I believe you're mistaken. Raytracing IS the technique where you're tracing light much the way it happens in the real world. The techniques usually used in GPUs are quite backward. It hasn't really been all that downhill, though; they've gotten pretty good at faking a lot of the effects, but when it comes to things like shadows, local lighting, radiosity, and refraction, Raytracing is where it's at.
I don't think he meant "innocent" in the not-breaking-the-law sense, but more in the "not against the reasonable moral rules of society" innocent..... he's saying the law was way too broadly worded and was picking up people who were doing reasonable things the law wasn't supposed to cover.
We have LOTS of laws that criminalize innocent activity even in the "reasonable moral rules of society" sense. Is there anything in the Constitution that actually forbids such laws? Perhaps there should be, but IS there?
I'm all in favor of the result of this decision, but this makes no sense: "... unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes 'wholly innocent conduct."
Isn't it the very purpose of criminal law to criminalize what would otherwise be innocent conduct? What law wouldn't be stuck down by this reasoning?
I'd love to RTFA to find out more, but there's NO LINK. Source please?
Note that these are raytracing cards, not rendering. Raytracing is a very different technique which can do cool effects like refraction through glass (shown in the chandeliers and scopes), jawdropping water, and realistic lighting effects that rendering cards simply cannot do.
It's also much more demanding on hardware. One of the big drawbacks is it requires a lot of scattered reads out of memory making caching much less effective. You need tons of bandwidth to low latency memory to make it happen. We're still a very long ways out from having this possible in reasonably-priced consumer GPUs.
Rag on Intel for their integrated graphics if you want (though I consider them a good non-gaming graphics chip with very good open source support), but these cards are not related to those in any way. These are full-featured x86/x64 processors with 32 cores per die. In other words, they created a 256-core system capable of software-raytracing the whole thing at high resolutions.
That is quite an accomplishment, and rest assured, it is top-tier performance in the raytracing world. This isn't meant to be a practical gaming system; this is pretty clearly being done by Intel to show off the benefits of their many-cores processors, and it is an impressive show.
To the GP: They're using Wolfenstein because it's one of very few games that has a ray-traced variant, and it exists only because Intel created it as a testbed. More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein:_Ray_Traced
On the last point, I'm willing to take them at face value. They earned a lot of credibility when DES was being designed. They approved the basic design, but made some changes to some minor details of the design. No one outside the NSA knew why for years. Eventually differential cryptanalysis was publicly discovered, and in retrospect it became clear that the NSA's changes were to defend against the attack.
So yes, the NSA appears to put deploying real security firmly ahead of compromising other people's security.
"They stole my $WHATEVER!" is exactly why umbrella insurance policies exist. Yes, they cover lost bits. Yes, they have value, and it costs real money to replace them, just like pieces of paper printed with green ink also have no intrinsic value but it's reasonable to have insurance to cover them.
As for the GP's point that Bitcoin is imaginary money: Your bank account balance is also just a bunch of bits in a database somewhere. The vast majority of those bits don't even have green pieces of paper to back them up.
That amount is reasonable for the immediate needs of an active exchange. They have to be able to send BTC when people request a withdrawal. Note that they're only keeping the necessary amount online. The bulk of their funds are stored elsewhere.
I'm not really a fan of Bitcoinica (they give far too much margin to noobs), but they're not a bucket shop. People call them that sometimes because they match-make internally without forwarding to the larger market, but all net positions are hedged by actual trades. Actual delivery of goods (Bitcoins) does take place - and in fact the "hot" wallet that does so is what got stolen today. Fortunately the bulk of their deposits are in cold storage and weren't hit.
Actually, pool users aren't losing anything. The "hot" wallet stored at Linode was only the daily-use petty cash fund used for routine payouts. The bulk of the pool's balance is in "cold" storage and was not affected, so it's not like they were cleaned out. They got the register at the front, but not the safe in the back.
The owner of the pool, Slush, is covering the losses out of pocket, so nobody is losing anything except him.
The same story (though with a larger "hot" wallet) is happening over at Bitcoinica as well.
The routers won't self-destruct, but there are a lot of things hooked up to computers that can. It's very common to have industrial machinery that can be destroyed or destroy nearby things due to a software fault. Iran's centrifuges are a good example. Hydro dams, nuke plants, chemical refineries... There are lots of nebulous and hard to quantify opportunities, which is why politicians are thrilled to see this become popular.
[quote]How can the mesh be resonant to a square wave (with lots of high frequency harmonics over a huge band)?[/quote]
There's no such thing as a square wave at 4GHz. You can draw them like that on paper, but in reality the edges smear into a pretty good approximation of a sine wave.
Regardless, it will still have some higher frequency components, but you don't have to worry about them. The resonance won't help generate nice sharp edges, but that's the line driver's job. The resonance is just to save energy by helping pump the voltage at the fundamental frequency.
(Disclaimer, not an EE, but I've looked over their shoulders a bunch of times)
What I don't get is why they don't just use the old copper to power the CPE. Surely it can't take more than a hundred milliamps to run the laser and a little embedded processor, and perhaps a bit more to ring the phones.
1, technical. VPN. There are plenty of cheap providers out there who exist to fix this problem, or just find a friend who's willing to let you bounce off their home network.
2, administrative. Go over the head of the technical guy who's blocking the net. You will need to do your homework first: have a good business case for why the current policies are a) inhibiting your (and many others') legitimate needs and b) aren't reasonable, necessary or effective measures to achieve security. If you have a hundred signatures on a petition you'll probably get some attention.
The Zune itself is probably fine, but look at it in social terms: Apple is the cool kid while MicroSoft is the wannabe making pathetic attempts to be "cool". You, in turn, are associating yourself with the pariah, and people react the same way as they did in junior high: making sure they quickly draw the line before THEY start getting associated too.
We think of ourselves as self-aware, but I'm sure the aliens are laughing at our ridiculous instinctual social behaviors.:(
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years...
20 years ago I was using Borland C. Nothing since has ever touched the beautiful integration of editing, compiling and debugging that BC had. The write-compile-test cycle was breathtakingly fast and convenient.
I'm not saying we haven't made progress. The editor I use now creams it, and I'm not looking to go back. But from a pure IDE standpoint, no, things pretty much peaked in the early to mid '90s.
Aside from licensing, Postscript requires some serious CPU. Microcontrollers don't cut it. To process 1200dpi pages in a reasonable amount of time you need a 32-bit CPU running in the hundreds of MHz and tens to hundreds of MB of RAM. While the cost of these is much lower than it used to be, it's still a considerable portion of the price of a printer. When you're making a $79 printer, an extra $10 or $20 for a fast CPU is a lot, especially when 95% of customers won't care.
I'm actually strongly against Bitcoin's deflationary model for this reason. Ideally I'd like to see it fixed so it has a small, continuous inflation.
I do oppose the idea that central banks can create arbitrarily large amounts of inflation, but the advantage is mostly just a hypothetical to demonstrate how a completely decentralized currency has advantages (or tradeoffs) that can't be easily accomplished with centralized currencies.
Given: a linear road with a series of lights; no alternate routes; no knowledge of the light timing: Brake at the last possible second to stop for the light; use maximum acceleration up to the speed limit once the light turns green (including if you were in the middle of braking; instantly switch to full power). In some cases this may have you completely stopped in the road a ways back from the light, waiting to launch a bit before it turns green.
Given: same as above but perfect knowledge of the next light but no other lights: Apply maximum braking until you can just barely reach the light the moment it turns green; then apply maximum acceleration to reach the light just as it turns green. The idea is to already be as close to the speed limit as possible when the light turns green. If there is extra time available you save gas with no time penalty by braking hard for a moment, coasting for a while, then using maximum acceleration so you are crossing the line at the speed limit as the light turns green. This regime is both faster and uses less gas than simply racing to the light and then waiting longer.
Given: Same as above but perfect knowledge of ALL lights: decelerate as EARLY as possible (just coast, or start with a stab at the brakes if you're going too fast and will arrive at the light too early; you always want all braking as early as possible and then coast). As late as possible use acceleration to just make it through the light before it turns red (solve this for all lights in the series in case you need to accelerate more to prevent missing one). If there's one you can't make, decelerate as early as possible and then be coming back up to speed just as you go through. The exception is for the last light: target reaching the speed limit as you cross the line as it turns green.
The last case - which is possible if the traffic lights communicate everything with you - is the fastest AND is very close to optimal gas mileage.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're mistaken. Raytracing IS the technique where you're tracing light much the way it happens in the real world. The techniques usually used in GPUs are quite backward. It hasn't really been all that downhill, though; they've gotten pretty good at faking a lot of the effects, but when it comes to things like shadows, local lighting, radiosity, and refraction, Raytracing is where it's at.
Examples:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Glasses_800_edit.png
http://hof.povray.org/images/chado_Big.jpg
http://hof.povray.org/micra1_09.html
http://hof.povray.org/images/warm_up_Big.jpg
http://hof.povray.org/images/kitchen.jpg
All of those are from POV-Ray. There are plenty more in their gallery over here:
http://hof.povray.org/
Feel free to send some counterexamples of other techniques doing it better.
The PDF has more pixels: http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2146416&type=pdf
How so?
I don't think he meant "innocent" in the not-breaking-the-law sense, but more in the "not against the reasonable moral rules of society" innocent. .... he's saying the law was way too broadly worded and was picking up people who were doing reasonable things the law wasn't supposed to cover.
We have LOTS of laws that criminalize innocent activity even in the "reasonable moral rules of society" sense. Is there anything in the Constitution that actually forbids such laws? Perhaps there should be, but IS there?
I'm all in favor of the result of this decision, but this makes no sense: "... unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes 'wholly innocent conduct."
Isn't it the very purpose of criminal law to criminalize what would otherwise be innocent conduct? What law wouldn't be stuck down by this reasoning?
I'd love to RTFA to find out more, but there's NO LINK. Source please?
Note that these are raytracing cards, not rendering. Raytracing is a very different technique which can do cool effects like refraction through glass (shown in the chandeliers and scopes), jawdropping water, and realistic lighting effects that rendering cards simply cannot do.
It's also much more demanding on hardware. One of the big drawbacks is it requires a lot of scattered reads out of memory making caching much less effective. You need tons of bandwidth to low latency memory to make it happen. We're still a very long ways out from having this possible in reasonably-priced consumer GPUs.
Rag on Intel for their integrated graphics if you want (though I consider them a good non-gaming graphics chip with very good open source support), but these cards are not related to those in any way. These are full-featured x86/x64 processors with 32 cores per die. In other words, they created a 256-core system capable of software-raytracing the whole thing at high resolutions.
That is quite an accomplishment, and rest assured, it is top-tier performance in the raytracing world. This isn't meant to be a practical gaming system; this is pretty clearly being done by Intel to show off the benefits of their many-cores processors, and it is an impressive show.
To the GP: They're using Wolfenstein because it's one of very few games that has a ray-traced variant, and it exists only because Intel created it as a testbed. More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein:_Ray_Traced
It's just a handle, ccguy. He doesn't hide his real identity.
On the last point, I'm willing to take them at face value. They earned a lot of credibility when DES was being designed. They approved the basic design, but made some changes to some minor details of the design. No one outside the NSA knew why for years. Eventually differential cryptanalysis was publicly discovered, and in retrospect it became clear that the NSA's changes were to defend against the attack.
So yes, the NSA appears to put deploying real security firmly ahead of compromising other people's security.
You accidentally all your bitcoins? :)
"They stole my $WHATEVER!" is exactly why umbrella insurance policies exist. Yes, they cover lost bits. Yes, they have value, and it costs real money to replace them, just like pieces of paper printed with green ink also have no intrinsic value but it's reasonable to have insurance to cover them.
As for the GP's point that Bitcoin is imaginary money: Your bank account balance is also just a bunch of bits in a database somewhere. The vast majority of those bits don't even have green pieces of paper to back them up.
That amount is reasonable for the immediate needs of an active exchange. They have to be able to send BTC when people request a withdrawal. Note that they're only keeping the necessary amount online. The bulk of their funds are stored elsewhere.
I'm not really a fan of Bitcoinica (they give far too much margin to noobs), but they're not a bucket shop. People call them that sometimes because they match-make internally without forwarding to the larger market, but all net positions are hedged by actual trades. Actual delivery of goods (Bitcoins) does take place - and in fact the "hot" wallet that does so is what got stolen today. Fortunately the bulk of their deposits are in cold storage and weren't hit.
Actually, pool users aren't losing anything. The "hot" wallet stored at Linode was only the daily-use petty cash fund used for routine payouts. The bulk of the pool's balance is in "cold" storage and was not affected, so it's not like they were cleaned out. They got the register at the front, but not the safe in the back.
The owner of the pool, Slush, is covering the losses out of pocket, so nobody is losing anything except him.
The same story (though with a larger "hot" wallet) is happening over at Bitcoinica as well.
The routers won't self-destruct, but there are a lot of things hooked up to computers that can. It's very common to have industrial machinery that can be destroyed or destroy nearby things due to a software fault. Iran's centrifuges are a good example. Hydro dams, nuke plants, chemical refineries... There are lots of nebulous and hard to quantify opportunities, which is why politicians are thrilled to see this become popular.
blasted by other bioethicists for working at the controversial stem-cell company
Fail. This is exactly the kind of company that we want a bioethicist working for.
[quote]How can the mesh be resonant to a square wave (with lots of high frequency harmonics over a huge band)?[/quote]
There's no such thing as a square wave at 4GHz. You can draw them like that on paper, but in reality the edges smear into a pretty good approximation of a sine wave.
Regardless, it will still have some higher frequency components, but you don't have to worry about them. The resonance won't help generate nice sharp edges, but that's the line driver's job. The resonance is just to save energy by helping pump the voltage at the fundamental frequency.
(Disclaimer, not an EE, but I've looked over their shoulders a bunch of times)
What I don't get is why they don't just use the old copper to power the CPE. Surely it can't take more than a hundred milliamps to run the laser and a little embedded processor, and perhaps a bit more to ring the phones.
1, technical. VPN. There are plenty of cheap providers out there who exist to fix this problem, or just find a friend who's willing to let you bounce off their home network.
2, administrative. Go over the head of the technical guy who's blocking the net. You will need to do your homework first: have a good business case for why the current policies are a) inhibiting your (and many others') legitimate needs and b) aren't reasonable, necessary or effective measures to achieve security. If you have a hundred signatures on a petition you'll probably get some attention.
The puritan culture in the US would get it for all their children if you'd just invent it. I wish I was joking.
The Zune itself is probably fine, but look at it in social terms: Apple is the cool kid while MicroSoft is the wannabe making pathetic attempts to be "cool". You, in turn, are associating yourself with the pariah, and people react the same way as they did in junior high: making sure they quickly draw the line before THEY start getting associated too.
We think of ourselves as self-aware, but I'm sure the aliens are laughing at our ridiculous instinctual social behaviors. :(
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years ...
20 years ago I was using Borland C. Nothing since has ever touched the beautiful integration of editing, compiling and debugging that BC had. The write-compile-test cycle was breathtakingly fast and convenient.
I'm not saying we haven't made progress. The editor I use now creams it, and I'm not looking to go back. But from a pure IDE standpoint, no, things pretty much peaked in the early to mid '90s.
Aside from licensing, Postscript requires some serious CPU. Microcontrollers don't cut it. To process 1200dpi pages in a reasonable amount of time you need a 32-bit CPU running in the hundreds of MHz and tens to hundreds of MB of RAM. While the cost of these is much lower than it used to be, it's still a considerable portion of the price of a printer. When you're making a $79 printer, an extra $10 or $20 for a fast CPU is a lot, especially when 95% of customers won't care.
I'm actually strongly against Bitcoin's deflationary model for this reason. Ideally I'd like to see it fixed so it has a small, continuous inflation.
I do oppose the idea that central banks can create arbitrarily large amounts of inflation, but the advantage is mostly just a hypothetical to demonstrate how a completely decentralized currency has advantages (or tradeoffs) that can't be easily accomplished with centralized currencies.
Nice! That's a very simple 80% solution.
Given: a linear road with a series of lights; no alternate routes; no knowledge of the light timing: Brake at the last possible second to stop for the light; use maximum acceleration up to the speed limit once the light turns green (including if you were in the middle of braking; instantly switch to full power). In some cases this may have you completely stopped in the road a ways back from the light, waiting to launch a bit before it turns green.
Given: same as above but perfect knowledge of the next light but no other lights: Apply maximum braking until you can just barely reach the light the moment it turns green; then apply maximum acceleration to reach the light just as it turns green. The idea is to already be as close to the speed limit as possible when the light turns green. If there is extra time available you save gas with no time penalty by braking hard for a moment, coasting for a while, then using maximum acceleration so you are crossing the line at the speed limit as the light turns green. This regime is both faster and uses less gas than simply racing to the light and then waiting longer.
Given: Same as above but perfect knowledge of ALL lights: decelerate as EARLY as possible (just coast, or start with a stab at the brakes if you're going too fast and will arrive at the light too early; you always want all braking as early as possible and then coast). As late as possible use acceleration to just make it through the light before it turns red (solve this for all lights in the series in case you need to accelerate more to prevent missing one). If there's one you can't make, decelerate as early as possible and then be coming back up to speed just as you go through. The exception is for the last light: target reaching the speed limit as you cross the line as it turns green.
The last case - which is possible if the traffic lights communicate everything with you - is the fastest AND is very close to optimal gas mileage.