You're right that the math is easier, but the rendering is significantly slower with the easier math. Triangles are easier to optimize because they can be represented almost purely by integers, as opposed to curves (well, curves can, but the math then becomes significantly harder) plus there's been a lot more time to optimize triangles. In the future we will have true curves, since it looks like ray tracing will be the next big jump (within 10 years from what I've heard) which does realistic rendering instead of hack rendering (i.e. Raster Graphics)
Hmm.. Where to start...
Yes. Triangles can be represented by integers. Except they're not. Modern GPUs use double precision floating point.
Sure there has been a lot of time spent optimizing triangles, but the industry could have spent that time optimizing curved surfaces.
Unfortunately, since 3dfx was purchased by nVidia, the industry has been stuck in neutral in terms of innovation. It's not that they don't have good ideas now and then... It's that the bean counters are afraid to pursue any technologies that might make their existing technologies obsolete. You wouldn't want to destroy the proven value of your current product line by obsoleting it with new technology that hasn't been proven in the marketplace, after all. Which is why you'll see nVidia fighting the ray tracing push every chance they get.
I don't see how you can get that from these videos. Some of the more fiddly bits seemed like they were related to the level design, and these were custom levels, not official levels. I have a hard time believing you could draw any (valid) conclusions whatsoever from a gameplay video that doesn't include a video of the player.
Honestly, I don't get what's so impressive about these graphics. Yeah, they're "improved", but they're still rough around the edges. Look at that first screenshot, for example. The spare tire rim on the back of the jeep has 10 sides. 10. You'd think they'd spend some time working on making round things *round*. There's got to be somebody at nVidia or ATI that can figure out how to accelerate more than just triangles... Hell, the math for curves is *easier* in some ways. Everything we see in these screens is still a flat surface with a picture slapped on it to give it "texture"... Sharp intersections, and the approximation of curves....
The particle effects, etc, are fantastic, but I wouldn't call them "graphical" improvements. And the lighting effects are nice, but every game seems to overuse them.
We need people to be pushing realistic graphics in the right direction, so I appreciate a game like this, but as things stand now I'd still rather play a game with stylized graphics than be constantly distracted by all the ways they got "realistic" wrong. I prefer PS2 graphics to these screens... I certainly won't be spending hundreds of dollars to get my hardware to run this.
A stand-alone Exchange server is over the top for 40 users. Use webmail or hosted Exchange.
That's hardly the most absurd thing about the situation. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, we're a Linux software company. 90% of the users run Linux as their primary OS. Exchange is deployed because people running businesses do what the trade rags and salespeople tell them, not because it's the right tool for the job.
It would be really unfortunate if VoIP was considered "too much", considering that VoIP is a low-bandwidth application that depends on latency more than throughput.
You can easily use more bandwidth casually surfing the web than you ever will talking on the phone using VoIP.
There is a three orders of magnitude difference between a high-quality VoIP call and a BitTorrent download. It should be easier than trivial for them to configure this so the former doesn't get throttled, but the latter does.
It was fairly common when I was in school for there to be a "drop the lowest score", or the lowest few scores policy for that reason. It also covered being sick and missing a quiz, or any of the "had a bad day" kind of excuses.
The real problem here is the inflexibility of the policy. School shouldn't be about passing or failing, it should be about learning. The goal of schools, and the school board shouldn't be to pass as many kids as possible, but to successfully teach as many kids as possible. If one kid does miserably at the beginning of the term, but rallies back and knows the stuff at the end, the teacher should be free to pass the kid. If the kid performs terribly most of the time, but cheats on a test without getting caught and clearly doesn't know the material, he/she should get failed.
Just like in real life, all parties involved should have flexibility, and treat each other like human beings.
You're proud of not being able to administer Exchange correctly?
Show me where I said I was the administrator? (Or where I said I was "proud" for that matter... The whole situation is embarrassing, quite frankly.)
I'm in the same position that the question submitter is: an end-user. Hence my response. I run linux for work, as do all the developers at the software company I work for. Yet the geniuses that run the business chose exchange, and demand upgrades when the trade rags tell them to like good little sheep.
I wasn't involved in the migration, but I know they virtualized at the same time. It's funny to me, since the old version performs just fine on the new hardware. As a software architect, and former Notes/Domino developer, I have a good deal of insight into how systems like this work, and I'm having a really hard time understanding how "unified messaging" and an "improved web portal" significantly increase the hardware requirements for a system with 40 users that should be sitting idle 99% of the time.
But then again, I don't rely on the hardware/software upgrade treadmill to justify my salary, so maybe that has something to do with it.
You answered most of your own question. It's still a little buggy and it has no camera.
It's also not subsidized by any carriers, and it's two generations behind in form-factor (screen size and device thickness).
The OpenMoko project was really exciting when it was announced, but the delays have made it wholly unappealing. They needed to ship stable product two years ago.
I recently and reluctantly switched from a Treo to an iPhone, as the other features have significantly and sufficiently surpassed the stagnant Palm platform and hardware. (I needed e-mail that didn't crash, and a modern browser, but not the $30/month Blackberry tax) I will say, though, that the Treo keyboard kicks the iPhone keyboard's ass. It's not even close. They don't even deserve to be compared. The iPhone has lower accuracy, less keys, more difficult to use punctuation, lower accuracy (can't mention that enough)... And somehow it's more fatiguing to tap virtual keys than to press real ones.
Yup. A keyboard seriously can't be done in software by now. All the best attempts merely promote the shortcuts and tolerance for poor accuracy that are the mainstay of modern SMS lingo.
The patents which make this functionality exclusive to Blackberry were filed in 1991.
I hope you don't have an irrational attachment to "Blackberry" devices themselves instead of the functionality of those devices, 'cause the floodgates are about to open. Every smartphone will have push e-mail soon.
Seriously. This phone is vendor locked. You can modify the OS code, sure... But you can't install the OS on it without it being signed by T-Mobile in some way so they can enforce their carrier lock. It's the same for apps. You can install anything you want but it has to be signed by Google, 'cause "malicious apps aren't allowed". Yeah. That's what Apple said too.
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.
That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.
In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
It's actually far worse than that.
You also have a ~9% chance that you missed one of those 10 terrorists, but a false sense of security that you got them all.
Exactly. They need to increase the accuracy by about 8 orders of magnitude before anybody can even consider using something like this.
Until then they can put it on the shelf with the 99.9% accurate facial recognition ATM machines that will give your money to 1/1000 people who walk by.
I just waited until the same higher-ups that forced the upgrade got so fed up with the poor performance of Exchange 2007 that they forced us to switch back.
Seriously. Talk to your average person. They want something tangible for their money. Downloads that cost more than $1 or so will probably never catch on very widely.
Look at the other services out there. Movies on the Xbox live service expire and disable themselves after two weeks (yes, I know, it's different for TV shows). With Netflix, you can't watch anymore after you stop paying the monthly fee.
This really isn't news. Media distribution companies are out of touch with how consumers want to purchase and use their products. We've known this forever. This article is just flamebait to get the PS3 and 360 fanboys at each other.
As long as the risk of failure can be made fairly low, for the opportunity to use this thing I (and many other people) would be comfortable with a contingency plan of "If it gets stuck you're going to have to jump".
Not everything needs to be 100% safe. Some things less so than others.
I haven't done any serious testing, so I don't know where the line is. My spam folder was 3GB, and Mail.app choked on it. I also had a problem with my linux-kernel archive folder, and a couple other mailing list boxes I have. After a few I gave up.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that the math is easier, but the rendering is significantly slower with the easier math. Triangles are easier to optimize because they can be represented almost purely by integers, as opposed to curves (well, curves can, but the math then becomes significantly harder) plus there's been a lot more time to optimize triangles. In the future we will have true curves, since it looks like ray tracing will be the next big jump (within 10 years from what I've heard) which does realistic rendering instead of hack rendering (i.e. Raster Graphics)
Hmm.. Where to start...
Yes. Triangles can be represented by integers. Except they're not. Modern GPUs use double precision floating point.
Sure there has been a lot of time spent optimizing triangles, but the industry could have spent that time optimizing curved surfaces.
Unfortunately, since 3dfx was purchased by nVidia, the industry has been stuck in neutral in terms of innovation. It's not that they don't have good ideas now and then... It's that the bean counters are afraid to pursue any technologies that might make their existing technologies obsolete. You wouldn't want to destroy the proven value of your current product line by obsoleting it with new technology that hasn't been proven in the marketplace, after all. Which is why you'll see nVidia fighting the ray tracing push every chance they get.
I don't see how you can get that from these videos. Some of the more fiddly bits seemed like they were related to the level design, and these were custom levels, not official levels. I have a hard time believing you could draw any (valid) conclusions whatsoever from a gameplay video that doesn't include a video of the player.
Honestly, I don't get what's so impressive about these graphics. Yeah, they're "improved", but they're still rough around the edges. Look at that first screenshot, for example. The spare tire rim on the back of the jeep has 10 sides. 10. You'd think they'd spend some time working on making round things *round*. There's got to be somebody at nVidia or ATI that can figure out how to accelerate more than just triangles... Hell, the math for curves is *easier* in some ways. Everything we see in these screens is still a flat surface with a picture slapped on it to give it "texture"... Sharp intersections, and the approximation of curves....
The particle effects, etc, are fantastic, but I wouldn't call them "graphical" improvements. And the lighting effects are nice, but every game seems to overuse them.
We need people to be pushing realistic graphics in the right direction, so I appreciate a game like this, but as things stand now I'd still rather play a game with stylized graphics than be constantly distracted by all the ways they got "realistic" wrong. I prefer PS2 graphics to these screens... I certainly won't be spending hundreds of dollars to get my hardware to run this.
Why are PACs permitted within companies? Sholudn't the workplace be a zero-politics environment?
Of course not. I'll bet even you don't believe that if you took a second to think about it.
Or do you think we should throw unions out too? After all, they're essentially PACs.
He's neither been nominated, nor would he have been elected, so he's in the clear.
A stand-alone Exchange server is over the top for 40 users. Use webmail or hosted Exchange.
That's hardly the most absurd thing about the situation. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, we're a Linux software company. 90% of the users run Linux as their primary OS. Exchange is deployed because people running businesses do what the trade rags and salespeople tell them, not because it's the right tool for the job.
It would be really unfortunate if VoIP was considered "too much", considering that VoIP is a low-bandwidth application that depends on latency more than throughput.
You can easily use more bandwidth casually surfing the web than you ever will talking on the phone using VoIP.
There is a three orders of magnitude difference between a high-quality VoIP call and a BitTorrent download. It should be easier than trivial for them to configure this so the former doesn't get throttled, but the latter does.
"Don't trust anyone under 25" - Everybody over 25 ;)
It was fairly common when I was in school for there to be a "drop the lowest score", or the lowest few scores policy for that reason. It also covered being sick and missing a quiz, or any of the "had a bad day" kind of excuses.
The real problem here is the inflexibility of the policy. School shouldn't be about passing or failing, it should be about learning. The goal of schools, and the school board shouldn't be to pass as many kids as possible, but to successfully teach as many kids as possible. If one kid does miserably at the beginning of the term, but rallies back and knows the stuff at the end, the teacher should be free to pass the kid. If the kid performs terribly most of the time, but cheats on a test without getting caught and clearly doesn't know the material, he/she should get failed.
Just like in real life, all parties involved should have flexibility, and treat each other like human beings.
You're proud of not being able to administer Exchange correctly?
Show me where I said I was the administrator? (Or where I said I was "proud" for that matter... The whole situation is embarrassing, quite frankly.)
I'm in the same position that the question submitter is: an end-user. Hence my response. I run linux for work, as do all the developers at the software company I work for. Yet the geniuses that run the business chose exchange, and demand upgrades when the trade rags tell them to like good little sheep.
I wasn't involved in the migration, but I know they virtualized at the same time. It's funny to me, since the old version performs just fine on the new hardware. As a software architect, and former Notes/Domino developer, I have a good deal of insight into how systems like this work, and I'm having a really hard time understanding how "unified messaging" and an "improved web portal" significantly increase the hardware requirements for a system with 40 users that should be sitting idle 99% of the time.
But then again, I don't rely on the hardware/software upgrade treadmill to justify my salary, so maybe that has something to do with it.
"I" didn't do anything, like I said. I'm just an end-user.
You're so smart though.
You answered most of your own question. It's still a little buggy and it has no camera.
It's also not subsidized by any carriers, and it's two generations behind in form-factor (screen size and device thickness).
The OpenMoko project was really exciting when it was announced, but the delays have made it wholly unappealing. They needed to ship stable product two years ago.
I recently and reluctantly switched from a Treo to an iPhone, as the other features have significantly and sufficiently surpassed the stagnant Palm platform and hardware. (I needed e-mail that didn't crash, and a modern browser, but not the $30/month Blackberry tax) I will say, though, that the Treo keyboard kicks the iPhone keyboard's ass. It's not even close. They don't even deserve to be compared. The iPhone has lower accuracy, less keys, more difficult to use punctuation, lower accuracy (can't mention that enough)... And somehow it's more fatiguing to tap virtual keys than to press real ones.
Yup. A keyboard seriously can't be done in software by now. All the best attempts merely promote the shortcuts and tolerance for poor accuracy that are the mainstay of modern SMS lingo.
The patents which make this functionality exclusive to Blackberry were filed in 1991.
I hope you don't have an irrational attachment to "Blackberry" devices themselves instead of the functionality of those devices, 'cause the floodgates are about to open. Every smartphone will have push e-mail soon.
Seriously. This phone is vendor locked. You can modify the OS code, sure... But you can't install the OS on it without it being signed by T-Mobile in some way so they can enforce their carrier lock. It's the same for apps. You can install anything you want but it has to be signed by Google, 'cause "malicious apps aren't allowed". Yeah. That's what Apple said too.
This is the iPhone. Made by Google.
Remember, the iPhone OS is open source too.
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.
That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.
In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
It's actually far worse than that.
You also have a ~9% chance that you missed one of those 10 terrorists, but a false sense of security that you got them all.
Exactly. They need to increase the accuracy by about 8 orders of magnitude before anybody can even consider using something like this.
Until then they can put it on the shelf with the 99.9% accurate facial recognition ATM machines that will give your money to 1/1000 people who walk by.
I just waited until the same higher-ups that forced the upgrade got so fed up with the poor performance of Exchange 2007 that they forced us to switch back.
Took about 3 weeks.
I'll give you a hint. They *all* read Slashdot.
Seriously. Talk to your average person. They want something tangible for their money. Downloads that cost more than $1 or so will probably never catch on very widely.
Steam and the 360 let you delete stuff you've bought and download it later.
So does the PS3.... For everything but Movies. Which according the the Xbox live website is the same way it works on the 360. For movies.
Although at least Microsoft is kind enough to market them strictly as rentals.
Look at the other services out there. Movies on the Xbox live service expire and disable themselves after two weeks (yes, I know, it's different for TV shows). With Netflix, you can't watch anymore after you stop paying the monthly fee.
This really isn't news. Media distribution companies are out of touch with how consumers want to purchase and use their products. We've known this forever. This article is just flamebait to get the PS3 and 360 fanboys at each other.
Woooshhh.
Bonus points, though, for fooling the moderators into modding you as "insightful" just because you used technical sounding terminology.
Who cares?
As long as the risk of failure can be made fairly low, for the opportunity to use this thing I (and many other people) would be comfortable with a contingency plan of "If it gets stuck you're going to have to jump".
Not everything needs to be 100% safe. Some things less so than others.
I haven't done any serious testing, so I don't know where the line is. My spam folder was 3GB, and Mail.app choked on it. I also had a problem with my linux-kernel archive folder, and a couple other mailing list boxes I have. After a few I gave up.