Re:Difficulties for beginning programmers
on
Hacking Quartz
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· Score: 1
The problem is higher expectations. Starting programming in a simple system, a newbie will be happy to create a tiny game or just something that reacts to keystrokes. Starting on Windows, nothing less than a full application or 3D shooter game is going to interest them. Then when they fail to produce a complex program right off the bat, they will be disappointed. It's not more difficult now, but expectations are so much higher that people get disappointed when they can't start producing Word and Quake right off the bat.
No, return policies are not the problem. They are quite useful, especially with consumer electronics. The problem is the retarded *rebates*. They're just a scam. If rebates were really about saving you money, Best Buy could file the forms for you electronically using your credit card information and the manufacturers could debit your card the same day. Heck, they could just reduce the price. The only reason they offer rebates is for the extra six months they get to keep your money and the possibility that you'll forget to file the forms or do it incorrectly, so they can keep your money forever (which I'm sure happens often enough to make offering rebates profitable).
You are missing the point of a blacklist. Sure, blacklists can help slow undesired activity such as spam and fraud, but a lot still gets through, and nobody is debating that. The _real_ point of a blacklist is to _motivate_ people to fix the problems at the source. If Macedonia really was cut off from the Internet due to fraud, they wouldn't just sit there. They would start a crackdown on fraud so that they could get their Internet back. Sure, there's collateral damage. But what about all the people who would have been defrauded? Surely they should be counted as damage prevented. What about the increased security of the Internet as a whole, leading to higher worldwide trust of Internet businesses and Internet growth? I believe these things are much larger than the collateral damage.
The lenses are a big problem. They are large, delicate, and expensive. This projector uses no lenses. Powerful LEDs would help too, but that technology is orthogonal to this technology. Both can help reduce projector size, weight, cost, and power usage.
You don't have to pay for IPv6. It's a free open standard developed by an international community process that anyone can join. If China wanted their concerns addressed in IPv6, they should have joined the IPv6 mailing list and made the changes themselves. Having a huge segment of the Internet using a different protocol than everyone else, even if it's "compatible" (yeah, right), is bad for the future of the Internet.
Phong shading isn't _that_ much better-looking than gouraud shading in most cases (diffusely reflecting surfaces). I'd say more effort should be expended looking into high-dynamic-range rendering, depth-of-field and focusing effects, global lighting and soft shadows, and better techniques for animating human characters.
The last one, in particular, is my pet peeve. Game developers have been so obsessed with graphics over the past years that they have failed to notice that the graphics are actually becoming *more* realistic than some other parts of their games. I think that the least realistic part of many games (besides their stories of course;-) has to be to the animation of the human characters. Video game character movements are quite recognizable and distinct from normal human movements. Long sequences of unbroken motion capture animation can look quite good, but the transitions between animations are always jarring, and seeing the same motion capture data over and over becomes repetitive quickly. Ragdoll physics are good for dead people, but animating live people remains a challenge. There needs to be something analagous to ragdoll physics for animating controlled actions such as walking, punching, getting punched, etc. Stored animation just won't cut it for the next generation of extremely realistic graphics. Characters that look cartoony and move like robots are OK, but characters that actually look like real people and move like robots look dumb.
This article is great, Joel is a genious, and it's all because of the one paragraph in the article where he answers your question #1.
Joel has explained the reason Internet Explorer's development hit a wall a year or two ago. All you people asking why Internet Explorer's standards compliance hasn't gotten any better, why it hasn't gotten tabbed browsing, etc, now you have your answer. It's a very good reason (for Microsoft), and it's obvious in retrospect, but I sure didn't think of it until I read these few sentences:
Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client.
Microsoft can't afford to make IE any better, because if was improved one or two generations more, the kinds of web applications that would become possible would make Windows irrelevant as a platform. Everyone would be developing for the web instead of Win32 or.NET or Avalon or whatever. Internet Explorer development has come to a screeching halt except for things which are absolutely necessary to avoid losing its #1 browser position (because for Microsoft the only thing worse than an improved IE is an improved Mozilla!). This is the reason why.
Even if the path Mapquest gives you is not the optimal one, it is still an extremely valuable resource for trip planning in unfamiliar areas (though Yahoo maps is really better, especially because of its excellent yellow pages integration). I don't know how I ever got anywhere without Mapquest. In a situation where you are at war in an unfamiliar area and you can't go around asking the locals where to go, something like Mapquest could be a lifesaver, literally.
Don't confuse this new IP network with today's short-range wireless Internet technologies. A hand-held IP based radio, if working with the same power on the same frequencies as an old analog radio, would have the same range in the absence of routing (perhaps better due to more efficient and error-tolerant digital transmission). But if a routed Internet connection is available, suddenly that range becomes the whole world. With mesh networking technology, range could be extended even in the absence of a wired internet connection, but I don't think this would really be scaleable beyond two or three hops.
For some applications, high power transmitters and/or long-range frequency bands could be used; for others low power and/or short-range frequencies. It would be one unified network, completely IP based, but not every device would have to use the same frequencies.
There is value in having a few bands reserved for low-tech emergency beacons or communication, so at least a few bands should be kept open. But for most other communication, a unified IP network is the way to go.
That analogy to computer part compatibility is flawed because computer parts aren't a limited resource in the same way spectrum is. If I go out and buy a computer part that's incompatible with yours, it doesn't cause your part to stop working. With radio, things are different. Regulation of some sort is without a doubt necessary to ensure that the spectrum doesn't become hopelessly polluted with competing products and therefore useless.
In an ideal world, the FCC would realize that 99% of current and future communications needs would be better served by a standard high-speed wireless IP network instead of the amazing mishmash of specialized protocol bands we have now. It would rearrange current spectrum allocation to phase out legacy systems and give almost all the useful communications bands to a new protocol (or small set of protocols) based around IP communication. This new wireless network would become part of the Internet. Efficient compressed digital data could replace jillions of old inefficient analog technologies (police radios, CB radios, AM/FM radio, TV, etc) and unify tons of existing digital standards (HDTV, CDMA/TDMA/GSM/3G cell phones, DirecTV/Dish network satellite TV, 802.11x, etc). With all of those bands available to it, the new IP network would have insane amounts of raw bandwidth to play with.
Before this could become a reality, some work would have to be done to adapt the ideas of IP QoS and multicasting to the realities of radio transmission so that things like TV and radio could be done efficiently over a wireless IP network. I haven't been following developments in IP multicasting technologies; are they mature enough to be useful for things like TV?
The technique they're using is not a marketing technique, it's simple economics. Professionals will pay more for their equipment than consumers will. However, Canon can't just charge professionals a different price for the same product. Instead they create a product that differs in ways only professionals care about. Then they sell it for a lot more than the consumer version even though it's not much more expensive to make. This way, Canon comes closer to charging everybody the maximum price they would be willing to pay, increasing their profits.
Before you go crying out the evils of the capitalist society that rewards such behavior, though, remember that anybody else can make cameras too and sell them for less. In fact people have an incentive to do this, because if they do they will steal Canon's market for themselves and make a lot of money. The price will be driven down by competition eventually. It can only be propped up by things like brand name recognition, patents, or monopolistic behavior.
Requiring extra linux-specific code just to get decent performance is dumb. Sounds to me like the kernel needs a simple profiler to assess the way files are being accessed. Large file + sequential access = read-ahead w/ small cache; large file + random access = large cache w/ recent pieces; small files + repeated access = large cache holding complete files; etc. Would this not solve the problem for everyone?
Of course they do that already. But there's only so low the power consumption can go and still provide reasonable performance.
Personally, I think the laptop fuel cell mentioned in the article is a million times more interesting than this battery. Available as soon as 2007, they say, with capacity about four times higher than conventional batteries and of course the ability to be refueled instantly.
Red vs. Blue is way more awesome than The Onion. I can't believe it didn't win something. The Onion is funny, but it's won the humor people's choice webby _every year_ since humor became a category; only once has it been upset in the non-people's-choice awards. Come on people; The Onion isn't the only funny thing on the web.
If a single IK chain can bring down your CPU, you're not doing the right optimizations. Game IK can be extremely heavily optimized for particular situations. For example, you can figure out what kinds of solutions are impossible ahead of time and do a simple check to eliminate them before doing all your IK calculations. I have been experimenting with this method for simulating physics. It is very fast, and it lends itself to an extremely simple method of doing IK that takes up no processor time besides that already used for the physics simulation. It's pretty neat stuff.
Kinematics doesn't require large amounts of processor time. In fact kinematics are widely used (skeletal animation systems = kinematics), but they don't solve the kinds of problems I'm talking about. Kinematics works well for, say, letting a character point their gun in any direction. But it just doesn't apply to a complex walking animation. Kinematics won't help you realistically transition from a standing animation to a running animation, that requires a separate transition animation. And what if you suddenly turn around and run in the opposite direction you were looking? Another animation is necessary, or else the character will do something unrealistic while blending between the turning and running animations, like slip their feet across the ground. And then what if you get hit while doing these things? In the left foot? In the right hand? In the head? What if you jump, or run into a wall while all this is going on? Or go over a cliff?
Kinematics can't help you generate realistic animations for these situations. What is needed is technology that generates realistic-looking animations from high-level descriptions of what the character is doing, on the fly. That kind of technology doesn't exist right now.
Yeah, the animations for the characters in that video were amazingly awful. If you play back the animation of Link's backflip slowly, it looks pretty retarded. When Link gets hit in the feet by that lizard's tail, he just does a generic "oops, I got hit" animation that looks like he blocked it with his shield at chest height, plus his feet slide slowly along the ground. In Nintendo's defense, many fighting games have these types of problems, and gamers are used to it, but for some reason these animations are worse than usual. It detracts from the realism so much. Isn't it time somebody came out with cool technology to solve these kind of character animation problems instead of another way to do lens flare?
WHAT privacy issues? Google doesn't "read" your emails any more than Hotmail or Yahoo does. Every word you read or write on Hotmail or Yahoo is stored on their servers and even *processed by their CPUs* (gasp) just as much as it is on GMail. Hotmail/Yahoo's spam filters even analyze your messages for content. GMail also analyzes your messages for content. The only difference is that GMail makes a decision about what ads to show you in addition to filtering spam. That additional step has ZERO extra privacy implications for privacy concerns.
The privacy concerns start coming in if Google stores that information, correlates it with other information about you, and builds a database accessible by humans. But there is no indication that they do this, there is reason to believe that they wouldn't, and they are NO MORE LIKELY to do this than Hotmail or Yahoo. If you are really a privacy nut, you shouldn't be letting companies with unknown motives store and process all of your personal correspondence in the first place! Privacy concerns are inherent to all webmail. GMail is no worse than any other service, and I trust Google more than Microsoft or Yahoo.
A portion? That's the whole thing! Not very good quality, but it's all there. Interesting, he used 3dsmax, with no complex global illumination or subsurface scattering or anything? I guess a good artist is more important than good algorithms. Imagine the images he could create if he used photon mapping for global illumination and complex shaders with subsurface scattering for realistic skin!
Seems like the biggest problem in character rendering today is animation, not appearence. The girl moved stiffly and unrealistically in the video, and while the facial expressions showed emotion, they were obviously not real. The Final Fantasy movie had the same problem with faces, though they used motion capture for the movements I believe. There's gotta be a way to create realistic looking human movements without motion capture.
Those stubborn profs are welcome to use old textbooks, or fork the open textbook. But they might find that the open textbook contains materials that they want to use, and that maintaining their fork is more trouble than it's worth. I would put that as an advantage of the open textbook idea: adoption of standardized notation.
On the contrary, I think open textbooks could be the best thing to happen to education in quite a while. When you're taking a class, the textbook is almost never the only source of information the teacher uses, and you rarely go through the book in order from chapter 1 to the end. Every teacher thinks they can do better than the textbook author, and they all add supplements and additions that often contain good ideas, but are never seen outside of their own classrooms. With an open textbook approach, every teacher would be free to mix and match lessons from any source and put them together in any order they wanted. The "open textbook" need not be one single book, but could be a collection of pieces. Popular collections of pieces could be printed in bulk like normal textbooks, or teachers could print their own custom textbooks at Kinko's or whatever. All their new ideas and improvements could be submitted back to the open textbook repository for everyone to benefit from. Imagine using a textbook that was built from the combined wisdom of every teacher in the field!
With this system, nobody would have to write textbooks at all any more. All the material would already be written, but in a constant state of peer review and revision by people who have an interest in making it better. There would be no point in writing a "new" textbook; simply revising the open textbook to suit your needs would be much easier and would result in a better end product since the open textbook would be high quality starting material.
After following some links around, I found this project, which I think is more amazing than any of the stuff at the 3D awards. Look at this, and this, and this, and this.
More images can be found at the site.
There is so much detail in these images that I've never seen before in CG characters. With a tiny bit better lighting model for the skin and hair, these images would be indistinguishable from reality. Maybe the digital actor is coming sooner than we think.
Don't use leech sites like encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com. Use Wikipedia itself, where the content comes from, where it will be the most up-to-date, and where you can edit it yourself.
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The problem is higher expectations. Starting programming in a simple system, a newbie will be happy to create a tiny game or just something that reacts to keystrokes. Starting on Windows, nothing less than a full application or 3D shooter game is going to interest them. Then when they fail to produce a complex program right off the bat, they will be disappointed. It's not more difficult now, but expectations are so much higher that people get disappointed when they can't start producing Word and Quake right off the bat.
No, return policies are not the problem. They are quite useful, especially with consumer electronics. The problem is the retarded *rebates*. They're just a scam. If rebates were really about saving you money, Best Buy could file the forms for you electronically using your credit card information and the manufacturers could debit your card the same day. Heck, they could just reduce the price. The only reason they offer rebates is for the extra six months they get to keep your money and the possibility that you'll forget to file the forms or do it incorrectly, so they can keep your money forever (which I'm sure happens often enough to make offering rebates profitable).
You are missing the point of a blacklist. Sure, blacklists can help slow undesired activity such as spam and fraud, but a lot still gets through, and nobody is debating that. The _real_ point of a blacklist is to _motivate_ people to fix the problems at the source. If Macedonia really was cut off from the Internet due to fraud, they wouldn't just sit there. They would start a crackdown on fraud so that they could get their Internet back. Sure, there's collateral damage. But what about all the people who would have been defrauded? Surely they should be counted as damage prevented. What about the increased security of the Internet as a whole, leading to higher worldwide trust of Internet businesses and Internet growth? I believe these things are much larger than the collateral damage.
The lenses are a big problem. They are large, delicate, and expensive. This projector uses no lenses. Powerful LEDs would help too, but that technology is orthogonal to this technology. Both can help reduce projector size, weight, cost, and power usage.
You don't have to pay for IPv6. It's a free open standard developed by an international community process that anyone can join. If China wanted their concerns addressed in IPv6, they should have joined the IPv6 mailing list and made the changes themselves. Having a huge segment of the Internet using a different protocol than everyone else, even if it's "compatible" (yeah, right), is bad for the future of the Internet.
In my experience, the Windows Remote Desktop client is much faster than the Unix one, and more reliable too. It's not the protocol, it's the client.
The last one, in particular, is my pet peeve. Game developers have been so obsessed with graphics over the past years that they have failed to notice that the graphics are actually becoming *more* realistic than some other parts of their games. I think that the least realistic part of many games (besides their stories of course ;-) has to be to the animation of the human characters. Video game character movements are quite recognizable and distinct from normal human movements. Long sequences of unbroken motion capture animation can look quite good, but the transitions between animations are always jarring, and seeing the same motion capture data over and over becomes repetitive quickly. Ragdoll physics are good for dead people, but animating live people remains a challenge. There needs to be something analagous to ragdoll physics for animating controlled actions such as walking, punching, getting punched, etc. Stored animation just won't cut it for the next generation of extremely realistic graphics. Characters that look cartoony and move like robots are OK, but characters that actually look like real people and move like robots look dumb.
Joel has explained the reason Internet Explorer's development hit a wall a year or two ago. All you people asking why Internet Explorer's standards compliance hasn't gotten any better, why it hasn't gotten tabbed browsing, etc, now you have your answer. It's a very good reason (for Microsoft), and it's obvious in retrospect, but I sure didn't think of it until I read these few sentences:
Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client.
Microsoft can't afford to make IE any better, because if was improved one or two generations more, the kinds of web applications that would become possible would make Windows irrelevant as a platform. Everyone would be developing for the web instead of Win32 or .NET or Avalon or whatever. Internet Explorer development has come to a screeching halt except for things which are absolutely necessary to avoid losing its #1 browser position (because for Microsoft the only thing worse than an improved IE is an improved Mozilla!). This is the reason why.
Even if the path Mapquest gives you is not the optimal one, it is still an extremely valuable resource for trip planning in unfamiliar areas (though Yahoo maps is really better, especially because of its excellent yellow pages integration). I don't know how I ever got anywhere without Mapquest. In a situation where you are at war in an unfamiliar area and you can't go around asking the locals where to go, something like Mapquest could be a lifesaver, literally.
For some applications, high power transmitters and/or long-range frequency bands could be used; for others low power and/or short-range frequencies. It would be one unified network, completely IP based, but not every device would have to use the same frequencies.
There is value in having a few bands reserved for low-tech emergency beacons or communication, so at least a few bands should be kept open. But for most other communication, a unified IP network is the way to go.
In an ideal world, the FCC would realize that 99% of current and future communications needs would be better served by a standard high-speed wireless IP network instead of the amazing mishmash of specialized protocol bands we have now. It would rearrange current spectrum allocation to phase out legacy systems and give almost all the useful communications bands to a new protocol (or small set of protocols) based around IP communication. This new wireless network would become part of the Internet. Efficient compressed digital data could replace jillions of old inefficient analog technologies (police radios, CB radios, AM/FM radio, TV, etc) and unify tons of existing digital standards (HDTV, CDMA/TDMA/GSM/3G cell phones, DirecTV/Dish network satellite TV, 802.11x, etc). With all of those bands available to it, the new IP network would have insane amounts of raw bandwidth to play with.
Before this could become a reality, some work would have to be done to adapt the ideas of IP QoS and multicasting to the realities of radio transmission so that things like TV and radio could be done efficiently over a wireless IP network. I haven't been following developments in IP multicasting technologies; are they mature enough to be useful for things like TV?
Before you go crying out the evils of the capitalist society that rewards such behavior, though, remember that anybody else can make cameras too and sell them for less. In fact people have an incentive to do this, because if they do they will steal Canon's market for themselves and make a lot of money. The price will be driven down by competition eventually. It can only be propped up by things like brand name recognition, patents, or monopolistic behavior.
Requiring extra linux-specific code just to get decent performance is dumb. Sounds to me like the kernel needs a simple profiler to assess the way files are being accessed. Large file + sequential access = read-ahead w/ small cache; large file + random access = large cache w/ recent pieces; small files + repeated access = large cache holding complete files; etc. Would this not solve the problem for everyone?
Personally, I think the laptop fuel cell mentioned in the article is a million times more interesting than this battery. Available as soon as 2007, they say, with capacity about four times higher than conventional batteries and of course the ability to be refueled instantly.
Red vs. Blue is way more awesome than The Onion. I can't believe it didn't win something. The Onion is funny, but it's won the humor people's choice webby _every year_ since humor became a category; only once has it been upset in the non-people's-choice awards. Come on people; The Onion isn't the only funny thing on the web.
If a single IK chain can bring down your CPU, you're not doing the right optimizations. Game IK can be extremely heavily optimized for particular situations. For example, you can figure out what kinds of solutions are impossible ahead of time and do a simple check to eliminate them before doing all your IK calculations. I have been experimenting with this method for simulating physics. It is very fast, and it lends itself to an extremely simple method of doing IK that takes up no processor time besides that already used for the physics simulation. It's pretty neat stuff.
Kinematics can't help you generate realistic animations for these situations. What is needed is technology that generates realistic-looking animations from high-level descriptions of what the character is doing, on the fly. That kind of technology doesn't exist right now.
Yeah, the animations for the characters in that video were amazingly awful. If you play back the animation of Link's backflip slowly, it looks pretty retarded. When Link gets hit in the feet by that lizard's tail, he just does a generic "oops, I got hit" animation that looks like he blocked it with his shield at chest height, plus his feet slide slowly along the ground. In Nintendo's defense, many fighting games have these types of problems, and gamers are used to it, but for some reason these animations are worse than usual. It detracts from the realism so much. Isn't it time somebody came out with cool technology to solve these kind of character animation problems instead of another way to do lens flare?
The privacy concerns start coming in if Google stores that information, correlates it with other information about you, and builds a database accessible by humans. But there is no indication that they do this, there is reason to believe that they wouldn't, and they are NO MORE LIKELY to do this than Hotmail or Yahoo. If you are really a privacy nut, you shouldn't be letting companies with unknown motives store and process all of your personal correspondence in the first place! Privacy concerns are inherent to all webmail. GMail is no worse than any other service, and I trust Google more than Microsoft or Yahoo.
Here.
Seems like the biggest problem in character rendering today is animation, not appearence. The girl moved stiffly and unrealistically in the video, and while the facial expressions showed emotion, they were obviously not real. The Final Fantasy movie had the same problem with faces, though they used motion capture for the movements I believe. There's gotta be a way to create realistic looking human movements without motion capture.
Those stubborn profs are welcome to use old textbooks, or fork the open textbook. But they might find that the open textbook contains materials that they want to use, and that maintaining their fork is more trouble than it's worth. I would put that as an advantage of the open textbook idea: adoption of standardized notation.
With this system, nobody would have to write textbooks at all any more. All the material would already be written, but in a constant state of peer review and revision by people who have an interest in making it better. There would be no point in writing a "new" textbook; simply revising the open textbook to suit your needs would be much easier and would result in a better end product since the open textbook would be high quality starting material.
Look at this,
and this,
and this,
and this.
More images can be found at the site.
There is so much detail in these images that I've never seen before in CG characters. With a tiny bit better lighting model for the skin and hair, these images would be indistinguishable from reality. Maybe the digital actor is coming sooner than we think.
Don't use leech sites like encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com. Use Wikipedia itself, where the content comes from, where it will be the most up-to-date, and where you can edit it yourself.