I think ease is good. If you write software there are several aims - ease of use, speed,
functionality, flexibility etc. You will always write bad code if you just look at one
of those, I really dont think many developers are doing this. Ease of use for me mainly means
how fast I can pick something up. For example, as a professional sw developer for >=10 years,
havving written a modeller in C++, I joined the effort to write an open source modeller in C++.
Still, I had to learn SSH, CVS, SourceForge, Linux (the modeller works under Windo$ and Linux,
but I want to test it under both), automake, (auto)conf, python, plib etc. If each of these had
taken a few month to learn, I would still not contribute. So, event to a proffesional ease of use is important (apart from maybe a few tools he uses every day and that cant be made easy).
Computers are there to solve problems.
My problem is not that I want to learn (say) an operating system, but I want to write a modeller.
Every tool I use for that should be as easy as possible. I often laugh at the people who
on purpose use a hard-to.use tool, for example one they know is inappropriate for the job.
Oh, I wrote that code to do xyz in abc - everyone knows writing such code
with that language is hard, so I am king. What a waste of time:-(. There are so many
unsolved problems. Why didnt they use an appropriate tool and used the time saved to
write a needed tool? For example a translator that doesnt produce gibberish or
a Go-playing program that beats a advanced human player? They would have got >1
million dollars for that. My Answer: They are not the great he-man-programmers they think they are.
Anyway, enough of that rant, lets look at the article in more detail. I think it contradicts itself.
The only main point I can really agree to is that there is still too much inconsistency.
If I want, I should have the same or similar save-file-dialogs whether I am in the web
or on the desktop, whether I am in Windo$ or Linux etc. One metaphor (he mentions
the desktop-metaphor) should be used throughout. For me, a consistent UI is easier.
So, the problem is too little easiness, not too much!
Also this shows, if stuff would get easier (in this case, more consistent) it would get more difficult
to tie people to a certain setup - he writes the opposite.
Another contradiction in the article is that OToneH he says
"An uncritical drive toward ease is arguably the most influential force in desktop computing today".
OTotherH he says that we dont have consistent UIs because thats too difficult to achieve -
well if this is my only aim (as he suggests), then the difficulty would not stop me at least trying.
He, however says, they are not even trying because it is too difficult.
And IMHO another contradiction: He says easiness appeals to females, for males
it is not important at all or only as a phase into more difficult things. Well,
I think computers are still mainly sold to males, at least they were a few years ago
and even then easiness of use was a major selling point. I think the author tries - unsuccessfully -
to merge some of his general political attitudes (he also speaks about Marx) with his hate for easiness.
His main argument is that his students know how to use some very easy programms, but
don't have general knowledge and therefore are unable to, for example, transfer files between home and uni.
Does he think this would be different when developers put less importance on ease?
There are several reasons why there is less "general computer knowledge" in an average
computer user. Earlier on, there were fewer users who spend much time learning stuff etc.
Either, we reduce the amount of computer users, or force them all to spend more time learning or
we realize that not everyone can have a deep understanding of, for example the operating system. We have experts for that.
When I started with the C64, quite a lot of owners had "C64 intern", the complete listing of the OS.
I wonder how large such a listing would be nowadays and how long it would take one person to just get an overview?
There were no worries about networks, security, GUIs etc. Of course people knew a higher percentage of
the background, since it was so much smaller.
Another thing is ease of use of one program versus ease of use of the, say five programs a user uses regularly.
For one program it might pay to hide the file-system from the user and have a simple UI instead. However, I
only have to learn the idea of the file system once, so if (almost) all the programs use this, then overall
it is easier to use to me. So, this example of his is in my mind not a question of ease versus general knowledge but of
ease working with one programm versus ease working with the computer.
As I said in the beginning - ease is ONE of the goals one should have. To pick up his example, when making a
power point presentation I can use templates, saving time, but maybe affecting the content if the templates fit badly. I think
this is as it should be: The person doing the presentation can decide himself. He has the priorities, whether he
needs to get it done quickly or perfectly. Also, only he knows how good the templates fit his problem.
cavitation is the term for the air bubbles created when the prop(s) of a submarine spin too rapidly
It doesnt need to be a submarine. There was a funny episode during the period of great competition between shipbuilders for the blue ribbon. They had build a new ocean liner which had enormous engines and was build to do the fastest ocean crossing ever. When they left the harbour on reduced power for the first test run it
went all right. But when they applied full power in open water, the ship actually decelerated.
The small and improperly designed propeller and the huge power of the engines meant that the propeller "beat away" the liquid, the water boiled and the propeller was in steam instead of liquid water.
a cavitation torpedo is probably (I can't say for sure) a torpedo designed to home in on the sounds of cavitation of another craft
No, it travels in a cavity. Others have posted the link already.
No, OpenGL/GLX doesn't give specifications of the card's capabilities (At least last time I looked). Like for example, I might want to enable bump mapping for better quility, but if the card doesn't support that in hardware, I'd prefer to disable it for the speed.
Even if you have an API like DirectX which tells you the capabilities of the hardware, to do it right you have to ignore this and just time a frame with bump mapping and then decide whether to use it. For example bump mapping might only run in hardware, if you have less than 3 lights. How do you want to describe this with capability
bits (flags). Also, even if it runs in hardware, but is much slower than an alternative (say, using many polys) that looks as good, then you would use the alternative. As a gfx developer you are not interested in what runs in hardware, but in how fast it is. Also, like the other person wrote you can leave these decisions to the user, since its also a matter of taste.
The big problem is getting graphics chip specs from graphics chip makers.
Dirk Hohndel (XFree core team member and SuSE CTO) said in his speach at LinuxTag that
it has become MUCH better, both because Linux is getting more important and because
the gfx card makers get more confidence in the word of the XFree team not to break NDAs etc.
He gave the example of Matrox. IIRC, for the first card they didnt give any documentation,
for the second some after it had shipped and now (for the G400?) they gave
complete documentation before it shipped.
This just shows me there is still a long way for poly-accelerators to go. If you want a game with, say the battle of waterloo, you want 1000s of bots at least.
Usually - yes. Mostly, we are rendering objects that are actually 3D -
people, monsters, houses, whatever.
But for all those things we only see a 2d-surface.
And most of the transparent things you can look into are monochrome,
so you can do them with a few polys. If you would put tea in a transparent cup and
add milk so that it isnt homogeneous and so that you can still see through the tea -
then you have an effect that is easy to do via voxels
and difficult (not impossible!) to do via polys.
So, for the visualization of almost all things the 2d-surface is enough. Notable exception s are scientists
that want to visualize a field or doctors that want transparent organs and flesh
since this helps visualize the anatomy.
Granted, sometimes we render
things that actually are purely 2D (CAD, FEM models, etc), but
a 3D representation (ie Octree vs. BSP) is far more natural.
Funny, its just the other way round:
When rendering things you almost always see only the 2d surface.
When doing CAD and caring about the center of gravity, weight,
(rotational) inertia etc, the volume is important.
To put it another way - we actually spend time first creating a lot of polygons from a solid 3D model - for no other reason that the fact we
need them for rendering, *and* decimating the very same meshes so that we have less facets! Bleugh!;)
I am not sure I understand you. If you, for example create the polys with a 3D scanner and then reduce them that
is because its faster to do it this way than to have a reasonable tesselation from the start.
My boss was looking at these at SIGGRAPH, so I might have one to play with with a bit of luck...
What will you use it for? I am not saying voxels are useless, but
I personally see much more uses for polys than for voxels.
If they know their intended victims may be
carrying guns, they go looking for easier targets. And law-abiding citizens carrying guns are not prone to random violence
(which is why they're known as law-abiding, duh). This has been shown time and time again by FBI crime statistics, but this
fact is very inconvenient for gun control advocates.
They hit easier targets? Like pregnant women, elderly people, people who dont want a gun (or geeks that dont do sports)? Well to a non-US-citizen this sounds like an argument FOR gun control! If all those dangerous guns in the hands of the law-abiding people just serve to have other people vicitmized instead of themselves, and not to reduce the amount of vicitims, then this is a severe blow to the arguments of the NRA.
Who would buy a product that sounds like Standard Animal Dung
Maybe. But would you drink it? Here is a true story:
An Irish whisky firm wanted to name its newest brand "Irish mist". Isn't that a nice, poetic name? Well, in German "Mist" means dung or manure, so you would drink Irish manure...
Are you kidding me?? That's an extremely simple algorithm
No, he is not kidding. He is speaking of convex polyhedra, you are speaking about convex polygons.
Even making polygons convex is difficult if you want things like holes etc. Actually there doesnt seem to be robust, open source code to do this. The Mesa people have great difficulties with this, Brian is thinking about dropping all his GLU routines because of it!
On Sourceforge, they have a section about modeling with 57 entries. Most of these are libraries, converters, CAD-programs etc, but there are 19 modelers among them! And AFAIK there are several OS modelers not on Sourceforge. There is at least Blender, so there are at least twenty OS modelers in the works. Ah, the joys of OS. I have no idea, whether some may merge, I doubt it. Probably a lot will die or never see the light of day.
What OS? It hasn't crashed once for me under Win2k
I am not surprised. A friend of mine bought it and the dealer told him to reduce the number of crashes you have to run it under Win NT (that was before Win2K came out) or at least dont use Multitasking under Win95/98.
Since I havent seen anything about LinuxTag, here are a few words:
It is supposed to be the largest Linux event in europe. It was held some time ago in Stuttgart, Germany. There was one "business day" with attendance fees. I havent been there but I heard it was booked out. Then there were three additional days free of charge for everyone. It consisted of a exhibition and lots of talks. I was there 2.5 days and could have spend more time there. The exhibition was very large, with all the major Linux players, plus a lot of large hw-manufacturers (HP, Siemens, SGI...), lots of publishers/book shops and lots of boothes for open source software/technologie, for ex a GIMP-booth, a VRML-booth etc.
There were almost 100 talks! These were the reason I went to Stuttgart.
The (in my mind) major talks I didn't hear were: Gimp (Simon Budig), VRML (Jörg Scheurich), Berlin, CORBA,Tcl, Tk, KOffice, KDE 2.0, Bonobo...
In other words same problems as with modern aviation (most modern planes are incapable of flying with all of their engines shut). So the solution is well known - do not stop.
What planes do you speak about? Modern airliners glide as well as gliders from ca 1950. Modern airliners have glide slopes of about 1:30. Actually, about a week ago there was an emergency landing of an Airbus in vienna without power. Not one person was hurt during the landing. Some people who had short trouser burnt their legs when they slid down the emergency slides.
There was another accident where a Boeing lost power over the atlantic - it had to glide 100 miles to reach the shore.
Helicopters are also very good at "gliding" down without power (called autorotation). When done correctly (and the landing strip is near:-)), the danger of this is so low that they practice this regularly.
Your point that meshes are worthless to work with is nonsense. You have problems with 3D studio? Perhaps they have nothing to do with meshes. 3D Studio is not the best program for mesh-modeling anyway.
mesh is nooo substitute for extrutions and constraints.
You can do extrusions with meshes, they are one operation of many that you can do on meshes.
i saw what some students had '3d scanned', and it was a mess
They didnt tweak it manually? Then of course its a mess. There is no 100% automatic way to 3D-scan things. The stanford article mentions the places that are hard to get to. This has got nothing to do with meshes. BTW, we (Hammes software) model everything manually and dont scan things, thats faster for us, since we dont need high resolution.
Oh, I am not the only one liking polygons:
Just last weekend I was at LinuxTag, the largest european Linux exhibition. There was someone from blender giving demonstrations. All the demonstrations invloved polys. He himself said that for most of the jobs he prefered them to other modeling methods.
In the newest edition of the German magazine "3D Live" there is a long, excellent article how to model a high-quality seagull for use in a cinema film in softimage, including of course exact texture coordinates. The author uses a polygon mesh.
Sorry, I have to disagree strongly. I have been using computers for 20 years, professionally for >10 years, generally prefer the CLI to visual stuff, used GCC and make before and contribute to an open source project that runs under Windo$ and Linux. I would LOVE an alternative to Windo$. Still, I have trouble getting into Linux. Maybe I wouldnt have so many if I had a few weeks just to learn Linux. Still, my installation of X went not smooth at all. Unless I used an obscure option to sax which is mentioned at the very end of the X-chapter, I can only see about 1/10 of the sax window on screen. When I wanted to use ISDN with SuSE, I looked through about 5-10 docs. Some things I had to read 5 times, others were missing in all docs.
Linux has gotten to be extremely easy to use. I can't see how to make it easier!
The most important thing would be the man-files. They are are awfull. When I just wanted to pack something with tar, I stared at least 5 minutes at the man file and didnt get it (luckily, the SuSE-manual was good in this respect). Also, I want to know how to use grep recursively, the man-page doesnt seem to say. Another man-page (about the command to show the memory-usage of processes) leaves out important issues (caching), leading me to completely mis-interpret the output. A *nix-expert on our mailing list explained everything in the same space as the man-page understandably and exhaustively. I wonder how long it took him, probably less than two hours. Why are the man-pages and documentation generally so bad? Is it an ego-thing? Are there legal reasons? I mean, there should be people who want to contribute and cant code that are gratefull for such a job. Another thing: I always swore (sp?) about Windo$ error messages. When I come about error messages in Linux that are conceptually bad (When running a batch, you should know whther the message come from the script or from "inside"), I was told that was in *nix since 1974. Sorry, I think Linux is not even fit for experts, if they have no time to learn it, let alone users.
Ever heard of the Russians ? The French ? They both have very good space infrastructure - hell, the French even have a bigger market share than the US in term of commercial space launch !
By "French" you mean "European"? Or what rockets / market share are you speaking about?
Intel is at least 8 years behind the curve; in fact, Intel hasn't been a technology leader since the 70s.
I think Intel has/had great engineers, they mostly just do what they have to do to make much money: They improve and improve and improve the old technology in a compatible way. They showed us what they can do when they are "set free" with the I860 (please note the "0":-)). This is my all time favorite processor. It was both a general purpose processor and a 3D processor. It was super scalar, risc, pipelined, achieved almost 100 MFLOPs and >100MIPs in real applications with 50MHz clock. Programming optimized assembly for it was like solving puzzles:-). It came out about 1990.
From day 1 there were better archetectures available, and at a lower cost. The only thing that kept it going in the early days was the market perception that PCs were business machines, so all the businesses bought them.
Absoultely true. When the PCs were black and white they said, "Oh look at the Amiga! It has colour! Thats for games, you wouldnt use that in an office, would you?". Speaking about the processor, the 68000-family was much more orthogonal and clean.
In my mind, the one outstanding difference is that in VSS you have to lock the file before you can can change it. While it is locked, other people cant change it (easily). In CVS, several people can work concurrently on one file. When different developers check in changes of one file, CVS has to try to merge them. This often works, but not always.
My personal opinion is: Use CVS for open source projects. When one developer starts work on a file and then doesn't have time to finish, other people are not hindered. For commercial apps I prefer the VSS-style. You know your working hours and your holidays, when you start working on a file, you will usually finish it. If you don't, you can still give it back. If someone needs a file somebody else is working on, its no problem contacting the other person (this might be a problem with open source). I don't say, use VSS. There are many VSS-like programs out there. For example, in my old company (>=7 years ago) we used PVCS, which was already quite nice. In my current job we work with VSS, which is alrightish (we only have 2.5 developers:-)), but we also have had file corruption.
Out of curiousity, is your thesis available online or in a journal somewhere?
No, unfortunately not. I wrote it 10 years ago, at that time even in academic circles the IN wasn't used as much as today and it wasn't a PhD-thesis anyway. I used the universities IN-connection mainly for public domain sw for my Amiga:-).
This brings me to one of my favorite true computer anecdotes.
I was sitting in the computer room, besides me a Prof. This Prof used the computer very seldomly, therefore he didnt need/want his own. His assistant however had his own and was an experienced user. For example, he convinced some computers used for teaching at day to do some simulations for him at night;-). Anyway, the Prof was swearing because the computer kicked him out again and again. Then his assistant came looking for him, quite excitedly, "Prof, Prof, somebody must have stolen our password! What a persistent bastard, I had to kick him out three times!"
Dr J.V.Narlikar has written numerous articles on how there exists a self serving cliche in the international astrophysics community who have a vested interest in receiving grnts for the study of black holes and the big bang theory.
A quick search only found one such article. This seemed more to be about the grants for large technical undertakins. I would imagine there would be quite a public outcry if we poured millions into gadgets that we think will fail. I can only speak about theoretical physics in Germany. Here, when you are a Professor you can research anything you want, your money is garantied. So, you will research something that interests you and where you think you will be able to make progress, maybe breakthroughs. Lets say you believe in the general theory of relativity, but think it possible there is an alternative. Obviously finding a workable alternative (maybe even one with new predictions) gives you much more fame then improvements on the existing theories. Think about the famous theoretical physicists: Almost all found new theories and broke away from the established physics of the time.
So the question is just: Do you believe an alternative theory is so improbable, that the huge fame you would get for it doesnt outweigh this improbability?
they are introducing artificial quantities like dark matter and an anti gravitational effect of free space
I dont see dark matter as artificial. Just the opposite: I would be very surprised if we could clearly "see" all the different forms of matter in the universe.
I say scrap the Big Bang theory
If you can, then do it. Its funny you bring this up, since my "Diplom-arbeit" (masters thesis?) went in that direction. As you probably know, general relativity has not yet been quantized. However, one can speculate on effects of QM on relativity. There are reasons that in a quasi-classical theory it leads to higher-order lagrangians. Since there are many possibilities and since there are anti gravitational effects, one can well believe that the universe once just was very small, but not singular. However, both theoretical arguments and computational simulation show the singularity. BTW, after I started on this, I also found an article that had done very similar things with the same conclusion in "nuovo cimento" (sp?). Of couse I dont say that my work prooved the big bang. But its very difficult (I believe: impossible) to scrap it. But you are, of course, welcome to try.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Ah, so its just a hoax that you think everything is a hoax;-) ?
Are you saying government bureaucrats will be better at deciding how to make industrial operations cleaner and more efficient than the experts who operate those plants?
The problem is, if the government doesnt intervene, for example by setting pollution taxes or by limiting the allowed amount of pollution, there is no incentive to think about pollution-reduction.
A rich industrialist will only clean up his act and spend the additional money to make his plant cleaner and more efficient if he sees a reason. One reason that comes to mind is his concern for the next generation.
Unfortunately, that doesnt seem to be how it works in reality.
When he sees most of his wealth expropriated in the form of inheritance taxation, it becomes a 'what's the use, may as well just aim for the short term bottom line' decision for him. So he hires an MBA to run the operation and moves to Florida. To fix this we need to get rid of Inheritance taxes altogether.
Ah, I see. Without inheritance tax, he would say, I will stop polluting for the sake of my grandchilds health. With inheritance tax, he says, I am not interested in my grandchilds health. Hm, I think its rather, "My company is just one in thousands. May actions wont affect my grandchild too much, but directly affect my wallet, reputation etc". Also, I dont think inheritance tax is the reason for the wide-spread short-term thinking.
Common sense ideas like this just don't get enough exposure,
I think your ideas are the opposite of common sense. I think we need taxes and we should have them were they either hurt little or were they can be used to steer. I think an inheritance tax hurts little.
Slashdot Mirror
I think ease is good. If you write software there are several aims - ease of use, speed, functionality, flexibility etc. You will always write bad code if you just look at one of those, I really dont think many developers are doing this. Ease of use for me mainly means how fast I can pick something up. For example, as a professional sw developer for >=10 years, havving written a modeller in C++, I joined the effort to write an open source modeller in C++. Still, I had to learn SSH, CVS, SourceForge, Linux (the modeller works under Windo$ and Linux, but I want to test it under both), automake, (auto)conf, python, plib etc. If each of these had taken a few month to learn, I would still not contribute. So, event to a proffesional ease of use is important (apart from maybe a few tools he uses every day and that cant be made easy).
:-(. There are so many
unsolved problems. Why didnt they use an appropriate tool and used the time saved to
write a needed tool? For example a translator that doesnt produce gibberish or
a Go-playing program that beats a advanced human player? They would have got >1
million dollars for that. My Answer: They are not the great he-man-programmers they think they are.
Computers are there to solve problems. My problem is not that I want to learn (say) an operating system, but I want to write a modeller. Every tool I use for that should be as easy as possible. I often laugh at the people who on purpose use a hard-to.use tool, for example one they know is inappropriate for the job. Oh, I wrote that code to do xyz in abc - everyone knows writing such code with that language is hard, so I am king. What a waste of time
Anyway, enough of that rant, lets look at the article in more detail. I think it contradicts itself. The only main point I can really agree to is that there is still too much inconsistency. If I want, I should have the same or similar save-file-dialogs whether I am in the web or on the desktop, whether I am in Windo$ or Linux etc. One metaphor (he mentions the desktop-metaphor) should be used throughout. For me, a consistent UI is easier. So, the problem is too little easiness, not too much!
Also this shows, if stuff would get easier (in this case, more consistent) it would get more difficult to tie people to a certain setup - he writes the opposite.
Another contradiction in the article is that OToneH he says "An uncritical drive toward ease is arguably the most influential force in desktop computing today". OTotherH he says that we dont have consistent UIs because thats too difficult to achieve - well if this is my only aim (as he suggests), then the difficulty would not stop me at least trying. He, however says, they are not even trying because it is too difficult.
And IMHO another contradiction: He says easiness appeals to females, for males it is not important at all or only as a phase into more difficult things. Well, I think computers are still mainly sold to males, at least they were a few years ago and even then easiness of use was a major selling point. I think the author tries - unsuccessfully - to merge some of his general political attitudes (he also speaks about Marx) with his hate for easiness.
His main argument is that his students know how to use some very easy programms, but don't have general knowledge and therefore are unable to, for example, transfer files between home and uni. Does he think this would be different when developers put less importance on ease? There are several reasons why there is less "general computer knowledge" in an average computer user. Earlier on, there were fewer users who spend much time learning stuff etc. Either, we reduce the amount of computer users, or force them all to spend more time learning or we realize that not everyone can have a deep understanding of, for example the operating system. We have experts for that. When I started with the C64, quite a lot of owners had "C64 intern", the complete listing of the OS. I wonder how large such a listing would be nowadays and how long it would take one person to just get an overview? There were no worries about networks, security, GUIs etc. Of course people knew a higher percentage of the background, since it was so much smaller.
Another thing is ease of use of one program versus ease of use of the, say five programs a user uses regularly. For one program it might pay to hide the file-system from the user and have a simple UI instead. However, I only have to learn the idea of the file system once, so if (almost) all the programs use this, then overall it is easier to use to me. So, this example of his is in my mind not a question of ease versus general knowledge but of ease working with one programm versus ease working with the computer.
As I said in the beginning - ease is ONE of the goals one should have. To pick up his example, when making a power point presentation I can use templates, saving time, but maybe affecting the content if the templates fit badly. I think this is as it should be: The person doing the presentation can decide himself. He has the priorities, whether he needs to get it done quickly or perfectly. Also, only he knows how good the templates fit his problem.
cavitation is the term for the air bubbles created when the prop(s) of a submarine spin too rapidly
It doesnt need to be a submarine. There was a funny episode during the period of great competition between shipbuilders for the blue ribbon. They had build a new ocean liner which had enormous engines and was build to do the fastest ocean crossing ever. When they left the harbour on reduced power for the first test run it went all right. But when they applied full power in open water, the ship actually decelerated. The small and improperly designed propeller and the huge power of the engines meant that the propeller "beat away" the liquid, the water boiled and the propeller was in steam instead of liquid water.
a cavitation torpedo is probably (I can't say for sure) a torpedo designed to home in on the sounds of cavitation of another craft
No, it travels in a cavity. Others have posted the link already.
. Linux can be configured to do everything but take out your garbage.
LOL. There is a garbage collector in Java, which runs under Linux.
No, OpenGL/GLX doesn't give specifications of the card's capabilities (At least last time I looked). Like for example, I might want to enable bump mapping for better quility, but if the card doesn't support that in hardware, I'd prefer to disable it for the speed.
Even if you have an API like DirectX which tells you the capabilities of the hardware, to do it right you have to ignore this and just time a frame with bump mapping and then decide whether to use it. For example bump mapping might only run in hardware, if you have less than 3 lights. How do you want to describe this with capability bits (flags). Also, even if it runs in hardware, but is much slower than an alternative (say, using many polys) that looks as good, then you would use the alternative. As a gfx developer you are not interested in what runs in hardware, but in how fast it is. Also, like the other person wrote you can leave these decisions to the user, since its also a matter of taste.
The big problem is getting graphics chip specs from graphics chip makers.
Dirk Hohndel (XFree core team member and SuSE CTO) said in his speach at LinuxTag that it has become MUCH better, both because Linux is getting more important and because the gfx card makers get more confidence in the word of the XFree team not to break NDAs etc. He gave the example of Matrox. IIRC, for the first card they didnt give any documentation, for the second some after it had shipped and now (for the G400?) they gave complete documentation before it shipped.
I can play UT with 15 bots
This just shows me there is still a long way for poly-accelerators to go. If you want a game with, say the battle of waterloo, you want 1000s of bots at least.
>Are voxels somehow superior to polygons?
;)
Usually - yes. Mostly, we are rendering objects that are actually 3D - people, monsters, houses, whatever.
But for all those things we only see a 2d-surface. And most of the transparent things you can look into are monochrome, so you can do them with a few polys. If you would put tea in a transparent cup and add milk so that it isnt homogeneous and so that you can still see through the tea - then you have an effect that is easy to do via voxels and difficult (not impossible!) to do via polys.
So, for the visualization of almost all things the 2d-surface is enough. Notable exception s are scientists that want to visualize a field or doctors that want transparent organs and flesh since this helps visualize the anatomy.
Granted, sometimes we render things that actually are purely 2D (CAD, FEM models, etc), but a 3D representation (ie Octree vs. BSP) is far more natural.
Funny, its just the other way round:
When rendering things you almost always see only the 2d surface. When doing CAD and caring about the center of gravity, weight, (rotational) inertia etc, the volume is important.
To put it another way - we actually spend time first creating a lot of polygons from a solid 3D model - for no other reason that the fact we need them for rendering, *and* decimating the very same meshes so that we have less facets! Bleugh!
I am not sure I understand you. If you, for example create the polys with a 3D scanner and then reduce them that is because its faster to do it this way than to have a reasonable tesselation from the start.
My boss was looking at these at SIGGRAPH, so I might have one to play with with a bit of luck...
What will you use it for? I am not saying voxels are useless, but I personally see much more uses for polys than for voxels.
If they know their intended victims may be carrying guns, they go looking for easier targets. And law-abiding citizens carrying guns are not prone to random violence (which is why they're known as law-abiding, duh). This has been shown time and time again by FBI crime statistics, but this fact is very inconvenient for gun control advocates.
They hit easier targets? Like pregnant women, elderly people, people who dont want a gun (or geeks that dont do sports)? Well to a non-US-citizen this sounds like an argument FOR gun control! If all those dangerous guns in the hands of the law-abiding people just serve to have other people vicitmized instead of themselves, and not to reduce the amount of vicitims, then this is a severe blow to the arguments of the NRA.
Who would buy a product that sounds like Standard Animal Dung
Maybe. But would you drink it? Here is a true story:
An Irish whisky firm wanted to name its newest brand "Irish mist". Isn't that a nice, poetic name? Well, in German "Mist" means dung or manure, so you would drink Irish manure...
Are you kidding me?? That's an extremely simple algorithm
No, he is not kidding. He is speaking of convex polyhedra, you are speaking about convex polygons.
Even making polygons convex is difficult if you want things like holes etc. Actually there doesnt seem to be robust, open source code to do this. The Mesa people have great difficulties with this, Brian is thinking about dropping all his GLU routines because of it!
On Sourceforge, they have a section about modeling with 57 entries. Most of these are libraries, converters, CAD-programs etc, but there are 19 modelers among them! And AFAIK there are several OS modelers not on Sourceforge. There is at least Blender, so there are at least twenty OS modelers in the works. Ah, the joys of OS. I have no idea, whether some may merge, I doubt it. Probably a lot will die or never see the light of day.
What OS? It hasn't crashed once for me under Win2k
I am not surprised. A friend of mine bought it and the dealer told him to reduce the number of crashes you have to run it under Win NT (that was before Win2K came out) or at least dont use Multitasking under Win95/98.
Since I havent seen anything about LinuxTag, here are a few words:
...
It is supposed to be the largest Linux event in europe. It was held some time ago in Stuttgart, Germany. There was one "business day" with attendance fees. I havent been there but I heard it was booked out. Then there were three additional days free of charge for everyone. It consisted of a exhibition and lots of talks. I was there 2.5 days and could have spend more time there. The exhibition was very large, with all the major Linux players, plus a lot of large hw-manufacturers (HP, Siemens, SGI...), lots of publishers/book shops and lots of boothes for open source software/technologie, for ex a GIMP-booth, a VRML-booth etc.
There were almost 100 talks! These were the reason I went to Stuttgart.
The (in my mind) major talks I didn't hear were: Gimp (Simon Budig), VRML (Jörg Scheurich), Berlin, CORBA,Tcl, Tk, KOffice, KDE 2.0, Bonobo
The talks I heard were:
Kylix (Borland staff)
XFree 86 (Dirk Hohndel)
Dear Mr Brooks (Alan Cox)
Gnome (Matthias Warkus)
Keynote (RMS)
Blender (Carsten Wartmann)
Sourceforge (Tony Gunthorpe)
KDevelop (?).
BTW, the (english) link to LinuxTag is http://www.linuxtag.de/2000/english/
In other words same problems as with modern aviation (most modern planes are incapable of flying with all of their engines shut). So the solution is well known - do not stop.
:-)), the danger of this is so low that they practice this regularly.
What planes do you speak about? Modern airliners glide as well as gliders from ca 1950. Modern airliners have glide slopes of about 1:30. Actually, about a week ago there was an emergency landing of an Airbus in vienna without power. Not one person was hurt during the landing. Some people who had short trouser burnt their legs when they slid down the emergency slides.
There was another accident where a Boeing lost power over the atlantic - it had to glide 100 miles to reach the shore.
Helicopters are also very good at "gliding" down without power (called autorotation). When done correctly (and the landing strip is near
Your point that meshes are worthless to work with is nonsense.
You have problems with 3D studio? Perhaps they have nothing to do with meshes. 3D Studio is not the best program for mesh-modeling anyway.
mesh is nooo substitute for extrutions and constraints.
You can do extrusions with meshes, they are one operation of many that you can do on meshes.
i saw what some students had '3d scanned', and it was a mess
They didnt tweak it manually? Then of course its a mess. There is no 100% automatic way to 3D-scan things. The stanford article mentions the places that are hard to get to. This has got nothing to do with meshes. BTW, we (Hammes software) model everything manually and dont scan things, thats faster for us, since we dont need high resolution.
Oh, I am not the only one liking polygons:
Just last weekend I was at LinuxTag, the largest european Linux exhibition. There was someone from blender giving demonstrations. All the demonstrations invloved polys. He himself said that for most of the jobs he prefered them to other modeling methods.
In the newest edition of the German magazine "3D Live" there is a long, excellent article how to model a high-quality seagull for use in a cinema film in softimage, including of course exact texture coordinates. The author uses a polygon mesh.
It _is_ Linux ready.
Sorry, I have to disagree strongly. I have been using computers for 20 years, professionally for >10 years, generally prefer the CLI to visual stuff, used GCC and make before and contribute to an open source project that runs under Windo$ and Linux. I would LOVE an alternative to Windo$. Still, I have trouble getting into Linux. Maybe I wouldnt have so many if I had a few weeks just to learn Linux. Still, my installation of X went not smooth at all. Unless I used an obscure option to sax which is mentioned at the very end of the X-chapter, I can only see about 1/10 of the sax window on screen. When I wanted to use ISDN with SuSE, I looked through about 5-10 docs. Some things I had to read 5 times, others were missing in all docs.
Linux has gotten to be extremely easy to use. I can't see how to make it easier!
The most important thing would be the man-files. They are are awfull. When I just wanted to pack something with tar, I stared at least 5 minutes at the man file and didnt get it (luckily, the SuSE-manual was good in this respect). Also, I want to know how to use grep recursively, the man-page doesnt seem to say. Another man-page (about the command to show the memory-usage of processes) leaves out important issues (caching), leading me to completely mis-interpret the output. A *nix-expert on our mailing list explained everything in the same space as the man-page understandably and exhaustively. I wonder how long it took him, probably less than two hours. Why are the man-pages and documentation generally so bad? Is it an ego-thing? Are there legal reasons? I mean, there should be people who want to contribute and cant code that are gratefull for such a job. Another thing: I always swore (sp?) about Windo$ error messages. When I come about error messages in Linux that are conceptually bad (When running a batch, you should know whther the message come from the script or from "inside"), I was told that was in *nix since 1974. Sorry, I think Linux is not even fit for experts, if they have no time to learn it, let alone users.
Ever heard of the Russians ? The French ? They both have very good space infrastructure - hell, the French even have a bigger market share than the US in term of commercial space launch !
By "French" you mean "European"? Or what rockets / market share are you speaking about?
How did you score the keysquares? Did you somehow look how much plain text they produced?
Intel is at least 8 years behind the curve; in fact, Intel hasn't been a technology leader since the 70s.
:-)). This is my all time favorite processor. It was both a general purpose processor and a 3D processor. It was super scalar, risc, pipelined, achieved almost 100 MFLOPs and >100MIPs in real applications with 50MHz clock. Programming optimized assembly for it was like solving puzzles :-). It came out about 1990.
I think Intel has/had great engineers, they mostly just do what they have to do to make much money: They improve and improve and improve the old technology in a compatible way. They showed us what they can do when they are "set free" with the I860 (please note the "0"
From day 1 there were better archetectures available, and at a lower cost. The only thing that kept it going in the early days was the market perception that PCs were business machines, so all the businesses bought them.
Absoultely true. When the PCs were black and white they said, "Oh look at the Amiga! It has colour! Thats for games, you wouldnt use that in an office, would you?". Speaking about the processor, the 68000-family was much more orthogonal and clean.
In my mind, the one outstanding difference is that in VSS you have to lock the file before you can can change it. While it is locked, other people cant change it (easily). In CVS, several people can work concurrently on one file. When different developers check in changes of one file, CVS has to try to merge them. This often works, but not always.
:-)), but we also have had file corruption.
My personal opinion is:
Use CVS for open source projects. When one developer starts work on a file and then doesn't have time to finish, other people are not hindered.
For commercial apps I prefer the VSS-style. You know your working hours and your holidays, when you start working on a file, you will usually finish it. If you don't, you can still give it back. If someone needs a file somebody else is working on, its no problem contacting the other person (this might be a problem with open source). I don't say, use VSS. There are many VSS-like programs out there. For example, in my old company (>=7 years ago) we used PVCS, which was already quite nice. In my current job we work with VSS, which is alrightish (we only have 2.5 developers
Out of curiousity, is your thesis available online or in a journal somewhere?
:-).
;-). Anyway, the Prof was swearing because the computer kicked him out again and again.
No, unfortunately not. I wrote it 10 years ago, at that time even in academic circles the IN wasn't used as much as today and it wasn't a PhD-thesis anyway. I used the universities IN-connection mainly for public domain sw for my Amiga
This brings me to one of my favorite true computer anecdotes.
I was sitting in the computer room, besides me a Prof. This Prof used the computer very seldomly, therefore he didnt need/want his own. His assistant however had his own and was an experienced user. For example, he convinced some computers used for teaching at day to do some simulations for him at night
Then his assistant came looking for him, quite excitedly, "Prof, Prof, somebody must have stolen our password! What a persistent bastard, I had to kick him out three times!"
Dr J.V.Narlikar has written numerous articles on how there exists a self serving cliche in the international astrophysics community who have a vested interest in receiving grnts for the study of black holes and the big bang theory.
;-) ?
A quick search only found one such article. This seemed more to be about the grants for large technical undertakins. I would imagine there would be quite a public outcry if we poured millions into gadgets that we think will fail. I can only speak about theoretical physics in Germany. Here, when you are a Professor you can research anything you want, your money is garantied. So, you will research something that interests you and where you think you will be able to make progress, maybe breakthroughs. Lets say you believe in the general theory of relativity, but think it possible there is an alternative. Obviously finding a workable alternative (maybe even one with new predictions) gives you much more fame then improvements on the existing theories. Think about the famous theoretical physicists: Almost all found new theories and broke away from the established physics of the time.
So the question is just: Do you believe an alternative theory is so improbable, that the huge fame you would get for it doesnt outweigh this improbability?
they are introducing artificial quantities like dark matter and an anti gravitational effect of free space
I dont see dark matter as artificial. Just the opposite: I would be very surprised if we could clearly "see" all the different forms of matter in the universe.
I say scrap the Big Bang theory
If you can, then do it.
Its funny you bring this up, since my "Diplom-arbeit" (masters thesis?) went in that direction. As you probably know, general relativity has not yet been quantized. However, one can speculate on effects of QM on relativity. There are reasons that in a quasi-classical theory it leads to higher-order lagrangians. Since there are many possibilities and since there are anti gravitational effects, one can well believe that the universe once just was very small, but not singular. However, both theoretical arguments and computational simulation show the singularity. BTW, after I started on this, I also found an article that had done very similar things with the same conclusion in "nuovo cimento" (sp?).
Of couse I dont say that my work prooved the big bang. But its very difficult (I believe: impossible) to scrap it. But you are, of course, welcome to try.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Ah, so its just a hoax that you think everything is a hoax
Anyone can upload a text file to a web server.
But not onto the NASA server.
Are you saying government bureaucrats will be better at deciding how to make industrial operations cleaner and more efficient than the experts who operate those plants?
The problem is, if the government doesnt intervene, for example by setting pollution taxes or by limiting the allowed amount of pollution, there is no incentive to think about pollution-reduction.
A rich industrialist will only clean up his act and spend the additional money to make his plant cleaner and more efficient if he sees a reason. One reason that comes to mind is his concern for the next generation.
Unfortunately, that doesnt seem to be how it works in reality.
When he sees most of his wealth expropriated in the form of inheritance taxation, it becomes a 'what's the use, may as well just aim for the short term bottom line' decision for him. So he hires an MBA to run the operation and moves to Florida. To fix this we need to get rid of Inheritance taxes altogether.
Ah, I see. Without inheritance tax, he would say, I will stop polluting for the sake of my grandchilds health. With inheritance tax, he says, I am not interested in my grandchilds health.
Hm, I think its rather, "My company is just one in thousands. May actions wont affect my grandchild too much, but directly affect my wallet, reputation etc".
Also, I dont think inheritance tax is the reason for the wide-spread short-term thinking.
Common sense ideas like this just don't get enough exposure,
I think your ideas are the opposite of common sense. I think we need taxes and we should have them were they either hurt little or were they can be used to steer. I think an inheritance tax hurts little.