I remember reading an interview (several months ago) wherein Carmack discussed the future of game engines...
He said that he played around with NURBS and other "imposter schemes" before deciding that triangles were best--for now. The next evolution, in his opinion, is having one, big, continous texture.
I'm really anxious to hear him talk more about what's ahead. This guy plays a big part in DEFINING the future of game engines. I want to know what direction he's going!
Cats as voyeurism-enabling devices
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 3
Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool
Voyeur: Yeah, baby... take it off for Daddy! That's it... show me the goods-- Hey! Damn cat! Stop playing with blinds, there's a naked woman in there! No, no! Look the other way!
I worked on Communicator 4.X back when Netscape wasn't AOL so I have some perspective on this...
There's a good reason that so many bugs get "latered" or marked "wont fix". Those bugs probably weren't that important!
My point is only that not all bugs are created equal and that saying a product may ship with 2,500 known bugs isn't quite as bad as it sounds.
e.g.
Bug #1 - "Alignment of radio buttons in news server pane of preferences dialog not up to spec"
Bug #2 - "Monitor detonates sending shrapnel into users face when you resize the main window"
Most software ships with several hundred bugs similar in kind to Bug #1. If you're lucky, you'll only get a dozen or two as severe as our second example.
As an aside, it would really suck to get assigned an "exploding monitor" bug... because then you have to reproduce it!
I was having some serious trouble with my wrists and forearms between ten hours of coding and my weight workouts.
I bought the Kinesis Ergo Classic with the footpad to help ease typing pain. And it helped a lot. But my condition was pretty severe and it wasn't long before, even with the new keyboard, I was in pretty serious discomfort.
I stepped up to the Data Hand keyboard about four months ago.
This is the final solution.
The design of this animal is so outrageously different, it's only vaguely recognizable as a keyboard. But it's worked wonders for me.
I bought a "Professional II" demo unit for 1/2 off. That came to 600 USD.
Yup. That's a full order of magnitude more than most ergo keyboards. And that was at 50% off!
Here's how I rationalized the purchase... I could either hurt myself, stop typing or try out the most expensive keyboard I'd ever seen. I gave it a try and, after a week of getting used to it, never looked back.
My lifting has improved, my productivity is up and I no longer dread the workday.
So here I am in the cradle of modern technology... Silicon Valley. And you know what I'm thinking? Forget the nice weather--How bad can the Arctic Circle be?
When it comes to Internet technology, Helsinki is hotter than Moutain View, Palo Alto, etc.
What's the rent like over there?;-)
Seriously, I wonder how wide the gap needs to get before domestic geeks start crowding on rafts and stowing away on planes to get to a more enlightened country--like, say, Finland?
all the interesting performance improvements come with qualitative changes in the way data is moved and operated on.
Shrinking the die, clocking the chip up, adding a bigger cache and bundling it with a whopper heatsink/fan are just ways of extending a processor's life.
This is an absolutely necessary activity, though--how else is a company to fund their new processor research? The Merced's been under development for years and Intel won't even begin to make money on it for [insert time frame]!
The fundamental shifts that are going to win 4x and 10x speed increases cost a lot of money to research and implement.
A multi-core processor is a real paradigm shift. Whoops, I used a buzz-word! But it's true.
VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) is also a seriously different way of thinking.
These sorts of innovations take a long time to bear fruit, the 33Mhz and 50MHz speed increments that we see along the way are what makes them financially feasible.
(I'm not arguing with the poster... just adding to his point)
Of course this system is based on scoring per individual, not per post, but I think it's safe to assume that the overall quality of a given user's posts is going to be fairly consisten
I strongly disagree. An obnoxious poster still has moments of brilliance and a briallant poster has moments of stupidity. We should be rating the post not the person.
TheTomcat hit the nail on the head when he suggested this device is better suited for a car than as a lug-around/portable player.
The IBM microdrives seem like the next logical step for portable MP3 storage. This technology will lay the foundation for true second-generation players. These players will be as small as the Rio or Nomad, but hold 5 1/2 hours of music instead of 30 minutes. Connectivity will probably be via USB... maybe Firewire.
Or maybe I should just wait around until we have a Holographic Memory Cube with 540 exobytes of storage. THEN I won't have anything to bitch about.
Just for fun, figure out how many 4 minute songs you can store with a 540 exobytes. Can you guess?
A: 1.29 x 10^15 songs at about 4 minutes each. But if you drop the encoding down to 96kbs you could probably squeeze on another thousand trillion tracks or so:-)
Wow somebody who can so brilliantly analyze a current situation will probably be overrun with job offers from now on
Well, I happen to think Matthew would be a great journalist, but I wonder if traditional media outlets are even looking for great journalists these days.
Perhaps I'm just cynical, but --from the outside-- it appears as though news outlets are hiring "pawns" that are willing to give news the Official Company Slant rather than objective thinkers.
Matthew would make a very bad pawn--too many original thoughts.
What's also true is that in the discussion of a topic like encryption, intellectual property, etc. the minority view almost always gets scored up.
There may be 50 posts articulating more-or-less the same arguments against software patents. Only one or two of these makes it above three. A single dissident will make a well-written post for The Other Side and--almost invariably--it gets moderated up three or four times.
Inspite of the fact that we are a (fairly) homogenous group, I think the combination of open discussion and moderation keeps us honest about our biases and exposes us to other schools of thought.
The worst case scenario that I can think of is that ActiveState develops some Tk-like library that let's you create GUI widgets, but is not cross-platform.
OK. Then we have Tk stuff on UNIX and Tk-mutant stuff on Windows.
How bad is that really? Will this kind of "balkanization" halt the development of good Perl scripts for the Unices? I doubt it.
Hardest part of the battle was getting a CD-ROM in there that Linux could talk to. Once I did that and I had my 2nd HD plugged into the right plug, it went OK.
Got my 3dfx drivers, installed KDE (that was easy!) and configured X (trial and error. Xconfigurator can't seem to let me have >1 resolution enable) and instlled linuxquake3.
I got no sound (my card isn't supported) but I got good framerates and I have to say that KDE is really nice. My only gripe: how come we can't have a "Monitors" or "Display" control panel to switch monitor resolutions? Xconfigurator may be a step up from the Old Ways, but it still kinda sucks. I'll go RTFM before I complain more, though. Network set up was a breeze, though.
*VERY* much looking forward to benchmarking q3test on Win32 to q3test on Linux (same machine). Which OS has more overhead I wonder?
And a guy who's smart and reads up on bodybuilding can put on a great deal of muscle mass quick. You won't regret it
Here here. The dumb jocks you don't eat right, don't train right and don't supplement right won't make progress as fast as the smart geeks who know the science.
By changing the shape of my body, I changed how everyone saw me. I was put-down, excluded and ignored (on good days!) before I started working out.
After a year or so of lifting weights, I still liked computer role playing games, I still spent a lot of time programming and I still sat in a corner during lunch reading books.
But instead of being an outcast, I got respect. I never had to get in a fight or push anyone around. All it took was big biceps and, in other people's eyes, I stopped being a worthless geek.
The only difference was 15 lbs of muscle. I'm still a big nerd on the inside.
I've continued lifting weights on through college and now into my professional life. It helps me blow off steam and, as dumb as it sounds, people really do view you in a different light when you look like a bodybuilder.
I'd like to how Microsoft has implemented the copy protection. How much protection does it really offer...
At some point the music has to be decoded and unencrypted. Even if we say that only their player will be able to get it there, couldn't we still attach a digital recording device to the digital out on our sound cards?
Also, if they managed to get this animal working on the Mac, it's (theoritically) possible to nab bits of unencrypted, uncompressed music right out of the player's memory space.
I don't mind paying for a song once, but I don't want my player to one day alert me that "Your music has expired. Please buy it again. VISA, Master Card, American Express or Discover?"
Does anyone know what barriers MS has thrown up to prevent us from buying an MS Audio 4.0 song and then getting it into a free(dom) format?
Slashdot Mirror
My question exactly!
I remember reading an interview (several months ago) wherein Carmack discussed the future of game engines...
He said that he played around with NURBS and other "imposter schemes" before deciding that triangles were best--for now. The next evolution, in his opinion, is having one, big, continous texture.
I'm really anxious to hear him talk more about what's ahead. This guy plays a big part in DEFINING the future of game engines. I want to know what direction he's going!
Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool
Voyeur: Yeah, baby... take it off for Daddy! That's it... show me the goods-- Hey! Damn cat! Stop playing with blinds, there's a naked woman in there! No, no! Look the other way!
I worked on Communicator 4.X back when Netscape wasn't AOL so I have some perspective on this...
There's a good reason that so many bugs get "latered" or marked "wont fix". Those bugs probably weren't that important!
My point is only that not all bugs are created equal and that saying a product may ship with 2,500 known bugs isn't quite as bad as it sounds.
e.g.
Bug #1 - "Alignment of radio buttons in news server pane of preferences dialog not up to spec"
Bug #2 - "Monitor detonates sending shrapnel into users face when you resize the main window"
Most software ships with several hundred bugs similar in kind to Bug #1. If you're lucky, you'll only get a dozen or two as severe as our second example.
As an aside, it would really suck to get assigned an "exploding monitor" bug... because then you have to reproduce it!
:-)
e-terrorism is an IBM e-business.
Humor alert. Attempts to paradory IBM's "e-whateverthefuck" campaign.
I was having some serious trouble with my wrists and forearms between ten hours of coding and my weight workouts.
I bought the Kinesis Ergo Classic with the footpad to help ease typing pain. And it helped a lot. But my condition was pretty severe and it wasn't long before, even with the new keyboard, I was in pretty serious discomfort.
I stepped up to the Data Hand keyboard about four months ago.
This is the final solution.
The design of this animal is so outrageously different, it's only vaguely recognizable as a keyboard. But it's worked wonders for me.
I bought a "Professional II" demo unit for 1/2 off. That came to 600 USD.
Yup. That's a full order of magnitude more than most ergo keyboards. And that was at 50% off!
Here's how I rationalized the purchase... I could either hurt myself, stop typing or try out the most expensive keyboard I'd ever seen. I gave it a try and, after a week of getting used to it, never looked back.
My lifting has improved, my productivity is up and I no longer dread the workday.
Americans should realize that they are not the first and foremost in every single aspect of civilization.
;)
We are first in capitalism. That's where we get the attitude
So here I am in the cradle of modern technology... Silicon Valley. And you know what I'm thinking? Forget the nice weather--How bad can the Arctic Circle be?
;-)
:: United States :: Finland
When it comes to Internet technology, Helsinki is hotter than Moutain View, Palo Alto, etc.
What's the rent like over there?
Seriously, I wonder how wide the gap needs to get before domestic geeks start crowding on rafts and stowing away on planes to get to a more enlightened country--like, say, Finland?
Remember the SAT's? Here's an anology....
India
United States
Is it really that far-fetched?
all the interesting performance improvements come with qualitative changes in the way data is moved and operated on.
Shrinking the die, clocking the chip up, adding a bigger cache and bundling it with a whopper heatsink/fan are just ways of extending a processor's life.
This is an absolutely necessary activity, though--how else is a company to fund their new processor research? The Merced's been under development for years and Intel won't even begin to make money on it for [insert time frame]!
The fundamental shifts that are going to win 4x and 10x speed increases cost a lot of money to research and implement.
A multi-core processor is a real paradigm shift. Whoops, I used a buzz-word! But it's true.
VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) is also a seriously different way of thinking.
These sorts of innovations take a long time to bear fruit, the 33Mhz and 50MHz speed increments that we see along the way are what makes them financially feasible.
(I'm not arguing with the poster... just adding to his point)
Of course this system is based on scoring per individual, not per post, but I think it's safe to assume that the overall quality of a given user's posts is going to be fairly consisten
I strongly disagree. An obnoxious poster still has moments of brilliance and a briallant poster has moments of stupidity. We should be rating the post not the person.
TheTomcat hit the nail on the head when he suggested this device is better suited for a car than as a lug-around/portable player.
:-)
The IBM microdrives seem like the next logical step for portable MP3 storage. This technology will lay the foundation for true second-generation players. These players will be as small as the Rio or Nomad, but hold 5 1/2 hours of music instead of 30 minutes. Connectivity will probably be via USB... maybe Firewire.
Or maybe I should just wait around until we have a Holographic Memory Cube with 540 exobytes of storage. THEN I won't have anything to bitch about.
Just for fun, figure out how many 4 minute songs you can store with a 540 exobytes. Can you guess?
A: 1.29 x 10^15 songs at about 4 minutes each. But if you drop the encoding down to 96kbs you could probably squeeze on another thousand trillion tracks or so
Wow somebody who can so brilliantly analyze a current situation will probably be overrun with job offers from now on
Well, I happen to think Matthew would be a great journalist, but I wonder if traditional media outlets are even looking for great journalists these days.
Perhaps I'm just cynical, but --from the outside-- it appears as though news outlets are hiring "pawns" that are willing to give news the Official Company Slant rather than objective thinkers.
Matthew would make a very bad pawn--too many original thoughts.
What's also true is that in the discussion of a topic like encryption, intellectual property, etc. the minority view almost always gets scored up.
There may be 50 posts articulating more-or-less the same arguments against software patents. Only one or two of these makes it above three. A single dissident will make a well-written post for The Other Side and--almost invariably--it gets moderated up three or four times.
Inspite of the fact that we are a (fairly) homogenous group, I think the combination of open discussion and moderation keeps us honest about our biases and exposes us to other schools of thought.
The worst case scenario that I can think of is that ActiveState develops some Tk-like library that let's you create GUI widgets, but is not cross-platform.
OK. Then we have Tk stuff on UNIX and Tk-mutant stuff on Windows.
How bad is that really? Will this kind of "balkanization" halt the development of good Perl scripts for the Unices? I doubt it.
Color me not worried.
Yes. I do. It's like getting an instant 30% discount.
This was my thought.
If the black hole is sucking in gas towards the viewer, it will appear to be blue (shorter wave length)
If the direction of suck is away from the viewer, it ought to appear red (longer wave length).
And if the acretion disk were viewed edge-on, one would see both red- and blue- shifted light.
I'm no high-energy astrophysicist, but doesn't this explanation make sense?
Why does this sound familiar?
Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, right?
[humor]
I guess this means Jobs will be ousted (again) and Apple will later decide to buy Be!
[/humor]
Remember Javagator? Java is not a good language for big applications.
I must say I'm rather proud.
Hardest part of the battle was getting a CD-ROM in there that Linux could talk to. Once I did that and I had my 2nd HD plugged into the right plug, it went OK.
Got my 3dfx drivers, installed KDE (that was easy!) and configured X (trial and error. Xconfigurator can't seem to let me have >1 resolution enable) and instlled linuxquake3.
I got no sound (my card isn't supported) but I got good framerates and I have to say that KDE is really nice. My only gripe: how come we can't have a "Monitors" or "Display" control panel to switch monitor resolutions? Xconfigurator may be a step up from the Old Ways, but it still kinda sucks. I'll go RTFM before I complain more, though. Network set up was a breeze, though.
*VERY* much looking forward to benchmarking q3test on Win32 to q3test on Linux (same machine). Which OS has more overhead I wonder?
And a guy who's smart and reads up on bodybuilding can put on a great deal of muscle mass quick. You won't regret it
Here here. The dumb jocks you don't eat right, don't train right and don't supplement right won't make progress as fast as the smart geeks who know the science.
Right. I'm a pretty hardcore libertarian, but I don't think guns should be a basic right.
Guns are tools that were designed to put holes in living things--primarily people. They have no other use.
Canada and the UK have the right idea.
By changing the shape of my body, I changed how everyone saw me. I was put-down, excluded and ignored (on good days!) before I started working out.
After a year or so of lifting weights, I still liked computer role playing games, I still spent a lot of time programming and I still sat in a corner during lunch reading books.
But instead of being an outcast, I got respect. I never had to get in a fight or push anyone around. All it took was big biceps and, in other people's eyes, I stopped being a worthless geek.
The only difference was 15 lbs of muscle. I'm still a big nerd on the inside.
I've continued lifting weights on through college and now into my professional life. It helps me blow off steam and, as dumb as it sounds, people really do view you in a different light when you look like a bodybuilder.
Closed, bloated and buggy software makes for a square wheel. It needs reinventing.
would it be cheaper to just buy a faster processor and run it at room temperature?
Bah! Now where's the fun in that?
I don't like either of those slogans. "What can we dot-com for you?"
Since when can a top-level-domain be "verbified"?
I'd like to how Microsoft has implemented the copy protection. How much protection does it really offer...
At some point the music has to be decoded and unencrypted. Even if we say that only their player will be able to get it there, couldn't we still attach a digital recording device to the digital out on our sound cards?
Also, if they managed to get this animal working on the Mac, it's (theoritically) possible to nab bits of unencrypted, uncompressed music right out of the player's memory space.
I don't mind paying for a song once, but I don't want my player to one day alert me that "Your music has expired. Please buy it again. VISA, Master Card, American Express or Discover?"
Does anyone know what barriers MS has thrown up to prevent us from buying an MS Audio 4.0 song and then getting it into a free(dom) format?