Typesetters absolutely did use a wider inter-sentence space than inter-word space. (Outside of France, at least.) In fact, around 1900 the convention used to be for inter-sentence space to be an em-space (as wide as an M) and inter-word space to be 1/3 of that, the width of a lowercase L. The em-space got shortened to an en-space (half as much) through the 20th century, making inter-sentence space 1.5 times the inter-word space. (aside: The space after a colon used to be huge. Like 1.5-2 ems.)
Personally, I use 2 spaces and find 1 space harder to read in most fonts. I feel like my eye "trips over" the first word in a new sentence when there's not enough space--it feels a bit like reading it twice. We have wonderful typesetting programs like LaTeX, but most of the stuff I see in Word and in web browsers looks pretty awful. I'm not sure why we don't use our good typesetting algorithms in more contexts. I've used some programs that make double spacing WAY too wide, while single-spacing is still too short, which is frustrating. (My company used HipChat, which had this problem.)
I think that single vs. double spacing would be a good way to communicate to the typesetter which kind of space to use. I think I've heard of a typesetting system that does this. LaTeX tried to infer what space you want after a period based on capitalization and such. It usually does the right thing, but you have to resort to weird syntax when it doesn't.
4) They actually have a hard time understanding the speaker. Usually doesn't happen with just the occasional to/too or their/there/they're, but combining several instances of bad grammar, poor spelling and typos into a single sentence and communication gets legitimately difficult.
Listened to your links. Frankly, I've heard church music with more dissonance. There was nary a minor 9th, major 7th, or minor 2nd to be found. Some major 2nds in the first link were about as dissonant as it got. I don't know what it is about metal that makes people think the harmonies are more complex than they are, but it's something I hear pretty often. Maybe the harsh timbres of the guitar effects and vocals make people think "this doesn't sound pretty; it must be dissonant."
I agree it's not really accurate to call it "The World's Ugliest Piece of Music." That would imply that the beauty of music is solely a function of how repetitive it is, which is obviously false because a single note repeated at regular intervals (or maybe a square wave held indefinitely on a single pitch) would certainly not qualify as "The World's Most Beautiful Piece of Music."
However, I don't mind this as a bit of marketing. There's really no denying that this piece is intended to be listened to after a brief explanation of the mathematics behind it, and "Mathematically Ugliest Music" is a more intriguing hook than the more descriptive "equally-tempered 88-tone row without repeated pitch or interval classes, played so that no two notes are rhythmically separated by the same rhythmic distance, on the premise that repetition is necessary for beauty in music."
While this piece does minimize a positive aspect of music, it does nothing to maximize negative aspects. Dissonance counterpoint comes to mind as a better example of actually trying to write unpleasing music. Basically, it takes the rules of counterpoint theorists have used to describe the music of Palestrina or Bach, then slavishly follows the opposite of those rules.
Well, different branches of mathematics have different notions of randomness. Your post makes sense assuming a statistician's concept of randomness. Your parent post almost makes sense assuming an information theorist's concept of random. (I say almost because actually proving a sequence to be Kolmogorov random is an incomputable problem.)
I think it's more a matter of not making a GUI instead of a command line interface. Making both is, of course, perfectly fine, so long as the CLI is fully-featured and reasonably usable.
"Apple's nVidia drivers are about 3 billion times more reliable than anything nVidia itself has ever produced."
FYI, NVIDIA produces Apple's NVIDIA drivers. Sounds like you may have hardware problems on your Win7 box.
I agree with you that it's polite to ask nicely for someone to do what they're paid for. I also agree with your parent post that it's not necessary.
It's not like the waitress is justified in not bringing you your dinner because you didn't say please when you ordered.
Ray-tracing relies on similar tricks. You mention, for instance, space partitioning structures. Similar structures, like kd-trees, are the secret to raytracing's much-touted O( log(n) ) performance (where n = number of triangles).
Less talked-about is the fact that if the scene moves, the structure needs to be updated or regenerated, and that making a structure that gets you O( log(n) ) rendering takes something like O( n*log(n) ). Note how real-time raytracing demos boasting 10,000s of polygons have no animation. The deformable environments you mention would be hell on a ray-tracer.
Of course, there are ways to cheat this, but my point is that ray-tracing relies on its own bag of tricks. If performance is no object, the theory in a ray-tracer is simple and the code elegant. Real-time ray-tracing can be just as ugly as rasterization.
Yep. That program is "badaboom Media Converter" by Elemental Technologies.
I look forward to seeing what other applications CUDA has for home users. So far we have video transcoding, gaming physics simulation, and distributed computing projects (SETI&Folding@Home). Doubtless graphics pretty soon, ironically (CUDA ray-tracing). It's really exciting.
If accelerating PhysX on Nvidia's GPU hardware is cheating, wouldn't accelerating PhysX on Ageia's PPU hardware be considered cheating, too?
No, The physics tests in 3DMark Vantage test just the physics processing. If you're playing a game, your GPU will be busy doing graphics acceleration too leaving a lot less processing power for physics. The Ageia physics card is a separate processor so using it shouldn't affect graphics processing (although it did a bit.. probably due to keeping track of extra particle/physics data).
And if you're playing a game, your CPU will be busy doing AI, game logic, some animation, scheduling, etc. Whether you run the test on a GPU or CPU, the non-physics load is unrealistically light when running this test.
I disagree. I would be just as happy listening to a recording of a Bosendorfer computer grand piano playing playing itself as I would one of a pianist playing it. I don't think I could tell the difference, even though I have a good ear and play piano myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Typesetters absolutely did use a wider inter-sentence space than inter-word space. (Outside of France, at least.) In fact, around 1900 the convention used to be for inter-sentence space to be an em-space (as wide as an M) and inter-word space to be 1/3 of that, the width of a lowercase L. The em-space got shortened to an en-space (half as much) through the 20th century, making inter-sentence space 1.5 times the inter-word space. (aside: The space after a colon used to be huge. Like 1.5-2 ems.)
Personally, I use 2 spaces and find 1 space harder to read in most fonts. I feel like my eye "trips over" the first word in a new sentence when there's not enough space--it feels a bit like reading it twice. We have wonderful typesetting programs like LaTeX, but most of the stuff I see in Word and in web browsers looks pretty awful. I'm not sure why we don't use our good typesetting algorithms in more contexts. I've used some programs that make double spacing WAY too wide, while single-spacing is still too short, which is frustrating. (My company used HipChat, which had this problem.)
I think that single vs. double spacing would be a good way to communicate to the typesetter which kind of space to use. I think I've heard of a typesetting system that does this. LaTeX tried to infer what space you want after a period based on capitalization and such. It usually does the right thing, but you have to resort to weird syntax when it doesn't.
4) They actually have a hard time understanding the speaker. Usually doesn't happen with just the occasional to/too or their/there/they're, but combining several instances of bad grammar, poor spelling and typos into a single sentence and communication gets legitimately difficult.
Of course, being third in a Valve series, we all know how this story ends.
Source 2: Episode 1?
People say they need a Kleenex and grab a generic brand facial tissue. Few people say they'll "Google" something then proceed to use Bing.
Even if you are in high orbit you can only see at most half of the planet at a time.
When you look at a tennis ball, do you remind yourself that you're only seeing half of it?
Often, yes. Is that just me?
Listened to your links. Frankly, I've heard church music with more dissonance. There was nary a minor 9th, major 7th, or minor 2nd to be found. Some major 2nds in the first link were about as dissonant as it got. I don't know what it is about metal that makes people think the harmonies are more complex than they are, but it's something I hear pretty often. Maybe the harsh timbres of the guitar effects and vocals make people think "this doesn't sound pretty; it must be dissonant."
I agree it's not really accurate to call it "The World's Ugliest Piece of Music." That would imply that the beauty of music is solely a function of how repetitive it is, which is obviously false because a single note repeated at regular intervals (or maybe a square wave held indefinitely on a single pitch) would certainly not qualify as "The World's Most Beautiful Piece of Music."
However, I don't mind this as a bit of marketing. There's really no denying that this piece is intended to be listened to after a brief explanation of the mathematics behind it, and "Mathematically Ugliest Music" is a more intriguing hook than the more descriptive "equally-tempered 88-tone row without repeated pitch or interval classes, played so that no two notes are rhythmically separated by the same rhythmic distance, on the premise that repetition is necessary for beauty in music."
While this piece does minimize a positive aspect of music, it does nothing to maximize negative aspects. Dissonance counterpoint comes to mind as a better example of actually trying to write unpleasing music. Basically, it takes the rules of counterpoint theorists have used to describe the music of Palestrina or Bach, then slavishly follows the opposite of those rules.
Well, different branches of mathematics have different notions of randomness. Your post makes sense assuming a statistician's concept of randomness. Your parent post almost makes sense assuming an information theorist's concept of random. (I say almost because actually proving a sequence to be Kolmogorov random is an incomputable problem.)
I would say that Half-life 2, Picross 3D, Starcraft 2, Super Mario World or Madden NFL '11 would be good adventure games to start with.
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So in decimal that's $448. Honestly, I expected better.
I think it's more a matter of not making a GUI instead of a command line interface. Making both is, of course, perfectly fine, so long as the CLI is fully-featured and reasonably usable.
"Apple's nVidia drivers are about 3 billion times more reliable than anything nVidia itself has ever produced."
FYI, NVIDIA produces Apple's NVIDIA drivers. Sounds like you may have hardware problems on your Win7 box.
I agree with you that it's polite to ask nicely for someone to do what they're paid for. I also agree with your parent post that it's not necessary. It's not like the waitress is justified in not bringing you your dinner because you didn't say please when you ordered.
... just change the grading scale from 90% A, 80% B, 70% C, 60% D, 50% F to 95% A, 90% B, 85% C, 80% D, 75% F.
I stopped reading when I got to "By Charlie Demerjian."
Seriously, this guy is to NVIDIA as Jack Thompson is to video games. It's just not as common knowledge that you shouldn't take him seriously.
Ray-tracing relies on similar tricks. You mention, for instance, space partitioning structures. Similar structures, like kd-trees, are the secret to raytracing's much-touted O( log(n) ) performance (where n = number of triangles).
Less talked-about is the fact that if the scene moves, the structure needs to be updated or regenerated, and that making a structure that gets you O( log(n) ) rendering takes something like O( n*log(n) ). Note how real-time raytracing demos boasting 10,000s of polygons have no animation. The deformable environments you mention would be hell on a ray-tracer.
Of course, there are ways to cheat this, but my point is that ray-tracing relies on its own bag of tricks. If performance is no object, the theory in a ray-tracer is simple and the code elegant. Real-time ray-tracing can be just as ugly as rasterization.
Crap, I can't edit. Most of those are 10 too high, since I didn't "chomp;" in my Perl script.
V+I+A+ +V+I+A+ +V+I+A+ == 778
U+M+C+ +U+M+C+ +U+M+C+ == 793
S+i+S+ +S+i+S+ +S+i+S+ == 919
G+e+o+d+e+ +b+y+ +N+S+C == 1005
G+e+n+u+i+n+e+T+M+x+8+6 == 1116
A+u+t+h+e+n+t+i+c+A+M+D == 1153
T+r+a+n+s+m+e+t+a+C+P+U == 1185
N+e+x+G+e+n+D+r+i+v+e+n == 1207
R+i+s+e+R+i+s+e+R+i+s+e == 1219
G+e+n+u+i+n+e+I+n+t+e+l == 1223
C+e+n+t+a+u+r+H+a+u+l+s == 1241
C+y+r+i+x+I+n+s+t+e+a+d == 1249
C+o+w+b+o+y+N+e+a+l == 1021 (but it's missing a
character, which may not be '\0')
Yep. That program is "badaboom Media Converter" by Elemental Technologies. I look forward to seeing what other applications CUDA has for home users. So far we have video transcoding, gaming physics simulation, and distributed computing projects (SETI&Folding@Home). Doubtless graphics pretty soon, ironically (CUDA ray-tracing). It's really exciting.
It's not actually some guy named Frank. It's a broom.
If accelerating PhysX on Nvidia's GPU hardware is cheating, wouldn't accelerating PhysX on Ageia's PPU hardware be considered cheating, too?
No, The physics tests in 3DMark Vantage test just the physics processing. If you're playing a game, your GPU will be busy doing graphics acceleration too leaving a lot less processing power for physics. The Ageia physics card is a separate processor so using it shouldn't affect graphics processing (although it did a bit.. probably due to keeping track of extra particle/physics data).
And if you're playing a game, your CPU will be busy doing AI, game logic, some animation, scheduling, etc. Whether you run the test on a GPU or CPU, the non-physics load is unrealistically light when running this test.
No, it's not CUDA, nor is it an extension of CUDA. It was implemented using CUDA, but developers don't need to use CUDA to use PhysX.
I disagree. I would be just as happy listening to a recording of a Bosendorfer computer grand piano playing playing itself as I would one of a pianist playing it. I don't think I could tell the difference, even though I have a good ear and play piano myself.
but can it play Crysis?