That very much depends on the application. For a well-optimized game, I could see that it might, especially if you're using a packer and network transport. For other things (applications written with VTK, most notably), using Chromium actually increases performance due to the state tracker.
When we designed the SPU chain dispatch mechanism, we really tried hard to optimize how Chromium intercepts and dispatches OpenGL calls. It's the network stuff that slows things down.
You're right about seeing Quake on a bunch of projectors!:-)
We've talked a couple times about having non-planar surfaces in the tilesorter. When that is done (and started - no one's taken it on yet), you'll be able to have projectors pointing in different directions to give you more of an immersive feel to something like Quake, with no code mods to the app itself. Pretty nice!
I agree with you about having a smaller OpenGL wrapper. Chromium is a chainsaw when all you need is a little knife. Sometimes you need a chainsaw, but not in this case.
An anti-abortion political website's relation to "family planning"--that being, the parents having control of when they do or do not have children--is equivalent to the relation of a cracker web site and Computer Security.
I'm gonna have to disagree here.
I'm going to use the word "anti-abortion", though that's not quite an accurate description of what I mean.
The anti-abortion viewpoint is that killing a fetus should not be one of the legal ways of choosing when to have children. That falls squarely into the realm of "family planning". The fact that an anti-abortion site discusses the consequences of the decision to abort doesn't mean that it's not about family planning. In fact, it's primarily about that subject. It's just a second-order effect.
A good anti-abortion site would also be a pro-life one, and also get into the first-order subject of family planning. The distinction is that anti-abortion is one topic, while pro-life is many. Pro-life also encompasses discussion about capital punishment, natural family planning (both disciplines), euthanasia, etc. It would also get into the international politics of forced sterilization and such by governments and other organizations. It would tie itself intimitely with human rights. In short, it should encompass all the subjects that being "pro" about "life" entails.
Someone may remember (if you live in the East Bay, or follow LLNL news) that a high ranking scientist here resigned for getting caught falsifying his doctorate for many years. Big ol' scandal at the time.
The statement that "no business name should mislead customers into thinking it's something else" does not translate into the statement that "all business names must be unambiguously clear". I do not make the claim that all business names must accurately describe the nature of the business. I am making the claim that the business name must not mislead customers in order to gain business. Don't confuse the two.
I find it humorous that someone considers a pro-life web site, one that presumably talks about being open to new life, as one that is not about family planning. That's precisely what planning a family is all about.
What twisted definitions we've wrapped ourselves with...
If that were the case, then all business names would have to accurately reflect the main business of a corporation, would it not?
No. The statement that "no business name should mislead customers into thinking it's something else" does not translate into the statement that "all business names must be unambiguously clear". I do not make the claim that all business names must accurately describe the nature of the business. I am making the claim that the business name must not mislead customers in order to gain business. Don't confuse the two.
I am mixing portions of law, you're correct. Trademarks and false advertising do fall under different sections of law.
But the principle is sound.
(I haven't done the research, but I'd be very surprised to discover that business names are not currently restricted. I don't believe that we live in the nation you describe, where anything and everything goes.)
A businessman has the right to call his business whatever he chooses.
Oh really? What if a businessman decided to name his business "Microsoft"? Or what about "Ford Motor Corporation"? Obviously, you can't use the name of another business for the purposes of your own.
Now that we've established the precident of limiting business names, let's go one step further. Should a business be allowed to use false statements to entice people to visit their premises? Can a grocery store advertise "New BMWs for only $10 a piece", with no intention of following through on it? I think most reasonable people would say no.
So now we are at the point where we need to ask whether the name of the business itself can be deemed a "false statement". That's an exercise that I'll leave up to the reader. (Hint: yes)
The nature of computer-generated imagery (CGI) nowadays makes me say that the three movies are animated. There are so many layers of compositing and CGI in those movies (er, will be) that one can go so far as to call them animated, with some live action bits.
Laurie Garrett, the journalist who wrote the email, was fairly horrified to find that her personal email had made it out to the whole world. Here is her response (cut verbatim from metafilter:
My name is Laurie Garrett.
I am astounded by what I've read here.
A few days ago I received an e-mail from a stranger, who asked if I was the author of a letter from Davos, regarding the World Economic Forum. The e-mailer implied that the letter was a hoax, and directed me to this URL.
Though I did, indeed, attend the WEF and wrote a personal letter afterwards to a handful of friends, I never typed a word that was meant for public consumption. That is what I told the stranger. And then I went back to work, covering the latest sad news from the trenches of the war on HIV.
Yesterday, however, I opened this URL and--with considerable humiliation -- read the remarks, paranoid fantasies speculations, derisions, insults and Internet din herein.
Let me as clear as possible about this: The letter you are all clamoring over, parsing, deriding and fantasizing about was a personal note. It is a private letter that someone among my friends thoughtlessly, yet I am sure without any malice, forwarded to a couple of people who are strangers to me. And they, in turn, passed it on to more strangers, and so on. Now, to my deep embarrassment, and acute sense of invaded privacy, all of you-- thousands of strangers--are dissecting my personal letter. I would never have written for public consumption in such a sloppy, candid, opinionated flip tone. This was never intended for your eyes.
I want you, please, to imagine something. It's 1979. I penned, in longhand, a letter to a friend describing my rather individual, admittedly biased take on attending the SALT II talks between Carter and Brezhnev. I placed that letter in an enveloped, sealed it, stamped it and posted it to my pal. (So far, I am recounting an event that actually occurred when, in my post-adolescence, I covered the Vienna Summit.)
Now, imagine my recipient found the letter amusing or insightful and photocopied my handwritten note, posting it to ten friends. And so on. Snail mail hell? Doubtful. In those seemingly ancient days we all respected privacy, and the time and money required to photocopy and post missives prompted all of us to pause and question whether we had a right to forward a personal letter without the author's permission.
But in 2003 few of us pen letters anymore, and the number of seconds it takes to forward an e-mail to a dozen people is too few for ethical reflection. We have erased privacy. And, remarkably, we have all come to believe that it is our right ? our privilege ? to read and analyze the personal musings of complete strangers. We don't want the government reading our mail, but we se no problem with reading other citizens' letters.
This saddens me deeply, and I have learned a sorry lesson. I shall no longer deliver such personal musings to friends and confidantes via the Internet. No one can be trusted in this CLICK-FORWARD electronic world.
But well outstripping the angst I feel over the loss of my personal privacy is my despair over your responses to the note. As I scanned the correspondence on this URL I found myself imagining tens of thousands of reasonably intelligent, energetic souls wasting precious moments of their lives n collective brainpower over n extraordinarily silly exercise. I saw an enormous web of cross-referencing and communication herein--of wasted "community".
Ten years ago, before the Great Dot Com Crash, Silicon Valley pundits waxed eloquent about the great "community" of the internet, and the "new global democracy" it represented. But People, this is a fraud. Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF--whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM--waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?
I beg of all of you--the Internet addicts of the world--to turn off your TVs and computers now and then and engage the world. Go have actual eye-to-eye conversations with your family, friends and neighbors. Read a great book. Argue politics over dinner with friends. Go to City Council meeting. Raise money for your local public library. Teach your 12-year-old algebra.
Climb a mountain.
Execute a dream.
Be a citizen of the real world.
As I read through the electronic conversation on this URL I was reminded of documentary I saw years ago about "Star Trek" fans. In it, William Shatner (AKA Captain Kirk) stood before hundreds of people dressed as Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans and assorted other imagined aliens. Somewhat bemused, Shatner looked at the sea of masked and oddly dressed humans and said, "People, I have only one thing to say to you: Get a life!"
That's what the government is there for, to make my life easier (or safer).
As much as you might like it, you're wrong.
"Safer," I can probably believe, if you're talking about "providing for the common defense." But easier is certainly not the job of the federal government. It most definitely is not in the constitution. Since the federal government is limited to only those powers which are described in the constitution, you're outta luck, buddy.
In fact, regular expression culture is a mess, and I share some of the blame for making it that way. Since my mother always told me to clean up my own messes, I suppose I'll have to do just that. [emphasis mine]
But Perl has often been tagged as a language in which it's easy to write programs that are difficult to read, and it's no secret that regular expression syntax that has been the chief culprit. [emphasis mine]
there's a lot of regex culture that needs breaking.
[Read all of Apocalypse 5 to learn exactly why perl 5 sucks to read. Even the extended syntax ain't really the most readable syntax.]
As a specific example, there are various ways things could improve if we muster the courage to break the ``weird'' relationship between @foo and $foo[].... the botch that in Perl 5 requires us to distinguish $foo[] from $foo->[]
I think length(@array) should be equivalent to @array.length(), so if there's a length method available, it should be called.
Legacy Perl $pkg'var Should Die. I agree. I was unduly influenced by Ada syntax here, and it was a mistake.
odd looking constructions like: $foo->[1][2][3]
We're definitely killing Perl 5's slice syntax
Various special punctuation variables are gone in Perl 6
Typeglobs are gone.
I'd like to get rid of the gratuitously ugly \E as an end-of-scope marker.
I've always thought qw() was kind of ugly, so I'd like to replace it with something prettier.
Angle Brackets Should Not Be Used for File Globbing. Indeed, they won't be. In fact, angle brackets won't be used for input at all, I suspect.
This allows us to simplify the special case in Perl 5 represented by the _ token, which was always rather difficult to explain.
The basic underlying question is "What exactly do those curlies mean?" For Perl 5 and earlier, the answer to that question was, "Too many things". Or rather, too many things with inconsistent rules.
curlies are so extremely overloaded in Perl 5
The old use integer pragma was a hack.
There's more, but I got tired of skimming the Apocalypses.
Just for a point of reference, I'm a perl programmer who doesn't fit your categories (a), (b), or (c), but still finds perl code hard to read fairly often.
With all that said, I'll close with one more quote from the Wall:
Perl 5 does a lot of things right, and we're not terribly interested in ``fixing'' that.
It's not the shape of the base that I'm concerned about. It's the angle between the base and the sides. Looking at it from the side, most prisms look like this:
---- | | | | | | ----
But there's nothing preventing you from creating a prism that looks like this:
---- // // // ----
That's what I mean. To describe the GameCube, the base has to be at right angles to the sides. If you don't put the word "right" into the description of the solid, you are not constraining it, and the prism could very well be non-right, as in the second drawing.
The French might be "prisme droit a base rectangulaire", but I'm not positive.
Wouldn't that be a "right rectangular parallelpiped" or "right retangular prism"? Gotta get that right angle in there. Prisms don't have to have to extrude at 90 degrees.
Um, Windows has OpenGL. The only reason I can see to use DirectX is if you want the functionality that DX9 gives you that is not available in OpenGL, or if ATI/nVidia drivers are broken for something in OpenGL and there is no workaround.
That's right! Watch out, you buglers! Your renditions of Taps, Reveille, and Charge might be seriously scrutinized by the Department of Homeland Security!
This is why the whole stem cell thing is so important, and should not be constarined [sic] in the way it is (For those who object to it on moral grounds saying it encourages abortions, it doesn't. The abortion doctor who made sales pitches like that to pregant women would be shot on principle.)
These sales pitches aren't made to pregnant women. They're made to dissectionists. Pregnant women are not the only people who pay for the services of an abortion clinic. On the other end are the dissectionists who pay for the privilege of using the discarded "tissue". Here's a reference, though it's graphic in its descriptions.
And, for the record, I am pro-life, so no flames from pro-lifers on the stem cell stuff like last time.
I'd like a bit of clarification of what you mean by "pro-life". If you believe that a fertilized embryo is a person, deserving of all the respect due a person, then why would you believe that embryonic stem cell research should be unconstrained? If, instead, you mean stem cell research that does not involve the destruction of an embryo (placental, umbilical, etc.), then I can understand you. But if you believe that embryonic stem cell research should be unconstrained, that implies that you believe that embryos are not as deserving of life as a person. That doesn't fit any definition of pro-life that I know.
I would honestly like to know how you reconcile these.
As for the overall point of your article, completely mastery over all of medical science, I'd watch out for the moral implications of the journey. Using an extreme example to illustrate a point, the Nazi's medical experiments were trying to do exactly that. While on the road to medical mastery (which I agree is a worthwhile goal), you have to watch out how you go about it. Not all routes are desirable ones.
Slashdot Mirror
decrease in performance
:-)
That very much depends on the application. For a well-optimized game, I could see that it might, especially if you're using a packer and network transport. For other things (applications written with VTK, most notably), using Chromium actually increases performance due to the state tracker.
When we designed the SPU chain dispatch mechanism, we really tried hard to optimize how Chromium intercepts and dispatches OpenGL calls. It's the network stuff that slows things down.
You're right about seeing Quake on a bunch of projectors!
We've talked a couple times about having non-planar surfaces in the tilesorter. When that is done (and started - no one's taken it on yet), you'll be able to have projectors pointing in different directions to give you more of an immersive feel to something like Quake, with no code mods to the app itself. Pretty nice!
I agree with you about having a smaller OpenGL wrapper. Chromium is a chainsaw when all you need is a little knife. Sometimes you need a chainsaw, but not in this case.
An anti-abortion political website's relation to "family planning"--that being, the parents having control of when they do or do not have children--is equivalent to the relation of a cracker web site and Computer Security.
I'm gonna have to disagree here.
I'm going to use the word "anti-abortion", though that's not quite an accurate description of what I mean.
The anti-abortion viewpoint is that killing a fetus should not be one of the legal ways of choosing when to have children. That falls squarely into the realm of "family planning". The fact that an anti-abortion site discusses the consequences of the decision to abort doesn't mean that it's not about family planning. In fact, it's primarily about that subject. It's just a second-order effect.
A good anti-abortion site would also be a pro-life one, and also get into the first-order subject of family planning. The distinction is that anti-abortion is one topic, while pro-life is many. Pro-life also encompasses discussion about capital punishment, natural family planning (both disciplines), euthanasia, etc. It would also get into the international politics of forced sterilization and such by governments and other organizations. It would tie itself intimitely with human rights. In short, it should encompass all the subjects that being "pro" about "life" entails.
(I'd like to delve into this deeper in this post, but as Twirlip observed about himself, I too am getting tired.)
While that would fix the most basic of hacks, it's not a robust solution.
I'm sure we all could come up with ways to differentiate the world from the models. Here are a few off the top of my head:
+ Texture binding
+ Frame-to-frame coordinate diffs
+ Polygon extents
+ Display lists (used to ensure performance)
+ Submission order (games will *always* draw world first)
This should be dead easy (if your game uses OpenGL) by using Chromium.
Someone may remember (if you live in the East Bay, or follow LLNL news) that a high ranking scientist here resigned for getting caught falsifying his doctorate for many years. Big ol' scandal at the time.
As I mentioned in another post,Read it more closely next time.
(This may be a bit off-topic, but...)
I find it humorous that someone considers a pro-life web site, one that presumably talks about being open to new life, as one that is not about family planning. That's precisely what planning a family is all about.
What twisted definitions we've wrapped ourselves with...
If that were the case, then all business names would have to accurately reflect the main business of a corporation, would it not?
No. The statement that "no business name should mislead customers into thinking it's something else" does not translate into the statement that "all business names must be unambiguously clear". I do not make the claim that all business names must accurately describe the nature of the business. I am making the claim that the business name must not mislead customers in order to gain business. Don't confuse the two.
I am mixing portions of law, you're correct. Trademarks and false advertising do fall under different sections of law.
But the principle is sound.
(I haven't done the research, but I'd be very surprised to discover that business names are not currently restricted. I don't believe that we live in the nation you describe, where anything and everything goes.)
A businessman has the right to call his business whatever he chooses.
Oh really? What if a businessman decided to name his business "Microsoft"? Or what about "Ford Motor Corporation"? Obviously, you can't use the name of another business for the purposes of your own.
Now that we've established the precident of limiting business names, let's go one step further. Should a business be allowed to use false statements to entice people to visit their premises? Can a grocery store advertise "New BMWs for only $10 a piece", with no intention of following through on it? I think most reasonable people would say no.
So now we are at the point where we need to ask whether the name of the business itself can be deemed a "false statement". That's an exercise that I'll leave up to the reader. (Hint: yes)
How? You just told us!
"Goggles: Integrated into the frame of exciting, stylish sports eyewear"
Did anyone else read this as: "Integrated into the frame of exciting, stylish sports underwear"???
why aren't the 3 movies animated?
The nature of computer-generated imagery (CGI) nowadays makes me say that the three movies are animated. There are so many layers of compositing and CGI in those movies (er, will be) that one can go so far as to call them animated, with some live action bits.
That's what the government is there for, to make my life easier (or safer).
As much as you might like it, you're wrong.
"Safer," I can probably believe, if you're talking about "providing for the common defense." But easier is certainly not the job of the federal government. It most definitely is not in the constitution. Since the federal government is limited to only those powers which are described in the constitution, you're outta luck, buddy.
If it's not hard to read, then why are the designers of perl 6 making a lot of efforts to make it a lot easier to read than perl 5?
Quoting Larry Wall from the Apocalypses:
- In fact, regular expression culture is a mess, and I share some of the blame for making it that way. Since my mother always told me to clean up my own messes, I suppose I'll have to do just that. [emphasis mine]
- But Perl has often been tagged as a language in which it's easy to write programs that are difficult to read, and it's no secret that regular expression syntax that has been the chief culprit. [emphasis mine]
- there's a lot of regex culture that needs breaking.
- [Read all of Apocalypse 5 to learn exactly why perl 5 sucks to read. Even the extended syntax ain't really the most readable syntax.]
- As a specific example, there are various ways things could improve if we muster the courage to break the ``weird'' relationship between @foo and $foo[].
... the botch that in Perl 5 requires us to distinguish $foo[] from $foo->[]
- I think length(@array) should be equivalent to @array.length(), so if there's a length method available, it should be called.
- Legacy Perl $pkg'var Should Die.
- odd looking constructions like: $foo->[1][2][3]
- We're definitely killing Perl 5's slice syntax
- Various special punctuation variables are gone in Perl 6
- Typeglobs are gone.
- I'd like to get rid of the gratuitously ugly \E as an end-of-scope marker.
- I've always thought qw() was kind of ugly, so I'd like to replace it with something prettier.
- Angle Brackets Should Not Be Used for File Globbing. Indeed, they won't be. In fact, angle brackets won't be used for input at all, I suspect.
- This allows us to simplify the special case in Perl 5 represented by the _ token, which was always rather difficult to explain.
- The basic underlying question is "What exactly do those curlies mean?" For Perl 5 and earlier, the answer to that question was, "Too many things". Or rather, too many things with inconsistent rules.
- curlies are so extremely overloaded in Perl 5
- The old use integer pragma was a hack.
There's more, but I got tired of skimming the Apocalypses.I agree. I was unduly influenced by Ada syntax here, and it was a mistake.
Just for a point of reference, I'm a perl programmer who doesn't fit your categories (a), (b), or (c), but still finds perl code hard to read fairly often.
With all that said, I'll close with one more quote from the Wall:
The <ecode> tag is your friend:That was written as:See the relevant section of the FAQ.
It's not the shape of the base that I'm concerned about. It's the angle between the base and the sides. Looking at it from the side, most prisms look like this:
/ / /
----
| |
| |
| |
----
But there's nothing preventing you from creating a prism that looks like this:
----
/
/
/
----
That's what I mean. To describe the GameCube, the base has to be at right angles to the sides. If you don't put the word "right" into the description of the solid, you are not constraining it, and the prism could very well be non-right, as in the second drawing.
The French might be "prisme droit a base rectangulaire", but I'm not positive.
Wouldn't that be a "right rectangular parallelpiped" or "right retangular prism"? Gotta get that right angle in there. Prisms don't have to have to extrude at 90 degrees.
Fair enough. The original poster was mainly talking graphics (I believe), so I was only considering the graphics portion. I stand corrected.
Um, Windows has OpenGL. The only reason I can see to use DirectX is if you want the functionality that DX9 gives you that is not available in OpenGL, or if ATI/nVidia drivers are broken for something in OpenGL and there is no workaround.
We must be grammar/spelling masochists to endure the likes of /. No j/k.
"make it easier for buglers and terrorists"
That's right! Watch out, you buglers! Your renditions of Taps, Reveille, and Charge might be seriously scrutinized by the Department of Homeland Security!
Oh, wait, you meant burglars... never mind...
This is why the whole stem cell thing is so important, and should not be constarined [sic] in the way it is (For those who object to it on moral grounds saying it encourages abortions, it doesn't. The abortion doctor who made sales pitches like that to pregant women would be shot on principle.)
These sales pitches aren't made to pregnant women. They're made to dissectionists. Pregnant women are not the only people who pay for the services of an abortion clinic. On the other end are the dissectionists who pay for the privilege of using the discarded "tissue". Here's a reference, though it's graphic in its descriptions.
And, for the record, I am pro-life, so no flames from pro-lifers on the stem cell stuff like last time.
I'd like a bit of clarification of what you mean by "pro-life". If you believe that a fertilized embryo is a person, deserving of all the respect due a person, then why would you believe that embryonic stem cell research should be unconstrained? If, instead, you mean stem cell research that does not involve the destruction of an embryo (placental, umbilical, etc.), then I can understand you. But if you believe that embryonic stem cell research should be unconstrained, that implies that you believe that embryos are not as deserving of life as a person. That doesn't fit any definition of pro-life that I know.
I would honestly like to know how you reconcile these.
As for the overall point of your article, completely mastery over all of medical science, I'd watch out for the moral implications of the journey. Using an extreme example to illustrate a point, the Nazi's medical experiments were trying to do exactly that. While on the road to medical mastery (which I agree is a worthwhile goal), you have to watch out how you go about it. Not all routes are desirable ones.