Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000 (give or take depending on aspect ratio, etc). Now, even assuming we could gang up 16 or 25 or whatever of these nvidia boards, we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film. All the hardware shortcuts and special-purpose circuitry in the latest video card are useless when it comes to final render for film, because they're not built into the gadget (and there are several different sorts) that's actually bombarding the emulsion with photons. (Typically some sort of three-pass (R,G,B) laser scanner).
Eh? You could easily read the contents of the video framebuffer out after it is finished rendering. Then you could save it to disk, spit it out to a special purpose film framebuffer or whatever. Yes, this is a relatively slow operation compared to writing to the videocard framebuffer, but if you're only rendering 2.5 frames per second anyway it would be a negligable hit.
There are tons of issues they are glossing over (the resolution issue you mentioned, the fact that current videocards dont have enough color precision for complex multipass effects and many others), but this 'VGA' issue isn't one of them.
At any rate, nobody who knows what they are talking about is saying that this process will replace traditional raytracing for film..but it a fairly good indicator of how quickly videocard performance and quality if progressing.
Also, it has other uses than a final render. If you can get a 'pretty good idea' of what a particular scene will look like at near realtime rates it would speed up some processes (like light placement for a scene) tremendously.
Lucky thing you didn't change majors to English or research/journalism.
Anyway, the computer software field will be better off without you. CS isn't about learning specific languages; it is about learning universal concepts. Specific languages are a dime a dozen and anyone who bothers to learn the basics correctly can pick up a new language in a matter of days.
Some people (particularly Linux sysadmins) are too dumb to learn a real language like Smalltalk or C++, and so they need to rely on hack languages like Perl or Python to get things done.
Huh? I think you are missing the point. Kevin seemed to miss the point too in his "apology" post.
I doubt anyone thought George Tirebiter was someone's real name...
Nobody cares that these troll posts were made using an alias, per se, they care that the person using the alias to post trolls was also an editor. The name he used, and its ability to be easily recognized as a pseudonym are totally irrelevant.
Considering how tame most of the LinuxToday talkbacks to his apology are, I think its safe to say they plan to continue censoring posts that oppose the views of the editors...
Considering THIS post, to the LT talkback:
Thank you for the apology. Here is one reader who appreciates it and will continue to recommend Linux Today as _the_ premier news site for all things Linux.
Cheers,
Caleb
How much do you want to bet Kevin Reichard is still posting under assumed names? I mean c'mon, at least be more subtle!
WTF? Since when are lawyers qualified to decide on technology issues? I'd understand if they were to review the legalities of the standard (patents and all that crap), but the standard itself?
Obviously it IS the legality of the standard they are interested in. They will all want to go over the spec with a fine tooth comb to make sure they don't wind up with another RAMBUS fiasco.
Yes, I realize RAMBUS's patents werent actually published at time of the memory standards meeting, they were still pending, but that whole incident has definately raised the amount of due diligence companies are putting into the legal end of standards committees. It makes no sense for AMD to endorse the standard going forward if, for example, it wound up that they would have to pay Intel a bunch of royalties on every chip they sold because they needed to use some patented method for the CPU to talk to add-in cards over this bus.
Yup, the window decorations and the docking bar with start button down at the bottom, and system tray to the bottom right all point to it being Windows (could be an X WM that tries really hard to look like Windows, but unlikely).
Anyway it definately looks a lot more like a mockup than a real prototype.
You might want to keep in mind that any scripts you write to fix compromised Code Red servers will technically be hack attempts (you will be accessing computer systems you are not authorized to access).
Despite the best intentions you will be breaking the law. Keep that in mind.
Re:Badass compression algorithm?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 2
Wouldn't work, as others have pointed out the offset into pi will generally be as long (or usually very much longer) than the message you are trying to encode. The Max Payne ISO is a lot of bits. Given a random bit generator (pi or otherwise) imagine how likely it is that you'll find those bits in exactly the right order.
The offset, if ever found, would be huge. Information theory says it would have to be...Think of it backwards. You have thousands of ISOs all about the same size (650 megs or so, lets ignore any compression). These ISOs all have about the same number of bits but they have vastly different data. Now how could a predictable random bit source include the data for all these ISOs without being many times the size of any single ISO (meaning that most offsets will be bigger than any single ISO)? It just doesn't add up.
Ya know, I really want to pirate DirecTV, but not to get all the channels... just to get a damn FOX affiliate over my dish so I could use my DirecTivo for The Family Guy and That 70s Show. Is that to much to ask?
Is paying DirecTV for usage of their system too much to ask? Nobody really needs all those channels. People generally only get DirecTV for a couple of channels they wouldn't otherwise be able to get in their area. If DirecTV can offer these programs you want to watch in a better way than you can see them now, why not just pay for the service?
IMO Its really damaging to the Geek community to have people who want to pirate DirecTV yelling in chorus with the people who think the DMCA is evil and corporations are trying to strip us of fair use, etc. Just paints us as an unruly mob that wants everything for free.
And, before anyone posts the 'well they broadcast their signal onto my property' defense, I don't buy into that and never will. The fact that these same people would be outraged if they were videotaped and/or voice recorded if they walked by my property (despite the fact that they are reflecting light and broadcasting sound waves onto my property) just makes it more ridiculous.
Well, ok, there is a story here -- ATI vs NVidia (and perhaps by extention, Nintendo vs Microsoft).
But what's with all of these doom & gloom posts about fragmenting games for specific hardware? There's already a ton of features that may or may not be available in Direct3D or OpenGL depending upon your underlying hardware and driver. In Direct3D these are known as 'capabilities', in OpenGL they are 'extentions', in either API you can easily check for their existence.
Game developers are already doing this for features such as dot3 bumpmaping. Some boards support this feature in hardware, some don't, so your code is free to check to see if its available and use it if it is or ignore it (or fallback to some other method) if its not.
These shaders aren't really any different from that.. you write code to look at the shader version supported and either use 'new improved' shaders or 'older style shaders' depending upon the platform.
Yes, its more work for the programmer/artists to support a fallback mode, but that's the price of targetting cutting edge gaming hardware while still supporting users of older systems. It always has been and always will be.
As to the dramatic question of ATI vs NVidia, I'd say that NVidia has the early advantage due to the XBox. Considering how similar the XBOX graphics system is to the PC GeForce 3, its pretty much guaranteed that all of the major gaming engines being used to create most 'big' games these days will target GeForce3/XBOX features specifically, and features of 'other boards' (such as ATI) only as a bonus if there's enough time, or ATI lays down enough cash on a crossmarketing deal.
Of course, if Microsoft manages to flub the XBOX release to a staggering degree, all bets as to the future are off.
How do they define success? I find it hard to believe that Final Fantasy, while the games do sell many copies, is more successful overall than, say, Pokemon.
Yes. My #1 problem with the movie was related to the voice sync. Yes, the lip movements matched pretty well, but like the AC said, a lot of times the voice didn't really 'fit' with the scene or the character's movements. And in some cases (specifically Steve Buschemi's character) the character look just didnt match the voice at all, every time he spoke it was jarring...it was very hard to believe someone who looked like "that" would sound like "that". And, seeing Ben Affleck talking with Alec Baldwin's voice was strange too.
Though Disney is evil, their animations work much better (even with celebrity voices) because they generally tweak the character design to more accurately match the look of the real person behind the voice. This tends to make it much more believeable, because while there are odd exceptions (Mike Tyson comes to mind), people generally have a voice sound that matches their look.
As another poster pointed out above, an even more obvious parallel exists between this and JunkBuster. There's really no technical difference between the changes to the final presentation of a webpage made by JunkBuster or by this software.
I think that 'sneakware' (all types of software that is bundled with other software that does things users probably wouldn't want being done if they really realized what had been installed) is unethical and bad business for plenty of reasons, but attacking it based on this 'copyright' issue is opening a whole can of worms that would outrage the typical Slashdot user if the shoe were on the other foot.
voice recorders always sound different than your voice (to yourself). The bad news is what you hear on the recorder is a hell of a lot closer to how you actually sound to other people than what you hear yourself.
While I think it is rather terrible that people are suffering and dying of AIDS and many other problems throughout the world, throwing the money from this at those problems won't solve them. The issues of poverty and health care for 3rd world nations are more about politics (and sometimes religion, etc) than simple economics.
Space research is very important for the future. Just look back through history and you'll see that the Earth has been hit with extinction-causing space objects several times in the past. In fact we're just about due to be hit again within the next half million years or so. (Which could be, oh, next year, even, might not be so far away). Learning as much as we can so we can either 1) avoid this, by using our space technology to deflect such objects or 2) get some people colonizing other planets is very important. While it sucks that people are dying and living in poverty I think it would suck a lot more if the entire human race were wiped out by something we could have dealt with if we had properly planned.
I wouldn't bother to post this as its useless to the discussion of the article, but I figured people always post (and snicker) when an IIS site displays the equivilent of this, so I might as well put this troll/flamebait up.
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in/var/www/lib/auth.php on line 4
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in/var/www/lib/auth.php on line 5
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in/var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 9
Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in/var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 9
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in/var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 9
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in/var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 14
Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in/var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 14
Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at/var/www/lib/auth.php:4) in/var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 47
Do the Slashdot editors read the articles? Clearly they do not. This is an Australian "Innovation Patent". If you had read the article you would see this is really nothing more than a registration of an idea. Quick, easy, simple to do. Doesn't give the 'patent' holder any rights to lawsuits, etc, it's just an official registration of an idea.
The guy who patented the wheel wasn't really trying to make a point that patents were too easy to get, his point was that these "Innovation Patents" should be renamed so as not to be confused with *real* patents, where prior art, etc are actually researched. These "Innovation Patents" are just rubberstamped, basically like a way to notarize them for timing purposes (should someone want to prove prior art, or that they registered the idea first in the future).
Once again Slashdot editors show their ignorance of what they are even posting.
Let me quote from the Tcl license, as taken from
here.
Modifications to this software may be copyrighted by their authors and need not follow the licensing terms described here, provided that the new terms are clearly indicated on the first page of each file where they apply.
That sounds like the GPL to you? Maybe you need some new reading glasses.
This isn't a flame of the GPL in general, just the realities of the world given this type of software. Something like this should probably be released with a more general license. LGPL, if you want to stick with the GNU crowd. How many *successful* embeddable-focused GPLed scripting systems are there? Uhm, none.
Of course, in the end the choice of license is completely up to the author of the software... so be it.
I personally don't have trouble remember a number of passwords because I usually use these passwords nearly every day. (Actually a lot of my passwords are more in finger-memory than brain-memory. Can't for the life of me recall what the exact sequence is unless I am typing it!)
Most people tend to use their passwords much less than that, though, and if you don't use them on a regular basis it can be pretty tough to recall, even if your memory for such things is generally good.
Slashdot Mirror
God damn it. Yet another Korea-centric article. When are the Slashdot editors going to realize there's more to the world than just Korea?
Eh? You could easily read the contents of the video framebuffer out after it is finished rendering. Then you could save it to disk, spit it out to a special purpose film framebuffer or whatever. Yes, this is a relatively slow operation compared to writing to the videocard framebuffer, but if you're only rendering 2.5 frames per second anyway it would be a negligable hit.
There are tons of issues they are glossing over (the resolution issue you mentioned, the fact that current videocards dont have enough color precision for complex multipass effects and many others), but this 'VGA' issue isn't one of them.
At any rate, nobody who knows what they are talking about is saying that this process will replace traditional raytracing for film..but it a fairly good indicator of how quickly videocard performance and quality if progressing.
Also, it has other uses than a final render. If you can get a 'pretty good idea' of what a particular scene will look like at near realtime rates it would speed up some processes (like light placement for a scene) tremendously.
"would of had"?
Lucky thing you didn't change majors to English or research/journalism.
Anyway, the computer software field will be better off without you. CS isn't about learning specific languages; it is about learning universal concepts. Specific languages are a dime a dozen and anyone who bothers to learn the basics correctly can pick up a new language in a matter of days.
Some people (particularly Linux sysadmins) are too dumb to learn a real language like Smalltalk or C++, and so they need to rely on hack languages like Perl or Python to get things done.
I doubt anyone thought George Tirebiter was someone's real name...
Nobody cares that these troll posts were made using an alias, per se, they care that the person using the alias to post trolls was also an editor. The name he used, and its ability to be easily recognized as a pseudonym are totally irrelevant.
Considering THIS post, to the LT talkback:
Thank you for the apology. Here is one reader who appreciates it and will continue to recommend Linux Today as _the_ premier news site for all things Linux.
Cheers,
Caleb
How much do you want to bet Kevin Reichard is still posting under assumed names? I mean c'mon, at least be more subtle!
They should call it the bizzigity bizz-us
Obviously it IS the legality of the standard they are interested in. They will all want to go over the spec with a fine tooth comb to make sure they don't wind up with another RAMBUS fiasco.
Yes, I realize RAMBUS's patents werent actually published at time of the memory standards meeting, they were still pending, but that whole incident has definately raised the amount of due diligence companies are putting into the legal end of standards committees. It makes no sense for AMD to endorse the standard going forward if, for example, it wound up that they would have to pay Intel a bunch of royalties on every chip they sold because they needed to use some patented method for the CPU to talk to add-in cards over this bus.
Yup, the window decorations and the docking bar with start button down at the bottom, and system tray to the bottom right all point to it being Windows (could be an X WM that tries really hard to look like Windows, but unlikely). Anyway it definately looks a lot more like a mockup than a real prototype.
Despite the best intentions you will be breaking the law. Keep that in mind.
The offset, if ever found, would be huge. Information theory says it would have to be...Think of it backwards. You have thousands of ISOs all about the same size (650 megs or so, lets ignore any compression). These ISOs all have about the same number of bits but they have vastly different data. Now how could a predictable random bit source include the data for all these ISOs without being many times the size of any single ISO (meaning that most offsets will be bigger than any single ISO)? It just doesn't add up.
Is paying DirecTV for usage of their system too much to ask? Nobody really needs all those channels. People generally only get DirecTV for a couple of channels they wouldn't otherwise be able to get in their area. If DirecTV can offer these programs you want to watch in a better way than you can see them now, why not just pay for the service?
IMO Its really damaging to the Geek community to have people who want to pirate DirecTV yelling in chorus with the people who think the DMCA is evil and corporations are trying to strip us of fair use, etc. Just paints us as an unruly mob that wants everything for free.
And, before anyone posts the 'well they broadcast their signal onto my property' defense, I don't buy into that and never will. The fact that these same people would be outraged if they were videotaped and/or voice recorded if they walked by my property (despite the fact that they are reflecting light and broadcasting sound waves onto my property) just makes it more ridiculous.
But what's with all of these doom & gloom posts about fragmenting games for specific hardware? There's already a ton of features that may or may not be available in Direct3D or OpenGL depending upon your underlying hardware and driver. In Direct3D these are known as 'capabilities', in OpenGL they are 'extentions', in either API you can easily check for their existence.
Game developers are already doing this for features such as dot3 bumpmaping. Some boards support this feature in hardware, some don't, so your code is free to check to see if its available and use it if it is or ignore it (or fallback to some other method) if its not.
These shaders aren't really any different from that.. you write code to look at the shader version supported and either use 'new improved' shaders or 'older style shaders' depending upon the platform.
Yes, its more work for the programmer/artists to support a fallback mode, but that's the price of targetting cutting edge gaming hardware while still supporting users of older systems. It always has been and always will be.
As to the dramatic question of ATI vs NVidia, I'd say that NVidia has the early advantage due to the XBox. Considering how similar the XBOX graphics system is to the PC GeForce 3, its pretty much guaranteed that all of the major gaming engines being used to create most 'big' games these days will target GeForce3/XBOX features specifically, and features of 'other boards' (such as ATI) only as a bonus if there's enough time, or ATI lays down enough cash on a crossmarketing deal.
Of course, if Microsoft manages to flub the XBOX release to a staggering degree, all bets as to the future are off.
How do they define success? I find it hard to believe that Final Fantasy, while the games do sell many copies, is more successful overall than, say, Pokemon.
Though Disney is evil, their animations work much better (even with celebrity voices) because they generally tweak the character design to more accurately match the look of the real person behind the voice. This tends to make it much more believeable, because while there are odd exceptions (Mike Tyson comes to mind), people generally have a voice sound that matches their look.
Anyway, the one thing Final Fantasy has in common with Open Source business is that it lost a huge ton of money.
I think that 'sneakware' (all types of software that is bundled with other software that does things users probably wouldn't want being done if they really realized what had been installed) is unethical and bad business for plenty of reasons, but attacking it based on this 'copyright' issue is opening a whole can of worms that would outrage the typical Slashdot user if the shoe were on the other foot.
That was a good post except for the last paragraph where you reveal that you are psychotic.
voice recorders always sound different than your voice (to yourself). The bad news is what you hear on the recorder is a hell of a lot closer to how you actually sound to other people than what you hear yourself.
Space research is very important for the future. Just look back through history and you'll see that the Earth has been hit with extinction-causing space objects several times in the past. In fact we're just about due to be hit again within the next half million years or so. (Which could be, oh, next year, even, might not be so far away). Learning as much as we can so we can either 1) avoid this, by using our space technology to deflect such objects or 2) get some people colonizing other planets is very important. While it sucks that people are dying and living in poverty I think it would suck a lot more if the entire human race were wiped out by something we could have dealt with if we had properly planned.
I wouldn't bother to post this as its useless to the discussion of the article, but I figured people always post (and snicker) when an IIS site displays the equivilent of this, so I might as well put this troll/flamebait up.
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in /var/www/lib/auth.php on line 4
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /var/www/lib/auth.php on line 5
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in /var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 9
Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in /var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 9
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 9
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in /var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 14
Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in /var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 14
Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/lib/auth.php:4) in /var/www/html/web_quilt/index.php on line 47
The guy who patented the wheel wasn't really trying to make a point that patents were too easy to get, his point was that these "Innovation Patents" should be renamed so as not to be confused with *real* patents, where prior art, etc are actually researched. These "Innovation Patents" are just rubberstamped, basically like a way to notarize them for timing purposes (should someone want to prove prior art, or that they registered the idea first in the future).
Once again Slashdot editors show their ignorance of what they are even posting.
Let me quote from the Tcl license, as taken from here.
Modifications to this software may be copyrighted by their authors and need not follow the licensing terms described here, provided that the new terms are clearly indicated on the first page of each file where they apply.
That sounds like the GPL to you? Maybe you need some new reading glasses.
Of course, in the end the choice of license is completely up to the author of the software... so be it.
I personally don't have trouble remember a number of passwords because I usually use these passwords nearly every day. (Actually a lot of my passwords are more in finger-memory than brain-memory. Can't for the life of me recall what the exact sequence is unless I am typing it!)
Most people tend to use their passwords much less than that, though, and if you don't use them on a regular basis it can be pretty tough to recall, even if your memory for such things is generally good.