generations ago running sort of acceptably at moderate resolution on an overpowered Intel demo system. He said that they'll never be able to produce a ray traced engine competitive with the state of the art raster-based games, so the ray tracing, while technically satisfying, will in every case offer poor performance for inferior graphics.
All of this boils down to a time lag. If raster graphics can do something in 2008, ray tracing can do it in 2012, etc. What if raster graphics stopped progressing for four years? Then ray tracing would have a chance to catch up, perhaps leading to new engines and APIs based on ray tracing, which would ensure long term use.
But wait...raster graphics have already been at a standstill for two years, for the first time since their inception. When the 360 came out and then the 8800 line showed up to put it firmly in its technical place, gaming graphics capabilities suddenly stopped. Not only did nVidia have its first unassailable lead over ATI in a long time, but suddenly the PC gaming market finally showed very strong signs of finally dying. Most of the remaining PC game developers shifted development to consoles, leading to (again as Carmack pointed out) a stationary graphical hardware target for new games. The overall number of PC gamers managed to stay high, but literally almost all of them were playing World of Warcraft, which has very low graphics card requirements.
Now two years have gone by, and WoW still dominates PC gaming, while only a few games have shown up that really push current hardware, with few people buying them. It's a pity that the most graphically impressive game is also quite mediocre when it comes to gameplay. There's very little market pressure on nVidia outside of the small enthusiast community, and they've managed to milk a 4x hardware lead over consoles for an unprecedented length of time. The graphics card industry used to beat the living crap out of Moore's Law, but now they've managed to eek out a 10% improvement in over two years, which is just sad. The next generation parts may or may not be coming soon, may or may not bring a large performance boost, and may or may not have any software at all to really justify their purchase.
Going waaaaay back to the beginning, CPU speeds over this same time period have been keeping up with their normal exponential increase in power. At this rate, it would only take two more generations of PC gaming failure for ray tracing on the CPU to catch up with rastering on the GPU, and if that happens, it could end up going to consoles. Hell, it might even be good for PC gaming's health. Currently most console players have a PC, but with its Intel integrated graphics it's only suited to playing games from 6-8 years ago. Already those same PCs can probably match that with ray tracing. If games were only dependent on CPU speed, they'd be a lot more accessible and easily played by a much larger part of the population.
The problem with bad jay walkers is that they can get themselves hit (or cause avoidance accidents) by drivers who are under the speed limit, not tailgating, and paying attention.
Who the hell are you to say they cant? The majority? No, we all jaywalk. So where is this authority coming from? No-where! How about all the people who actually want to drive instead of playing "dodge the stupid jaywalker." You want to jaywalk, sure thing as long as certain conditions are met. These would include such things as drivers having total immunity, criminal and civil, if they hit someone crossing in a non-designated place. Likewise the jaywalker (or his estate) would be required to pay any and all costs that result including cost to the driver who hit them (such as lost time) and estimated costs to society from the resulting traffic jam. Everything you say except for paying the costs of the traffic jam is already in place. I recently saw a case brought up in traffic court where a jay walker got killed by a driver and then his estate was forced paid the driver money for repairs and some less tangible costs.
I can communicate with fax machines by whistling. I can't actually send any data, of course, but I can initiate the transfer and get them to print a blank page. I used to let my parents know I needed to be picked up from school when the voice line was busy - if they saw a blank page coming out of the fax, they knew it was me.
Just keep out of the southern US and you won't encounter that any more than you would in Germany or Italy, but yeah, that sucks. Take solace in knowing that the rest of the country largely treats southerners like southerners treated you.
I've encountered a few Parisians who sort of did this, usually in non-touristy restaurants. However, I think the average Parisian is at least as friendly to English-speaking Americans like me as the average American, and when I go to other parts of France I meet the warmest people I've ever seen in any part of the world. France has a wonderful culture and a wonderful people.
Microsoft is afraid of moving apps off the desktop. In a world where computers boot a simple OS, then open a web browser to get all work (email, documents, spreadsheets, everything else) done scares the hell out of microsoft. That is not the business model that microsoft has been using. I don't think microsoft could switch to that kind of business model any time soon. Luckily for Microsoft, nor can the world. If the software world turns and now marches swiftly toward browser apps, I bet it would take ten years to get to the point where it would begin to be comparable with local apps in terms of both functionality and user base.
The poll defines "top academic scientist" as a reader of Nature. Obviously this has major issues. For one, very few serious scientists read Nature regularly, since it doesn't speak directly to a given field. In my "top academic" institution, almost all of the people I know who have gone to Nature's website recently are either science undergrads doing low level research for a simple presentation or non-scientists trying to figure out what was meant by article X which they saw referenced in an AP news story. In fact, the poll itself wouldn't be encountered by most scientists looking at Nature, since scientists are almost always entering through an external search portal directly to an article of interest. Scientists with real pressure (say, busy grad students or professors) don't browse Nature. They strategically read an occasional article in Nature, but in most cases the same research will have been published already in greater detail in a more field-specific journal.
Collectively, all of this means that Nature's pool of respondents was almost certainly not "top scientists." Instead, they were selecting undergrads, non-scientists, and generally people with a lot of extra time on their hands. Yes, we know undergrads use Ritalin to cheat on tests. We have no indication, however, that Ritalin helps one to do the deep creative thinking necessary for involved science.
Slashdot Mirror
But..."grainy" means overly sharp. So you're saying the glossy screen is much sharper, but that the matte screen's problem in comparison is that it's too sharp...
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I'm sure it would be hard to dump Paint.NET. It's the third least bloated piece of software I've ever seen. The second if Irfanview, of course, which is the best image viewer on any platform and has been since the 90s, and the first is mars.exe, that voxel-based 3-d "Martian surface" demo from the mid-90s that was like 4 kilobytes (http://www.whisqu.se/per/docs/math37.htm).
Homo sapiens emerged from Africa. By your argument, we should call everyone in the US an African American. I don't personally have a problem with that, but I suspect that wasn't your intent.
There's a lot more racial tension in France than in the US.
When Intel has a ray tracing Crysis-killing demo, we'll be in 2013 playing things 10-100x more complex/faster on raster hardware.
No, it's not meant to be for your own good. Mass vaccination policy is in place for the good of the population. If 95% of people get vaccinated for Pluto's Spotted Canker Sores, then 5% of the population remains a nice breeding ground for it, allowing the disease to sustain itself and mutate into more dangerous varieties. This is somewhat similar to the avian flu threat we face today, which is largely caused by the lack of genetic diversity in chicken populations. The uniformity of chicken immune systems acts like the uniform lack of vaccine in humans, allowing new disease strains to come into being and multiply in a friendly environment before spreading to the rest of us.
Personal anecdotal nonevidence beats reason and statistics every time. This is why humanity will fail.
I first heard about this nonsense in an article about some retarded celebrity going on Oprah or somesuch to make the claim.
Thanks for the new sig.
How exactly is the lack of need for better gfx going to create a market for raytracing? In this situation the only reason to switch to raytracing is when your gfx card brakes down and you already own a cpu with 128 cores.
Also, the cpu is not idle in games, there are other things to do besides rendering, like collision detection and AI. Hey, someone read my weird rant. Good for me.
Yes, the scenario I describe is one in which no graphics stagnate, removing demand for higher end discrete graphics cards until eventually CPUs catch up and can meet gaming needs without a GPU. If everyone can get the same experience pegged at 60 fps with just the CPU, why pay nVidia for a graphics card?
In case you didn't notice, I hate this scenario. I think ray tracing is never going to be technically competitive. I also think that my story is weak because it ignores that nVidia will be working on graphics chips for new consoles that will be based on technology that can be easily ported to PCs. Stepping back from my extreme example, however, I imagine the market moving in that direction, with the result being that for the first time consoles could have graphics comparable to PCs for most of their product cycle, and possibly even beat PC graphics when they're new. If you think this has already happened, you haven't been paying attention.
Let's say that as you drive the car out of the dealer's lot, a timer labeled "end of life for car" starts counting down from 4 years. This sucks for you. Pouring gasoline all over the car and lighting it on fire is the equivalent of what SES Americom is doing. Yes, that makes them more money, but it would be better for the world if they would instead sell the damn car to someone else who would use it for those four years. It's amazing if their insurance doesn't deduct the remaining value of the satellite after the initial launch debacle from the payout.
Just anecdotal, but that's all their poll was, too. In my department, people read a lot of journals cover-to-cover (often online), but I've never known anyone to do so with Nature other than board undergrads trying to ignore me while I teach a class.
This is exactly what I meant in my original post. Academics don't just go browsing Nature - they read an occasional article (whenever there's an article in the field).
Also, Nature and Science produce huge impact factors, but in my field, at least, the cover story in Nature is always an article that shows up as a more detailed article in something like PRL. My group had the cover of Nature not so long ago, and this was true of our article, too. I didn't mean to get in a pissing match about Nature though, I meant to point out that browsing the Nature web page to kill time was likely not an activity that the academic powerhouses partake in.
Let's surmise for a minute:
The problem with ray tracing, as Carmack said, is that it will always be much slower than raster-based graphics with a given amount of computing power. He pointed out that there's nothing impressive about Intel's demo of a game from two generations ago running sort of acceptably at moderate resolution on an overpowered Intel demo system. He said that they'll never be able to produce a ray traced engine competitive with the state of the art raster-based games, so the ray tracing, while technically satisfying, will in every case offer poor performance for inferior graphics.
All of this boils down to a time lag. If raster graphics can do something in 2008, ray tracing can do it in 2012, etc. What if raster graphics stopped progressing for four years? Then ray tracing would have a chance to catch up, perhaps leading to new engines and APIs based on ray tracing, which would ensure long term use.
But wait...raster graphics have already been at a standstill for two years, for the first time since their inception. When the 360 came out and then the 8800 line showed up to put it firmly in its technical place, gaming graphics capabilities suddenly stopped. Not only did nVidia have its first unassailable lead over ATI in a long time, but suddenly the PC gaming market finally showed very strong signs of finally dying. Most of the remaining PC game developers shifted development to consoles, leading to (again as Carmack pointed out) a stationary graphical hardware target for new games. The overall number of PC gamers managed to stay high, but literally almost all of them were playing World of Warcraft, which has very low graphics card requirements.
Now two years have gone by, and WoW still dominates PC gaming, while only a few games have shown up that really push current hardware, with few people buying them. It's a pity that the most graphically impressive game is also quite mediocre when it comes to gameplay. There's very little market pressure on nVidia outside of the small enthusiast community, and they've managed to milk a 4x hardware lead over consoles for an unprecedented length of time. The graphics card industry used to beat the living crap out of Moore's Law, but now they've managed to eek out a 10% improvement in over two years, which is just sad. The next generation parts may or may not be coming soon, may or may not bring a large performance boost, and may or may not have any software at all to really justify their purchase.
Going waaaaay back to the beginning, CPU speeds over this same time period have been keeping up with their normal exponential increase in power. At this rate, it would only take two more generations of PC gaming failure for ray tracing on the CPU to catch up with rastering on the GPU, and if that happens, it could end up going to consoles. Hell, it might even be good for PC gaming's health. Currently most console players have a PC, but with its Intel integrated graphics it's only suited to playing games from 6-8 years ago. Already those same PCs can probably match that with ray tracing. If games were only dependent on CPU speed, they'd be a lot more accessible and easily played by a much larger part of the population.
Well done motion-blurred 24 currently would take more power than 60 unblurred fps, but yeah, the notion isn't a bad one.
The problem with bad jay walkers is that they can get themselves hit (or cause avoidance accidents) by drivers who are under the speed limit, not tailgating, and paying attention.
I can communicate with fax machines by whistling. I can't actually send any data, of course, but I can initiate the transfer and get them to print a blank page. I used to let my parents know I needed to be picked up from school when the voice line was busy - if they saw a blank page coming out of the fax, they knew it was me.
Just keep out of the southern US and you won't encounter that any more than you would in Germany or Italy, but yeah, that sucks. Take solace in knowing that the rest of the country largely treats southerners like southerners treated you.
I've encountered a few Parisians who sort of did this, usually in non-touristy restaurants. However, I think the average Parisian is at least as friendly to English-speaking Americans like me as the average American, and when I go to other parts of France I meet the warmest people I've ever seen in any part of the world. France has a wonderful culture and a wonderful people.
The poll defines "top academic scientist" as a reader of Nature. Obviously this has major issues. For one, very few serious scientists read Nature regularly, since it doesn't speak directly to a given field. In my "top academic" institution, almost all of the people I know who have gone to Nature's website recently are either science undergrads doing low level research for a simple presentation or non-scientists trying to figure out what was meant by article X which they saw referenced in an AP news story. In fact, the poll itself wouldn't be encountered by most scientists looking at Nature, since scientists are almost always entering through an external search portal directly to an article of interest. Scientists with real pressure (say, busy grad students or professors) don't browse Nature. They strategically read an occasional article in Nature, but in most cases the same research will have been published already in greater detail in a more field-specific journal.
Collectively, all of this means that Nature's pool of respondents was almost certainly not "top scientists." Instead, they were selecting undergrads, non-scientists, and generally people with a lot of extra time on their hands. Yes, we know undergrads use Ritalin to cheat on tests. We have no indication, however, that Ritalin helps one to do the deep creative thinking necessary for involved science.