...not all of the benefit of open source...[is in] the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.
He makes the claim that there are benefits other than saving money. And that other benefit is... wait for it...having more money in the budget.
Re:How does it compare on windows?
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
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· Score: 1
It'd be interresting to know how this release compares to other OpenGL implementations on Windows.
Compares how? In performance? Or in accuracy?
Performance numbers wouldn't mean much, since Mesa is software-based.
As for accuracy, from what I've heard from colleagues, it's sometimes annoying to program OpenGL for Windows since it's not very compliant. I have not seen results of running the standard OpenGL conformance tests on Windows.
Looking through that particular ruling, it only rules on the particular matter of binding arbitration in Santa Clara county. It's a fairly involved ruling, and does set the precident that a EULA can be considered an "inconscionable" (sp?) contract, rendering some sections unenforcable.
At the core, the ruling says that EULAs are like any other contract, and fall under standard contract law. There are rules that contracts have to abide by (for instance, it cannot be wholly one-sided; both parties must benefit).
Did you know that there is a chain of private schools whose selling point is that they have no computers?
God, how wonderful!! And I'm dead serious.
Give a computer to a dummy, leave him with it for a month, and what do you have? A dummy with a computer.
Give a computer to a genius, leave him with it for a month, and what do you have? Magic.
It's not the computer that makes the difference, it's the knowledge of the person in front of the computer. And it's not the computer that gives the person the knowledge.
The hard part of education is not solved by having a digital processor. It is not solved by having access to the internet. It's not even handled by teaching word processing, how to use a spreadsheet, or how to make a web page.
The heart of education is learning how to reason, think, and infer relationships between various pieces of information. The computer is no more useful in a school than a pencil. Education does not flow from it unbidden.
Along those lines, I actually consider computers to be a distraction in the classroom. The same education lessons can be taught without them, and more effectively. And I don't mean trade skills. I mean education.
And to put this in context, I'm a far cry from a Luddite. I'm a career computer scientist who works on some of the largest computers in the world.
Re:3d displays cannot work
on
3D LCD Display
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· Score: 1
Good work.
Man, you're getting a lotta flames for what was actually a fairly well written article.
Something that a lot of people seem to either not know, or conveniently forget, is that stem cells can be retrieved from sources other than embryos. Vast amounts can be harvested from placentas, even more than can be harvested from an embryo. They can also be retrieved from umbilical cords. Scientists have even been able to find useful stem cells from adult muscle tissue.
The point is that this is not a medical issue. All of the research benefits from embryonic stem cell use can be realized through the use of stem cells that are done without the destruction of a single embryo.
This is a pro-life/pro-choice issue. The question is one of whether you believe that a developing fetus/embryo is a person, and if its destruction is destroying a person.
Well, I'll give a couple of counterexample: The Photoshop native file format is well understood by the open source community. The data file format of 3D Studio is pretty transparent. I'm sure I could find plenty of other examples.
In terms of the discussion at hand about open source in government, here's what should happen: There should be an open standards body that defines data file formats. All documents that the federal, state, and local governments produce for consumption by the public must be written in those formats. Considering the weight of the government in software purchases, I would think that, if this were mandated, vendors would start making it easier to save in these open formats so as to cater to such a large customer.
Should governments spend tax dollars to buy closed, proprietary applications that lock the people's data into tightly protected formats?
You're presupposing that all closed-source apps have a closed data format. You and I both know that that's simply not true.
What *should* be mandated is that all information that is accessible to the public is in a data format that is open. We as the public really don't care how the government gets it there.
No. That should be able to be done with normal environment mapping (if I'm understanding you correctly).
I meant a lot of the demos that I saw in the "When Will Ray-Tracing Replace Rasterization" panel on Tuesday. The first presenter (Philipp Slusallek from the Universitat des Saarlandes) was showing an app that raytraced a conference room in real time. It would progressively recompute the diffuse interreflection solution whenever you changed the position of the chairs and such. It was also running interactive on the show floor at RackSavers.
The GPU-based raytracer was described in the "Graphics Hardware" talks on Friday. The authors were Tim Purcell and Ian Buck from Stanford.
I do agree with you that we're at the "baby step" stage. These are very small things - very specific to show something special.
But it's been shown that a GPU can compute a general Renderman shader, though it may take hundreds of passes. The advent of the vertex and pixel processors make the gap a lot smaller than most people think. And it's getting smaller every day.
Do you honestly think that gpu's are going to be able to achieve real-time radiosity in next couple years? Real time raytracing like renderes have now? Hundreds of thousands of blades of grass with no tricks? Individual hairs? Do you think that will happen anytime soon?
I used to think as you do. That was before I got a large amount of education while attending Siggraph this year.
At Siggraph, I saw a live demonstration of a real-time raytracer that was also computing a diffuse interreflection solution (radiosity-like, for those who don't understand) on the fly. I also saw a real-time recursive raytracer written by Stanford researchers that was implemented in a GPU's pixel shader. There is currently research on displacement map "textures" that could conceivably let you render thousands of blades of grass or individual hairs without having to send all of that geometry down the AGP bus.
All of these things blow the doors off what people think a graphics chip can do. Your post would have been accurate last year. Not now.
I will agree with one point: software-based rendering will always be able to compute certain effects that will be difficult or cumbersome to do in a GPU. But I'll also claim that the gap is dramatically shrinking.
I'll also say that the two techniques are not really in conflict. You can use them both in conjunction with each other. You can use a hardware-accelerated Z-buffer to help a raytracer determine first-level occlusion. You can use a raytracer to generate textures and maps for a GPU. In the future, we will see both techniques used to compliment each other.
You must have a different perspective than I do. That's not what I read from that post.
About the only "down" thing he mentioned was that he realized at 30 that he wasted a lot of his life. That doesn't mean that he wasted all of his life. It doesn't mean that nothing rewarding came from it.
You're assuming the converse, which is a logical fallacy. Too many people do it nowadays.
Since Chromium allows applications to demonstrate pretty much linear scalability as nodes are added, I would guess that they got interactive frame rates. At least, that's what I've seen with Chromium displaying to one of those displays at Stanford.
Slashdot Mirror
wait for it...having more money in the budget.
Um, that's the same thing, dude!
Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7, Line 66?
It'd be interresting to know how this release compares to other OpenGL implementations on Windows.
Compares how? In performance? Or in accuracy?
Performance numbers wouldn't mean much, since Mesa is software-based.
As for accuracy, from what I've heard from colleagues, it's sometimes annoying to program OpenGL for Windows since it's not very compliant. I have not seen results of running the standard OpenGL conformance tests on Windows.
Or even better: Copy Restricted
...programmers should submit all legal correspondence in ... Perl...
:-)
If we did that, it would just as unreadable as the legalese itself!
Looking through that particular ruling, it only rules on the particular matter of binding arbitration in Santa Clara county. It's a fairly involved ruling, and does set the precident that a EULA can be considered an "inconscionable" (sp?) contract, rendering some sections unenforcable.
At the core, the ruling says that EULAs are like any other contract, and fall under standard contract law. There are rules that contracts have to abide by (for instance, it cannot be wholly one-sided; both parties must benefit).
With all that said, IANAL.
Or is that -1? :-)
What really gets me is that you know that he did it for 20 minutes. Watched it all the way to the end to see how that plot twist resolved eh? ;-)
And yet, even in the throes of 9/11, Slashdot itself fared better than CNN, MSNBC, Foxnews, and others.
I may be falling for a troll, but here goes....
Did you know that there is a chain of private schools whose selling point is that they have no computers?
God, how wonderful!! And I'm dead serious.
Give a computer to a dummy, leave him with it for a month, and what do you have? A dummy with a computer.
Give a computer to a genius, leave him with it for a month, and what do you have? Magic.
It's not the computer that makes the difference, it's the knowledge of the person in front of the computer. And it's not the computer that gives the person the knowledge.
The hard part of education is not solved by having a digital processor. It is not solved by having access to the internet. It's not even handled by teaching word processing, how to use a spreadsheet, or how to make a web page.
The heart of education is learning how to reason, think, and infer relationships between various pieces of information. The computer is no more useful in a school than a pencil. Education does not flow from it unbidden.
Along those lines, I actually consider computers to be a distraction in the classroom. The same education lessons can be taught without them, and more effectively. And I don't mean trade skills. I mean education.
And to put this in context, I'm a far cry from a Luddite. I'm a career computer scientist who works on some of the largest computers in the world.
Good work.
Man, you're getting a lotta flames for what was actually a fairly well written article.
Why not make those things links so that people don't have to cut and paste them? You'd even get around the 'pasted space' issue.
Why not make a link so that people can use it easily?
Something that a lot of people seem to either not know, or conveniently forget, is that stem cells can be retrieved from sources other than embryos. Vast amounts can be harvested from placentas, even more than can be harvested from an embryo. They can also be retrieved from umbilical cords. Scientists have even been able to find useful stem cells from adult muscle tissue.
The point is that this is not a medical issue. All of the research benefits from embryonic stem cell use can be realized through the use of stem cells that are done without the destruction of a single embryo.
This is a pro-life/pro-choice issue. The question is one of whether you believe that a developing fetus/embryo is a person, and if its destruction is destroying a person.
I'm guessing that the password was one of:
1) "password"
2) The same as the account name. Like having "root"'s password be "root".
Than what is it?
Can you not call the poles of a colorspace "colors"?
If you aren't going to call it a color, what epsilon away from pure black or pure white do you choose before you can actually call it a color?
There's a good chance that this might be a hoax.
...at how far we've fallen.
Ship it to me! ... I will take ... anything related to electronics...
:-)
Methinks Pyrosz must have a mailing address in China.
applications...all save in closed formats.
Well, I'll give a couple of counterexample: The Photoshop native file format is well understood by the open source community. The data file format of 3D Studio is pretty transparent. I'm sure I could find plenty of other examples.
In terms of the discussion at hand about open source in government, here's what should happen: There should be an open standards body that defines data file formats. All documents that the federal, state, and local governments produce for consumption by the public must be written in those formats. Considering the weight of the government in software purchases, I would think that, if this were mandated, vendors would start making it easier to save in these open formats so as to cater to such a large customer.
Should governments spend tax dollars to buy closed, proprietary applications that lock the people's data into tightly protected formats?
You're presupposing that all closed-source apps have a closed data format. You and I both know that that's simply not true.
What *should* be mandated is that all information that is accessible to the public is in a data format that is open. We as the public really don't care how the government gets it there.
car reflecting the texture map
No. That should be able to be done with normal environment mapping (if I'm understanding you correctly).
I meant a lot of the demos that I saw in the "When Will Ray-Tracing Replace Rasterization" panel on Tuesday. The first presenter (Philipp Slusallek from the Universitat des Saarlandes) was showing an app that raytraced a conference room in real time. It would progressively recompute the diffuse interreflection solution whenever you changed the position of the chairs and such. It was also running interactive on the show floor at RackSavers.
The GPU-based raytracer was described in the "Graphics Hardware" talks on Friday. The authors were Tim Purcell and Ian Buck from Stanford.
I do agree with you that we're at the "baby step" stage. These are very small things - very specific to show something special.
But it's been shown that a GPU can compute a general Renderman shader, though it may take hundreds of passes. The advent of the vertex and pixel processors make the gap a lot smaller than most people think. And it's getting smaller every day.
Do you honestly think that gpu's are going to be able to achieve real-time radiosity in next couple years? Real time raytracing like renderes have now? Hundreds of thousands of blades of grass with no tricks? Individual hairs? Do you think that will happen anytime soon?
I used to think as you do. That was before I got a large amount of education while attending Siggraph this year.
At Siggraph, I saw a live demonstration of a real-time raytracer that was also computing a diffuse interreflection solution (radiosity-like, for those who don't understand) on the fly. I also saw a real-time recursive raytracer written by Stanford researchers that was implemented in a GPU's pixel shader. There is currently research on displacement map "textures" that could conceivably let you render thousands of blades of grass or individual hairs without having to send all of that geometry down the AGP bus.
All of these things blow the doors off what people think a graphics chip can do. Your post would have been accurate last year. Not now.
I will agree with one point: software-based rendering will always be able to compute certain effects that will be difficult or cumbersome to do in a GPU. But I'll also claim that the gap is dramatically shrinking.
I'll also say that the two techniques are not really in conflict. You can use them both in conjunction with each other. You can use a hardware-accelerated Z-buffer to help a raytracer determine first-level occlusion. You can use a raytracer to generate textures and maps for a GPU. In the future, we will see both techniques used to compliment each other.
You must have a different perspective than I do. That's not what I read from that post.
About the only "down" thing he mentioned was that he realized at 30 that he wasted a lot of his life. That doesn't mean that he wasted all of his life. It doesn't mean that nothing rewarding came from it.
You're assuming the converse, which is a logical fallacy. Too many people do it nowadays.
Since Chromium allows applications to demonstrate pretty much linear scalability as nodes are added, I would guess that they got interactive frame rates. At least, that's what I've seen with Chromium displaying to one of those displays at Stanford.