The Toshiba Portege R500 is pretty close to half the weight of the Macbook Air, in its minimal configuration, and even fully loaded it's lighter AND includes an optical drive, a faster and larger hard drive, Ethernet, a PC-card slot, removable battery, basically all the things that you can't get or cost more in the Macbook Air.
The other computers you named are also lighter and more capable.
The apple, while lacking in features in contrast to other notebooks in this class, is NOT over priced considering.
If it's lacking features and it's similarly priced, how can you describe it as anything BUT 'expensive'?
I didn't say it was over-priced, mind you. The Mac Tax you pay to get an OS that doesn't suck with applications that don't suck is worth it. But that's what you're paying for, when you get a Mac instead of a Toshiba.
But compared to the plain old Macbook it *is* super-expensive, and once you add the optical drive it's not really that much lighter. Yes, I know, they have all kinds of tricks to make that optional, but I've been a network admin for 20 years and I've had a Toshiba Libretto and I've had plenty of my users opt for laptops with optional optical drives, and every time one of them comes in for support they've got the drive dock attached or the drive stuffed into their briefcase or bag. They're road warriors, executives, the guys who this is supposedly targeted at, and they know that they're going to have people handing them stuff on disc often enough to make it a bad bet to leave the drive behind.
Resolution isn't a big deal: I already run my computer at 1280x1024, which is slightly better than HD... and over the past 10 years good affordable monitors have really only gone from 1024x768 to 1280x1024... higher resolution monitors than that cost more than most computers.
No, the big problem with raytracing is your last point: game companies are very conservative.
Even if nVidia could stick several parallel RPUs in the next generation of graphics chips pretty much for free (and they could, when an RPU would come out to about 1% of their silicon budget) it'd be five years before any game other than open source-ones like Doom and Second Life used them.:(
Of course Intel could stick 32 RPUs in the next Core Hyper Quadro II without noticing the transistor budget, but they won't. Maybe AMD/ATI will put it in the next Biathlon XXX...
My MacBook certainly didn't come with a video adapter.
My Macbook Pro came with a VGA adapter. I guess that's part of the price difference between the Macbook and the Pro... but it seems the Macbook Air is priced like the Pro and delivers like the Macbook.
Lets look at what else it doesn't come with: anything and everything that will keep you tied to your desk.
The Macbook Air would tie me to my desk more surely than my Macbook Pro does. All that wireless stuff you're talking about? That's software. Having to dangle a dongle drive off my leg when I'm checking out a CD version of a presentation while I'm sitting on a bench in a conference center, wishing I was back at my desk to I could USE that wireless connection, that's hardware.
I'm a programmer. I just want a machine I can write software on. Once, I loved gadgets, too, but now I really just want a gadget that (a) works, and (b) is beautiful and easy-to-use.
I'm a programmer. I just want a machine I can write software on. Once I loved hacking on the computer itself, but now I just want a gadget that (a) works and (b) is easy to use. Beautiful I'll take... but I'm a programmer, I'm the only guy who'll see it, and the rest of my office is decorated in Early 21st Gentury Geek so I don't care.
Software-wise, OSX gives me (a) works, (b) is beautiful and easy to use.
Hardware-wise, I'm still waiting for Apple to deliver on (b). Beautiful they've got down, but they sure make it hard to use. My beautiful Macbook Pro is hidden behind my monitor, because the keyboard is the worst laptop keyboard I've ever owned, and pretty close to the worst I've ever used. The Macbook and Macbook air have an even more screwed up chiclet keyboard. I can go almost 15 minutes on my Macbook Pro without having to stop because of my RSI, but I couldn't even manage five minutes on the Macbook keyboard I tried.
Your hands and wrists are still in pretty good shape, good for you, but for two grand I think I ought to get a keyboard at least as good as the one on an $800 Thinkpad, not something I'd refuse to accept from Dell.
One button mouse/trackpad, missing keys (look, Steve, the Macbook Pro's got all this space around the kayboard, so why do I have to hit Fn to get Page Up? I DON'T CARE if it makes them cheaper for you if you don't have to design two keyboards... design is what we're paying you for, remember?), lousy cooling (you saved 1/10th of an inch by leaving out enough space for proper airflow, so I have to remove the battery pack to keep it from overheating when I use iMovie HD), and all the rest of the design problems.
The bottom line is that I didn't buy my Macbook Pro because it looked good, I bought it because it was part of the cost of getting software that doesn't suck. The bottom line is that Apple still puts far more effort into the "looks good" part of "works and looks good", and far too little into the "works" part. The bottom line is that unless the "looks good" part is the main reason for getting the computer, the Macbook Air is nothing more than a crippled Macbook... and you're better off spending the extra $700 on symphony tickets or a good suit if you just want style.
I'm not particularly an Apple fan either, and I can't stand the iPod and I can't stand the new chiclet keyboards (and GOD I hope they don't hang on as long as those horrible puck mice on the iMacs), but when Apple does something write I'll happily defend them.
But the guy you were replying to was saying the same thing you are saying now. Really. Look:
I've got some good news for you then: You don't have to settle for a 13 inch screen and 1.8GHz processor at $2,099! For just $1,999.00 you can get a macbook pro with a 2.2GHz processor, the same RAM, a bigger hard disk, a bigger screen (still LED-backlit), free built-in gigabit ethernet, firewire, a decent graphics chip, you can avoid the glossy screen, RAM and HDD are user-upgradable - and you get all this for $100 less!
Or is being thin a really big selling point for you?
He's making the same damn point: the Macbook Air isn't for the people who think being thin is irrelevant and getting decent performance is important. The only difference is that he's implying something about people who are willing to spend an extra $700 to get a slower but thinner Macbook, and you're implying something else. He's not missing the point any more than you are. If you're not a road warrior or a student who wants something to carry around for writing papers this is not the laptop for you and was never meant to be. If you are a road warrior or a student who wants something to carry around for writing papers, this is not the laptop for you either.
* For the road warrior, the lack of a removable battery pack is killer. When I was a road warrior my laptop was a Toshiba Libretto, which was genuinely smaller than any of the competition, but included a removable battery pack... which was super-important, even though the Libretto could go a solid 5 hours on a charge.
* For the student, well, how many students have an extra $700 (whoops, sorry, $830 including the optical drive and ethernet adapter) to blow on a laptop?
The 2 pounds difference in weight is reduced to one pound right off the bat by that external optical drive.
I'm not saying there's not a market for them, obviously there is, but it's not the student or the road warrior, it's the people for whom style matters above all. I'm normally ready to jump on people who say that's the only reason to get a Mac, but in this case we're comparing Macs against Macs: the advantage of being able to run applications that don't suck on an OS that doesn't suck isn't on the Macbook Air's side.
Owning a Macbook Air looks like being nibbled to death by ducks. Not only is it super-expensive, but Apple's actually charging for things that have come included in all their other laptops, like the video adapter:
In addition to the $99 MacBook Air external SuperDrive, Apple is also offering a $29 USB Ethernet Adapter, $49 MagSafe Airline Adapter, and $19 Apple Micro-DVI to Video Adapter.
Anyone else remember that one of the "oh wow" moments in Apple history was when it was discovered that the Macintosh was the most frequently stolen computer in the world. More recently the iPod became the target of choice for footpads and muggers. With such an easily disguised laptop, is Apple trying for the hat trick?
Or in other words, using a car metaphor, of course: "Nobody will ever buy a Porsche, because it's got only two seats and a minimal trunk space. For 50'000 EUR *less*, you'd get four seats, a pickup-sized cargo bay AND as much horsepowers, so the Porsche is clearly bad value.":)
If a Porsche had the same handling characteristics as a pickup, it *would* be bad value.
Unlike automobiles, making a laptop smaller doesn't increase its performance... it usually decreases it. The Macbook Air has a slower processor and hard disk (less horsepower) than the Macbook Pro, not the same.
If you're going to use an automotive analogy, try and find one that makes the slightest bit of sense.
Rasterization is an embarassingly parallel problem.
If you just count the rasterizing itself, yes, rasterization and raytracing are similar. The difference is that this step is most of the work in a raytracer, but isn't that really a tiny part of the job in a modern GPU? Most of the GPU is devoted to the preprocessing hacks, shaders, texture copying, and all the other front end work to make it look good with as low a triangle count as it can get away with.
Yes, they put a dock *inside* the computer, at the bottom of the desktop, but they forgot to put one on the *outside* where you need it most.
The third party port replicators for Mac laptops cost a bundle, compared to the original manufacturer ones for the Thinkpad (for example), and since they're hacks they can't even begin to do as good a job.
First, resolution isn't growing very fast. Top-of-the-line displays today are 2560x1600. Top of the line displays in 1998 were 1280x1024. That's four times as many pixels in 10 years. Good quality consumer displays were 1024x768 then, and they're 1280x1024 now. That's not even twice the number of pixels. Resolution is not a limiting factor in performance.
But raytracing is also O(processors). It scales up linearly with the number of raytracing pipelines available. Trading off slower and simpler raytracing engines for more parallelism works. There just doens't seem to be that kind of parallelism in rasterization.
Also, rasterizers aren't just rendering triangles. They're using shaders and textures to avoid rendering triangles, which is why you only have half a million triangles per frame... you're using pre-baked textures and procedural algorithms to avoid rendering in real-time. Which means you need the memory bandwidth to pump those textures through the pipeline, and the megahertz to run the shaders.
The raytracer can simply throw more triangles at the scene. The result, as Philipp Slusallek points out, is that you need less CPU and less memory bandwidth for the raytracer.
The need for "accuracy" in gaming is not high enough to justify the downside of ray tracing.
But that's not the reason you need ray tracing. You need ray tracing because it scales up so much better than ad-hoc approximations as the scene complexity increases. It gives you "good enough" with less power.
Look, Slusallek's RPU was getting far better raytracing results than a 2005 P4 CPU, on hardware that's about comparable to a mid-90s Pentium MMX. It's three years later. Intel's showing "good enough" performance now with maybe 8 times the CPU of that 3 year old Pentium-4 Slusallek was talking about.
Building an RPU array with 2008 technology instead of 1996 technology? I would be amazed if you couldn't get at least as good looking a game as you're getting from a 9-series GPU for a lot less hardware... which means a lot less money, and far lower power requirements...
Any academic, or indeed student, with a few $1000 can buy a Xilinx system and design a 66MHz chip. What they tend to do next is assume that all they have to do is buy a more expensive Xilinx system and the chip will suddenly run at 2GHz.
1. When I referred to those company's resources, that includes their engineers.
2. Even assuming there's something inherently preventing them from running a raytracer faster than 66 MHz, it's an embarrassingly parallel problem. Even if all you can do is stick (say) thirty-two 66 MHz RPUs on a chip with a hundred times the gates, it's still going to get almost a 30:1 speedup rendering the whole scene. And that 2005 chip was getting performance comparable to its contemporary CPUs already.
3. If ATI/AMD or Intel started out right now building an RPU, and it took them 2 years to first silicon, if they ended up with a design that was no more than 30 times faster than the 2005 RPU (and I doubt they would be that bad), it might "only" be doing raytracing competitive than the 8-core CPUs they'll be selling... but it'd use a fraction of the power. There's no way you're going to have an 8-core CPU in a laptop in 2 years, but you could have a 32-way RPU in it.
So I have this huge expensive chunk of silicon, and all it's good for, is playing games? That's swell when I happen to be playing a game. What about the other 95% of the day?
What's that got to do with raytracing?
If your video card cost more than about $20, why isn't that dilemma already burning in your heart?
Raytracing scales up far better than rasterization. Adding triangles to a raytraced scene has far less effect on it than to a rasterized scene, because you don't have to render anything that's not actually part of the scene... and you don't have to run what is effectively a separate rendering pass to eliminate parts of the scene to limit the hidden variables, and the processing for each collision is much simpler so you can fit thousands of dedicated raytracing processors in a hardware raytracer where the same transistor budget might support 8 or 12 rendering pipelines.
Look at what they were doing in 2005, with 1% of the gates, 1% of the memory bandwidth, and 15% of the core clock speed of today's GPUs: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/
Professer Philipp Slusallek of the University of Saarbruecken demonstrated a dedicated raytracer in 2005, using a 66 MHz Xilinx FPGA with about 6 million gates. The latest ATI and nVidia GPUs have 100 times as many transistors and run at 6-8 times the clock with hundreds of times the memory bandwidth. Raytracing is completely parallelizable, and scales up almost linearly with processors, so it's not at all unlikely that if those kinds of resources were applied to raytracing instead of vectorizing you'd be able to add a raytracer capable of rendering 60+ FPS at the level of detail of the very latest games into the transistor budget of the chips they're designing now without even noticing.
So, what type of computer shall we have that solves the new challenges?
A custom chip that has hundreds or thousands of dedicated raytracing processors that run in parallel. Raytracing is embarrassingly parallelizable, so it's far better suited to specialized processors than vectorizing.
Saarland University, the people who designed OpenRT in the first place, were getting 60+ frames a second on a hardware raytracing engine in 2005... and their raytracing engine only had 6 million gates and ran at 75 MHz. Today's GPUs have 100 times as many gates and run at 8 times the clock. A dedicated raytracer built with nVidia's or ATI's or Intel's resources instead of Saarland University's could give you that thousand core processor right now.
You can design the drive with an extra pillar in the centre of the drive near the hub, but it has the possibility to scratch the disk, so they are sometimes left out.
The extra lever can be built in to the hub, so it never touches anything but the center ring of the disc, or the retaining mechanism on the hub can retract completely.
Personally I have never liked slot drives. You can't use small or irregular discs in them either, or eject them manually without power.
My experience with DVD recorders is that compared to tape they're fussy, annoying, and inconvenient... simply as a result of the technology. With a good VCR you can stop and start recording to skip commercials or to selectively record stuff and barely get a glitch on the tape, and slam a tape in on short notice, and they just work. When I was regularly taping I thought VCRs were finicky, but compared to DVD recorders they're perfection.
Put a hard disk in them with enough capacity to hold a couple of DVDs worth of data (which really isn't all that much) and write the DVD itself as a separate process out of band, and you'll get somewhere. As it is, no sale.
Not on topic for the article, but re: the story... don't forget that the original mechanism Wells' Invisible Man used was to render the pigments in the body colorless, and that was obviously bad science even back then. A century or so of hindsight is going to hurt most fiction.
By the same logic, the guys who found those nasty papers Diebold didn't want published, or the Halloween memoirs, or the Guantanamo files, or any other material accidentally left in a public place that embarrassed a company or government, are guilty of the same crime.
What's next, being arrested for looking up corporate records in a public library?
There should be no legal difference between making a DNS request for a zone transfer and photocopying a prospectus.
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The Toshiba Portege R500 is pretty close to half the weight of the Macbook Air, in its minimal configuration, and even fully loaded it's lighter AND includes an optical drive, a faster and larger hard drive, Ethernet, a PC-card slot, removable battery, basically all the things that you can't get or cost more in the Macbook Air.
The other computers you named are also lighter and more capable.
The apple, while lacking in features in contrast to other notebooks in this class, is NOT over priced considering.
If it's lacking features and it's similarly priced, how can you describe it as anything BUT 'expensive'?
I didn't say it was over-priced, mind you. The Mac Tax you pay to get an OS that doesn't suck with applications that don't suck is worth it. But that's what you're paying for, when you get a Mac instead of a Toshiba.
But compared to the plain old Macbook it *is* super-expensive, and once you add the optical drive it's not really that much lighter. Yes, I know, they have all kinds of tricks to make that optional, but I've been a network admin for 20 years and I've had a Toshiba Libretto and I've had plenty of my users opt for laptops with optional optical drives, and every time one of them comes in for support they've got the drive dock attached or the drive stuffed into their briefcase or bag. They're road warriors, executives, the guys who this is supposedly targeted at, and they know that they're going to have people handing them stuff on disc often enough to make it a bad bet to leave the drive behind.
Resolution isn't a big deal: I already run my computer at 1280x1024, which is slightly better than HD... and over the past 10 years good affordable monitors have really only gone from 1024x768 to 1280x1024... higher resolution monitors than that cost more than most computers.
:(
No, the big problem with raytracing is your last point: game companies are very conservative.
Even if nVidia could stick several parallel RPUs in the next generation of graphics chips pretty much for free (and they could, when an RPU would come out to about 1% of their silicon budget) it'd be five years before any game other than open source-ones like Doom and Second Life used them.
Of course Intel could stick 32 RPUs in the next Core Hyper Quadro II without noticing the transistor budget, but they won't. Maybe AMD/ATI will put it in the next Biathlon XXX...
Maybe you should have tried reading the "What's in the box" section:
Guess so. I was just following the links from the article, and that wasn't in them. Sorry.
My MacBook certainly didn't come with a video adapter.
My Macbook Pro came with a VGA adapter. I guess that's part of the price difference between the Macbook and the Pro... but it seems the Macbook Air is priced like the Pro and delivers like the Macbook.
Lets look at what else it doesn't come with: anything and everything that will keep you tied to your desk.
The Macbook Air would tie me to my desk more surely than my Macbook Pro does. All that wireless stuff you're talking about? That's software. Having to dangle a dongle drive off my leg when I'm checking out a CD version of a presentation while I'm sitting on a bench in a conference center, wishing I was back at my desk to I could USE that wireless connection, that's hardware.
I'm a programmer. I just want a machine I can write software on. Once I loved hacking on the computer itself, but now I just want a gadget that (a) works and (b) is easy to use. Beautiful I'll take... but I'm a programmer, I'm the only guy who'll see it, and the rest of my office is decorated in Early 21st Gentury Geek so I don't care.
Software-wise, OSX gives me (a) works, (b) is beautiful and easy to use.
Hardware-wise, I'm still waiting for Apple to deliver on (b). Beautiful they've got down, but they sure make it hard to use. My beautiful Macbook Pro is hidden behind my monitor, because the keyboard is the worst laptop keyboard I've ever owned, and pretty close to the worst I've ever used. The Macbook and Macbook air have an even more screwed up chiclet keyboard. I can go almost 15 minutes on my Macbook Pro without having to stop because of my RSI, but I couldn't even manage five minutes on the Macbook keyboard I tried.
Your hands and wrists are still in pretty good shape, good for you, but for two grand I think I ought to get a keyboard at least as good as the one on an $800 Thinkpad, not something I'd refuse to accept from Dell.
One button mouse/trackpad, missing keys (look, Steve, the Macbook Pro's got all this space around the kayboard, so why do I have to hit Fn to get Page Up? I DON'T CARE if it makes them cheaper for you if you don't have to design two keyboards... design is what we're paying you for, remember?), lousy cooling (you saved 1/10th of an inch by leaving out enough space for proper airflow, so I have to remove the battery pack to keep it from overheating when I use iMovie HD), and all the rest of the design problems.
The bottom line is that I didn't buy my Macbook Pro because it looked good, I bought it because it was part of the cost of getting software that doesn't suck. The bottom line is that Apple still puts far more effort into the "looks good" part of "works and looks good", and far too little into the "works" part. The bottom line is that unless the "looks good" part is the main reason for getting the computer, the Macbook Air is nothing more than a crippled Macbook... and you're better off spending the extra $700 on symphony tickets or a good suit if you just want style.
But the guy you were replying to was saying the same thing you are saying now. Really. Look:
He's making the same damn point: the Macbook Air isn't for the people who think being thin is irrelevant and getting decent performance is important. The only difference is that he's implying something about people who are willing to spend an extra $700 to get a slower but thinner Macbook, and you're implying something else. He's not missing the point any more than you are.
If you're not a road warrior or a student who wants something to carry around for writing papers this is not the laptop for you and was never meant to be.
If you are a road warrior or a student who wants something to carry around for writing papers, this is not the laptop for you either.
* For the road warrior, the lack of a removable battery pack is killer. When I was a road warrior my laptop was a Toshiba Libretto, which was genuinely smaller than any of the competition, but included a removable battery pack... which was super-important, even though the Libretto could go a solid 5 hours on a charge.
* For the student, well, how many students have an extra $700 (whoops, sorry, $830 including the optical drive and ethernet adapter) to blow on a laptop?
The 2 pounds difference in weight is reduced to one pound right off the bat by that external optical drive.
I'm not saying there's not a market for them, obviously there is, but it's not the student or the road warrior, it's the people for whom style matters above all. I'm normally ready to jump on people who say that's the only reason to get a Mac, but in this case we're comparing Macs against Macs: the advantage of being able to run applications that don't suck on an OS that doesn't suck isn't on the Macbook Air's side.
Anyone else remember that one of the "oh wow" moments in Apple history was when it was discovered that the Macintosh was the most frequently stolen computer in the world. More recently the iPod became the target of choice for footpads and muggers. With such an easily disguised laptop, is Apple trying for the hat trick?
Or in other words, using a car metaphor, of course: "Nobody will ever buy a Porsche, because it's got only two seats and a minimal trunk space. For 50'000 EUR *less*, you'd get four seats, a pickup-sized cargo bay AND as much horsepowers, so the Porsche is clearly bad value." :)
If a Porsche had the same handling characteristics as a pickup, it *would* be bad value.
Unlike automobiles, making a laptop smaller doesn't increase its performance... it usually decreases it. The Macbook Air has a slower processor and hard disk (less horsepower) than the Macbook Pro, not the same.
If you're going to use an automotive analogy, try and find one that makes the slightest bit of sense.
Rasterization is an embarassingly parallel problem.
If you just count the rasterizing itself, yes, rasterization and raytracing are similar. The difference is that this step is most of the work in a raytracer, but isn't that really a tiny part of the job in a modern GPU? Most of the GPU is devoted to the preprocessing hacks, shaders, texture copying, and all the other front end work to make it look good with as low a triangle count as it can get away with.
Kirk makes that point... as a point in favor of rasterization(!)... in http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/raytracing-vs-rasterization.html .
Yes, they put a dock *inside* the computer, at the bottom of the desktop, but they forgot to put one on the *outside* where you need it most.
The third party port replicators for Mac laptops cost a bundle, compared to the original manufacturer ones for the Thinkpad (for example), and since they're hacks they can't even begin to do as good a job.
You're scaling along a different axis....
Raytracing is O(resolution), and O(ln(triangles))
First, resolution isn't growing very fast. Top-of-the-line displays today are 2560x1600. Top of the line displays in 1998 were 1280x1024. That's four times as many pixels in 10 years. Good quality consumer displays were 1024x768 then, and they're 1280x1024 now. That's not even twice the number of pixels. Resolution is not a limiting factor in performance.
But raytracing is also O(processors). It scales up linearly with the number of raytracing pipelines available. Trading off slower and simpler raytracing engines for more parallelism works. There just doens't seem to be that kind of parallelism in rasterization.
Also, rasterizers aren't just rendering triangles. They're using shaders and textures to avoid rendering triangles, which is why you only have half a million triangles per frame... you're using pre-baked textures and procedural algorithms to avoid rendering in real-time. Which means you need the memory bandwidth to pump those textures through the pipeline, and the megahertz to run the shaders.
The raytracer can simply throw more triangles at the scene. The result, as Philipp Slusallek points out, is that you need less CPU and less memory bandwidth for the raytracer.
The need for "accuracy" in gaming is not high enough to justify the downside of ray tracing.
But that's not the reason you need ray tracing. You need ray tracing because it scales up so much better than ad-hoc approximations as the scene complexity increases. It gives you "good enough" with less power.
Look, Slusallek's RPU was getting far better raytracing results than a 2005 P4 CPU, on hardware that's about comparable to a mid-90s Pentium MMX. It's three years later. Intel's showing "good enough" performance now with maybe 8 times the CPU of that 3 year old Pentium-4 Slusallek was talking about.
Building an RPU array with 2008 technology instead of 1996 technology? I would be amazed if you couldn't get at least as good looking a game as you're getting from a 9-series GPU for a lot less hardware... which means a lot less money, and far lower power requirements...
Any academic, or indeed student, with a few $1000 can buy a Xilinx system and design a 66MHz chip. What they tend to do next is assume that all they have to do is buy a more expensive Xilinx system and the chip will suddenly run at 2GHz.
1. When I referred to those company's resources, that includes their engineers.
2. Even assuming there's something inherently preventing them from running a raytracer faster than 66 MHz, it's an embarrassingly parallel problem. Even if all you can do is stick (say) thirty-two 66 MHz RPUs on a chip with a hundred times the gates, it's still going to get almost a 30:1 speedup rendering the whole scene. And that 2005 chip was getting performance comparable to its contemporary CPUs already.
3. If ATI/AMD or Intel started out right now building an RPU, and it took them 2 years to first silicon, if they ended up with a design that was no more than 30 times faster than the 2005 RPU (and I doubt they would be that bad), it might "only" be doing raytracing competitive than the 8-core CPUs they'll be selling... but it'd use a fraction of the power. There's no way you're going to have an 8-core CPU in a laptop in 2 years, but you could have a 32-way RPU in it.
So I have this huge expensive chunk of silicon, and all it's good for, is playing games? That's swell when I happen to be playing a game. What about the other 95% of the day?
What's that got to do with raytracing?
If your video card cost more than about $20, why isn't that dilemma already burning in your heart?
Cool, but does it run Linux?
Does any video card run Linux?
Raytracing scales up far better than rasterization. Adding triangles to a raytraced scene has far less effect on it than to a rasterized scene, because you don't have to render anything that's not actually part of the scene... and you don't have to run what is effectively a separate rendering pass to eliminate parts of the scene to limit the hidden variables, and the processing for each collision is much simpler so you can fit thousands of dedicated raytracing processors in a hardware raytracer where the same transistor budget might support 8 or 12 rendering pipelines.
Look at what they were doing in 2005, with 1% of the gates, 1% of the memory bandwidth, and 15% of the core clock speed of today's GPUs: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/
Professer Philipp Slusallek of the University of Saarbruecken demonstrated a dedicated raytracer in 2005, using a 66 MHz Xilinx FPGA with about 6 million gates. The latest ATI and nVidia GPUs have 100 times as many transistors and run at 6-8 times the clock with hundreds of times the memory bandwidth. Raytracing is completely parallelizable, and scales up almost linearly with processors, so it's not at all unlikely that if those kinds of resources were applied to raytracing instead of vectorizing you'd be able to add a raytracer capable of rendering 60+ FPS at the level of detail of the very latest games into the transistor budget of the chips they're designing now without even noticing.
Here's a debate between Professer Slusallek and chief scientist David Kirk of nVidia: http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/raytracing-vs-rasterization.html .
Here's the SIGGRAPH 2005 paper, on a prototype running at 66 MHz: http://www.cs.utah.edu/classes/cs7940-010-rajeev/sum06/papers/siggraph05.pdf
Here's their hardware page: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/
So, what type of computer shall we have that solves the new challenges?
A custom chip that has hundreds or thousands of dedicated raytracing processors that run in parallel. Raytracing is embarrassingly parallelizable, so it's far better suited to specialized processors than vectorizing.
Saarland University, the people who designed OpenRT in the first place, were getting 60+ frames a second on a hardware raytracing engine in 2005... and their raytracing engine only had 6 million gates and ran at 75 MHz. Today's GPUs have 100 times as many gates and run at 8 times the clock. A dedicated raytracer built with nVidia's or ATI's or Intel's resources instead of Saarland University's could give you that thousand core processor right now.
You can design the drive with an extra pillar in the centre of the drive near the hub, but it has the possibility to scratch the disk, so they are sometimes left out.
The extra lever can be built in to the hub, so it never touches anything but the center ring of the disc, or the retaining mechanism on the hub can retract completely.
Personally I have never liked slot drives. You can't use small or irregular discs in them either, or eject them manually without power.
My experience with DVD recorders is that compared to tape they're fussy, annoying, and inconvenient... simply as a result of the technology. With a good VCR you can stop and start recording to skip commercials or to selectively record stuff and barely get a glitch on the tape, and slam a tape in on short notice, and they just work. When I was regularly taping I thought VCRs were finicky, but compared to DVD recorders they're perfection.
Put a hard disk in them with enough capacity to hold a couple of DVDs worth of data (which really isn't all that much) and write the DVD itself as a separate process out of band, and you'll get somewhere. As it is, no sale.
So what you're saying is that there's a *stronger* case protecting these documents that HAVE been treated as public record than DNS records.
Than you for making my argument even stronger than I intended.
(ie: I think you'll find we're in agreement)
I hope that this doesn't lead to Apple getting on the DRM-protection treadmill with the Apple TV the way they have with the iPhone.
I thought Steve Jobs was smarter than that.
Not on topic for the article, but re: the story... don't forget that the original mechanism Wells' Invisible Man used was to render the pigments in the body colorless, and that was obviously bad science even back then. A century or so of hindsight is going to hurt most fiction.
By the same logic, the guys who found those nasty papers Diebold didn't want published, or the Halloween memoirs, or the Guantanamo files, or any other material accidentally left in a public place that embarrassed a company or government, are guilty of the same crime.
What's next, being arrested for looking up corporate records in a public library?
There should be no legal difference between making a DNS request for a zone transfer and photocopying a prospectus.