I got death threats from Christians for being an atheist.
There's a contradiction in the terms. To me, that sentence sounds like "Linux kernel hackers refused to share Linux source code with me because I had a Mac at home." Of course, it's possible that one particular guy who happens to be a Linux kernel hacker took a stupid stance one day, but that stance is nonetheless in direct contradiction with fundamental Linux values, namely that everybody can access the source code.
Similarly, "thou shalt not kill" means you can't be a Christian and make a death threat. You can call yourself a Christian and make a death threat. You can call yourself a Linux kernel hacker and refuse to share source code changes. In both cases, you are going nowhere.
Why do you see a contradiction? If I say "when the ancestors of dolphins returned to sea, there must have been one animal, among all ancestors of all dolphins today, that was the first one to return to the water," do you find this logically shocking? What if I say: "of all our ancestors, one of them lit the very first fire, and we then passed the knowledge from generation to generation"? Maybe fire was invented at multiple locations, maybe it was invented then lost, then invented again. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a single event that we can call "first fire" that we can use to illustrate what fire is.
Sin assumes a certain dose of humanity, enough mental agility to have both an understanding that you are doing something wrong and a will to do it anyway. That's what the text you quoted calls being a "true man". Just like for fire, it's only logical to think that, among all our ancestors, there was one who committed the very first sin. And just like the first fire can be used to reason about fire for all humanity (as in "we believe that from the very first fire, fire has been used to provide heat, cook food and as a defense against wildlife"), the very first sin has a very strong explanatory power (as in "we believe that from the very first sin, sin has caused us to lie, deceive, put the blame on others, attempt to hide what we did...")
And what about before then? If the people originally writing it thought it to be a literal account, that's all that matters.
It doesn't matter a bit. To Christians, the Bible is the word of God, trying to teach a thing or two about love, not killing one another, and so on.
To make an analogy, the fact that at age 3, you thought Santa Claus to be a literal account is not all that matters, what matters is whether your parents loved you and whether you had a good time watching "Santa Claus" at the mall. It would be a gross misunderstanding of parenthood to claim that since you believed at age 3 there was a Santa Claus, a) your parents lied to you and were evil people, or b) they had to believe it themselves. Unfortunately, the position you expressed demonstrates a similar misunderstanding.
On the other hand, there's no mental gymnastic involved at all in realizing that your parents knew more than you did, and that you understood what they told you only years after they did. Just the same, there's no mental gymnastic involved in believing that the word of God may contain truths that we only understand much later.
To Christians, the reference for understanding the Bible is Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ said both that the Old Testament was true (e.g. Matthew 5:17-20) and that it was insufficient (e.g. Mark 10:5). From that point on, humanity has been supposed to talk to God directly ("Our Father,...", a prayer taught by Jesus Christ).
That last point is the key. To many Christians, faith is not a third-party account, it's a first-person relationship with God, today. A reasoning such as "The Bible is wrong, therefore God does not exist" is, to a first-person Christian, similar to a reasoning about the non-existence of Santa Claus implying that parents don't love their kids or (worse yet) that they don't exist. Such a reasoning may seem super-solid to you, but to a Christian, it is incredibly weak, shallow and unconvincing, irrespective of your intelligence and of the proofs you accumulate of errors in the Bible.
And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. But Jesus said unto them, For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of the creation, Male and female made he them. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh: so that they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
If your dad told you that the square of something is always positive when you were 3, and then told you that the square of i is -1 when you were 6, then (putting aside the fact that you are a math genius) do you believe that he was wrong the first time? Or that you need to stretch his interpretation based on your newly acquired knowledge? I don't think so. Rather, you think that he adapted his wording based on your capabilities.
For the Bible, I think it's not a stretch to claim that Genesis, for example, is about as good a description of how the world evolved that anybody could give to the tribes who lived 2000BC. Actually, put in context, it's remarkably good at identifying the key inflection points, in particular when you consider that "day" in that context is not a precise duration, you could say "period".
First, earth has no shape, it's not yet formed, it's just stuff floating around. Then light, sun and stars. Then planets form, only then is there a "sky". Then dry land and seas separate (Wikipedia says "Over time, such cosmic bombardments ceased, allowing the planet to cool and form a solid crust. Water that was brought here by comets and asteroids condensed into clouds and the oceans took shape.", not that different). Then vegetation (and there's no obvious reason at all for people at the time to infer that vegetation would appear first). Then the moon and the stars. It's the one big anachronistic description in the list, but I've always wondered if it was possible to see stars or the moon in the sky before vegetation cleared the atmosphere. Then living creatures, animals, but in two periods: fish, birds and insects first (period of the dinosaurs), then a second "day" with stock animals (mammals). And finally man.
So overall, this creation myth is pretty good in terms of teaching power, at least compared to various other myths of the same era, see here for a few examples: http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.
But more importantly, while you are right that Christianity in the general sense is not incompatible with these two scientific theories, certainly a literal interpretation of the Bible is incompatible.
Which, of course, is binding to Christians... Sigh.
Well, to prove just how idiotic this reasoning is, I've decided to apply it the other way round. Do you trust Linus Torvalds? Surely most Slashdot readers do. So there's a good chance you do too. Yet, dear VeniceBeach, a literal interpretation of Linus Torvalds own words is totally incompatible with biology, the Apple App Store, or basic economy. It's even incompatible with Slashdot! Don't believe me? I have proof: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/linus_torvalds.html.
> Software is like sex Burn biologists! They claim that sex is about reproduction!
> Any program is only as good as it is useful. Burn the guy who wrote Bubble Wrap for the iPhone!
> Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one. Burn the car dealer who refused to sell me one thousand cars for the price of one!
> Microsoft isn't evil Burn Slashdot!
Need I go on? Or can you accept the idea that Christians don't have to take the Bible literally? There's a fraction of ultra-bigots in the US who are ready to take everything in the Bible literally, save for "thou shalt not kill" when it applies to a deer or restricts their right to bear arms. I demand that Christians (or Americans, for that matter) not be judged by this standard.
Equating any Christian to this stereotype is as insulting to the majority of Christians as equating all Linux kernel hacker to a lowly -1 Slashdot troll.
If I understand correctly, the idea is that a simulation would put some observable limits on, say, the energy of particles.
For some reason, this reminds me of another interesting thought exercise, but going backwards. Patrick Demichel is looking for the first of all Skewes' numbers. He devised a method which results, roughly, in "1.397162914×10^316 is the first Skewes' number, or there's not enough energy in the Universe find the actual value." See http://grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/the-number-you-cant-compute. I see that he kept working on it since then, I wonder if that statement (dating back 2008) still holds...
I must confess that I also missed the point. The headline of the submission focuses on the RSS feed in 3D, making me believe that it really is the "RSS feed" that is important. Perhaps you should frame this demo differently to convey your intent to the reader. "Create Dynamic 3D documents easily" sounds quite diffferent from "3D RSS reader" as a headline.
You are right I guess. I'll take that into account for my next Slashdot submission:-)
I looked as this tool as I would be interested in displaying my computer network / sysadmin type stuff dynamically in 3D. Stock market performance. That sort of stuff. But I can't see that this tool makes that easier.
Let's try making something like that together. Here's one way to do it:
1) Create a small web server somewhere that returns the stuff you are interested it, for example in CSV format. Say you get lines with X,Y,Z,"label".
2) Read that web server with Tao Presentations, using code that looks like this:
Of course, your server could also send color, or a sphere diameter, so you could have something like:
drawit X,Y,Z,Color,Radius,Label ->
locally
translate X,Y,Z
color Color
sphere Radius
translate Radius, 0, 0
text Label
If you don't want to access the network to get your data, you can also read that from a local file. For example, you can have a Perl script that munches your input data and writes it to a given local file. Then, your Tao Presentations document does something similar to the above, but with load_csv instead of get_url_csv.
You could obviously send data in other formats and parse it with regexps (XML and JSON are coming soon, hopefully). But at the moment, CSV is by far the fastest way to read relatively big amounts of data for Tao Presentations. In this 3D star map example, we use that very technique to show about 15000 stars from the Hipparcos catalog, and it runs smoothly on a modern laptop.
I understand your position. To be honest, we didn't really expect to hit the Slashdot front page (not that I will complain). We were content with people who look at the Firehose.
But to respond to you point, I think there is a lot of value in this new brand of journalism made of first person straight talk: blogs, video posts on YouTube, etc. You talk to me, I respond to you. Nobody in between. You know it's me, an individual, who loves his product and is clearly biased, and not some abstract and distant entity who doesn't care and just pushes "information" just because they're paid to pretend they are unbiased.
What I love first about Slashdot is that posts are from people who care about stuff, not about anonymous drones. When we get a story about Intel unveiling a new 10 watt chip (right below ours), isn't that also blatant advertising? But my hope is that this was actually submitted by some Intel guy who actually works on the chip.
The second thing I love about Slashdot is that the small guys (like us) have a fighting chance in telling their story. Hey, I'm right next to Intel, and we are a gazillion times smaller. Sure, it's free advertising too. But I've put a lot of my money in that stuff, it's paying relatively little at the moment, so do you really think that I can pass on this opportunity of reaching a wide audience on a level playing field?
The third thing about Slashdot are the comments. Granted, I would have loved to see just a little more positive feedback to what we have to offer. Still, the comments generally crack me up (this is an acquired taste, though, the rest of the team is just looking at them and just going "Huh?"). And more importantly, they are very valid data points.
If someone tells me that the language is hard to read, I need to dig further to see what we can do about it. If someone else tells me that you can do that in OpenGL in no time flat, I have to deduce that most readers, even on Slashdot, don't realize what it really took to make interactive 3D that simple. Yes, our app is written in OpenGL, and no it didn't take us "no time flat", and yes, we are good (I personally wrote the first 3D platform game, back in 1989, a year or so before Carmack's Hovertank 3D). So now, we need to explain better why this matters. Without Slashdot, I have no chance to get such live feedback.
So I understand your point, but believe me, the fact that articles about a noname startup from the south of France show up on Slashdot is a good sign. It demonstrates IMO that the Slashdot spirit is still alive and kicking. But hey, I'm biased;-)
Apparently we need a nice high level 3D presentation library but we don't want to work out how to use libxml2.
The idea here was precisely to show the kind of things you could do with mere regular expressions (we introduced a regexp module recently). Yes, I know it is theoretically wrong, and if you knew how much I don't care, you wouldn't bother insulting me with the suggestion that we wouldn't know how to use libxml2. XML parsing is on its way, but if you want to add it yourself, Taodyne provides a C++ SDK (here is an example to get you started).
(Also, what language did you base that on? It's surprisingly hard to read.)
As mentioned in the story, it's called XL. Can you elaborate why you think it is hard to read? As an aside, I completely disagree with that statement. Here is for example how you create a slide in Reveal.js:
<section>
<h2>Heads Up</h2>
<p>
reveal.js is an easy to use, HTML based, presentation tool.
</p> </section>
Here is how you create a similar slide in Tao Presentations:
slide "My page",
title
text "Heads up"
story
text "Tao Presentations is an easy to use, XL-based presentation tool"
For me, I already know which one I find easier to read (or to copy-paste in Slashdot for that matter). But the difference really shows when you want to add a time-dependent HSV color:
slide "My page",
title
text "Heads up"
story
color_hsv 20 * time, 30%, 80%
text "Tao Presentations is an easy to use, XL-based presentation tool"
Now, writing this in Reveal.js is left as an exercise for the reader...
Rather, I think you just... missed the point. The point is not the end result, it is to show how you can now create dynamic 3D documents really easily.
I'd have assumed that using OpenGL or something one could knock something like this together in no time flat, probably any time in the last 10 to 15 years!
You'd assume wrong. In addition to OpenGL, you need at least: font rendering and typography, typesetting, JPEG image decoding, networking, text parsing. If you don't believe me, go ahead, do it. I did that short example over a coffee break, definitely less than 2 hours. Let me see how long your "no time flat" will be if you do "something like this" with straight OpenGL.
If you want to replicate this with another technology, you'd be much luckier starting with Reveal.js, Impress.js and combining this with Three.js. With that basis, I think you can probably get somewhere rapidly. At least, you'll have text and picture rendering.
Not transparently event-driven, no. For example, consider the following Tao Presentations code:
color "red" rectangle 320, 200 locally
rotatez 20 * time
color "blue"
rectangle 400, 100
Because we used time in the inner block, we will re-evaluate that block more rapidly than the rest (roughly 60 times per second in that case). So we transparently detect that this or that part of the document needs this or that event. I don't think Javascript does that, does it?
So the founder and president [of] Taodyne submits a "story" extolling the virtues of Taodyne's latest program/thingie and this actually makes it onto Slashdot? Am I really expecting too much of Slashdot by thinking that this shouldn't happen? I mean the entire summary is blatantly written like an advert -- perhaps you could say the guy isn't trying to deceive anyone since it's obvious to anyone looking (eg. me) what's going on, but is that really a good direction to go in? Is even the barest of journalistic integrity a lost cause on this site?
How is the fact that I'm the founder of Taodyne making the story irrelevant to Slashdot readers? What would have been unethical would have been to ask a friend to submit the story for me.
Of course, I'm biased. I've put years of my life into creating what I believe is the first interactive 3D document description language. I think that this is relevant to Slashdot readers. Remember, "News for nerds"? Our first tag line was "3D presentation software for geeks", it's still in my Slashdot signature.
My idea of being a "nerd" is not "I will the (N+1)-th post to rant about how big corporations are evil". Mine is "I will create this bleeding edge 3D language so that uber-geeks can use live tweets as bullet points next time they talk about some hot topic." YMMV. Don't like what we did? Feel free to not use it.
I am pretty sure we have moved on from individual content viewers. If they were to process https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ designed applications and use some tagging to define a distance relocating the perspective then this might have a value.
There are frameworks such as Reveal.js or Impress.js that try to present things nicely using CSS3, HTML5, etc. Taodyne didn't use markup languages on purpose. From that article:
Standard markup, yes, but still a new language On the surface, this structure is well known, so that you can leverage what you already know about HTML.
But notice how the two examples above don't use exactly the same syntax. There's a reason for that: in both cases, the power of that code really lies in additional definitions using Javascript and CSS 3D. We no longer use a really standard language, but some kind of dialect. We still need to learn this dialect before creating presentations.
It's not like the required code is extraordinarily big. For Impress.js, we are talking about 700 lines of CSS and 800 lines of Javascript. Reveal.js is slightly more extensive, with 1238 lines of CSS and 1039 lines of Javascript, not counting a few libraries.
However, that still means that you need to learn new semantics on how to build animations. The benefits of using a "standard" language are somewhat mitigated. More importantly, it means that what makes the presentation really different, the interesting 3D animations and transitions, are not in the document description itself.
A new kind of programming language designed specifically for real-time, interactive documents has a number of benefits. For example, we don't have a linear execution model. Parts of the document execute in response to events, transparently. That way, if you have a document that refreshes only once per second, we use practically no CPU. And if only this or that part of the document executes. See Execution and Drawing Model on this description of Tao documents.
I'm just waiting for some advancements in augmented reality, so that I can see the world around me in 3D!/sarcasm
All sarcasm aside, 3D is not the new 2D, 3D is the new color. Black and white didn't go away, you can still use it to great effect. But most digital content today is in color, just because we can. It looks more natural, it allows effects that you can't do in black and white.
When you print a PDF document on a black and white printer, you expect it to look right. What's the equivalent for 3D today? Taodyne's value proposition is to make it ridiculously easy to create portable, dynamic 3D documents that will show at their best on Mac, PCs or Linux, on 2D, active 3D, passive 3D, 3D DLP projectors, 3D polarized projectors, multiscopic glasses-free 3D displays, 2D+Z, you name it.
Sure, glasses-free 3D displays today are expensive and have limited resolution. But when Adobe launched Postscript, laser printers were prohibitively expensive, and only black and white. Today, you can practically get a color laser printer with a Happy Meal. I'm willing to bet that in 5 years, glasses-free 3D panels with resolutions of 4K or more will be commonplace. Google glasses will be the new iPhone. And you'll want to be able to create cool interactive, real-time 3D contents for these devices.
But then I click on the links and see RSS FEEDS IN THREE DEES! Not even really in 3D, just with perspective.
Use the "View->Display Mode" menu and select your favorite 3D mode, and you'll have actual 3D. Including 3D without glasses if you are lucky enough to own Alioscopy, Dimenco or Tridelity displays.
And what's with the "120 lines of code" crap? I could probably do the same thing in 5 lines of Processing.
Why don't you do just that? But knowing Processing, I seriously doubt this is more than trolling.
But this is a stupid thing that should never have been done. And not "stupid as in awesome" like launching flaming pianos with a trebuchet or "stupid as in a challenge" like getting a toaster to play Oregon Trail, but stupid as in pointless with no redeeming value.
And someone modded this insightful? Ach, Slashdot.
I'm getting a strong, familiar VRML-era stench about this hype.
We thought of it more like an innovative way to create tweeter walls than virtual words. Just like Powerpoint is not about re-creating realistic pictures, Tao Presentation is not about creating virtual worlds, but about telling a story.
It should have atleast been events around the world (a globe with blob points each resprenting a news article, sized as large as the importance of the article).
Yes. And if you RTFA, you'll see:
Unfortunately, I didn't find any good way to obtain latitude and longitude reliably for each piece of news, otherwise we could have created a much cooler effect, showing each picture and news at the right spot on the surface of Earth... If anybody has an idea on how to do that, I'm interested.
The best there is GeoRSS, but Google News doesn't use that. So we can show the earthquakes on a globe if you wish. Hit the 'w' key for a small animation.
Now, if you know of a good database of geolocalized news, I'm very interested.
Just making it 3D doesn't make it good. Our goal is simply to provide a tool to create dynamic 3D contents easily. Remember the first HTML pages with the blink tag? They all looked horrible, it took a while for designers to catch up with this new technology.
So I'm not a good graphic designer? Not surprised. Well, we are looking for good designers to help us fix that. Do something beautiful with Tao Presentations, and we'll be sure to talk about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I'm really sorry to hear that stuff like that happens! It's a real shame.
I got death threats from Christians for being an atheist.
There's a contradiction in the terms. To me, that sentence sounds like "Linux kernel hackers refused to share Linux source code with me because I had a Mac at home." Of course, it's possible that one particular guy who happens to be a Linux kernel hacker took a stupid stance one day, but that stance is nonetheless in direct contradiction with fundamental Linux values, namely that everybody can access the source code.
Similarly, "thou shalt not kill" means you can't be a Christian and make a death threat. You can call yourself a Christian and make a death threat. You can call yourself a Linux kernel hacker and refuse to share source code changes. In both cases, you are going nowhere.
"When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.
Why do you see a contradiction? If I say "when the ancestors of dolphins returned to sea, there must have been one animal, among all ancestors of all dolphins today, that was the first one to return to the water," do you find this logically shocking? What if I say: "of all our ancestors, one of them lit the very first fire, and we then passed the knowledge from generation to generation"? Maybe fire was invented at multiple locations, maybe it was invented then lost, then invented again. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a single event that we can call "first fire" that we can use to illustrate what fire is.
Sin assumes a certain dose of humanity, enough mental agility to have both an understanding that you are doing something wrong and a will to do it anyway. That's what the text you quoted calls being a "true man". Just like for fire, it's only logical to think that, among all our ancestors, there was one who committed the very first sin. And just like the first fire can be used to reason about fire for all humanity (as in "we believe that from the very first fire, fire has been used to provide heat, cook food and as a defense against wildlife"), the very first sin has a very strong explanatory power (as in "we believe that from the very first sin, sin has caused us to lie, deceive, put the blame on others, attempt to hide what we did...")
And what about before then? If the people originally writing it thought it to be a literal account, that's all that matters.
It doesn't matter a bit. To Christians, the Bible is the word of God, trying to teach a thing or two about love, not killing one another, and so on.
To make an analogy, the fact that at age 3, you thought Santa Claus to be a literal account is not all that matters, what matters is whether your parents loved you and whether you had a good time watching "Santa Claus" at the mall. It would be a gross misunderstanding of parenthood to claim that since you believed at age 3 there was a Santa Claus, a) your parents lied to you and were evil people, or b) they had to believe it themselves. Unfortunately, the position you expressed demonstrates a similar misunderstanding.
On the other hand, there's no mental gymnastic involved at all in realizing that your parents knew more than you did, and that you understood what they told you only years after they did. Just the same, there's no mental gymnastic involved in believing that the word of God may contain truths that we only understand much later.
To Christians, the reference for understanding the Bible is Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ said both that the Old Testament was true (e.g. Matthew 5:17-20) and that it was insufficient (e.g. Mark 10:5). From that point on, humanity has been supposed to talk to God directly ("Our Father, ...", a prayer taught by Jesus Christ).
That last point is the key. To many Christians, faith is not a third-party account, it's a first-person relationship with God, today. A reasoning such as "The Bible is wrong, therefore God does not exist" is, to a first-person Christian, similar to a reasoning about the non-existence of Santa Claus implying that parents don't love their kids or (worse yet) that they don't exist. Such a reasoning may seem super-solid to you, but to a Christian, it is incredibly weak, shallow and unconvincing, irrespective of your intelligence and of the proofs you accumulate of errors in the Bible.
You can take the Bible as the word of God without considering it as being a literal truth. It's educational material. I'm not the one saying this, Jesus did several times, for instance Mark 10:5 (see http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%2010:4-9&version=ASV):
And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. But Jesus said unto them, For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of the creation, Male and female made he them. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh: so that they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
If your dad told you that the square of something is always positive when you were 3, and then told you that the square of i is -1 when you were 6, then (putting aside the fact that you are a math genius) do you believe that he was wrong the first time? Or that you need to stretch his interpretation based on your newly acquired knowledge? I don't think so. Rather, you think that he adapted his wording based on your capabilities.
For the Bible, I think it's not a stretch to claim that Genesis, for example, is about as good a description of how the world evolved that anybody could give to the tribes who lived 2000BC. Actually, put in context, it's remarkably good at identifying the key inflection points, in particular when you consider that "day" in that context is not a precise duration, you could say "period".
First, earth has no shape, it's not yet formed, it's just stuff floating around. Then light, sun and stars. Then planets form, only then is there a "sky". Then dry land and seas separate (Wikipedia says "Over time, such cosmic bombardments ceased, allowing the planet to cool and form a solid crust. Water that was brought here by comets and asteroids condensed into clouds and the oceans took shape.", not that different). Then vegetation (and there's no obvious reason at all for people at the time to infer that vegetation would appear first). Then the moon and the stars. It's the one big anachronistic description in the list, but I've always wondered if it was possible to see stars or the moon in the sky before vegetation cleared the atmosphere. Then living creatures, animals, but in two periods: fish, birds and insects first (period of the dinosaurs), then a second "day" with stock animals (mammals). And finally man.
So overall, this creation myth is pretty good in terms of teaching power, at least compared to various other myths of the same era, see here for a few examples: http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.
But more importantly, while you are right that Christianity in the general sense is not incompatible with these two scientific theories, certainly a literal interpretation of the Bible is incompatible.
Which, of course, is binding to Christians... Sigh.
Well, to prove just how idiotic this reasoning is, I've decided to apply it the other way round. Do you trust Linus Torvalds? Surely most Slashdot readers do. So there's a good chance you do too. Yet, dear VeniceBeach, a literal interpretation of Linus Torvalds own words is totally incompatible with biology, the Apple App Store, or basic economy. It's even incompatible with Slashdot! Don't believe me? I have proof: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/linus_torvalds.html.
> Software is like sex
Burn biologists! They claim that sex is about reproduction!
> Any program is only as good as it is useful.
Burn the guy who wrote Bubble Wrap for the iPhone!
> Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
Burn the car dealer who refused to sell me one thousand cars for the price of one!
> Microsoft isn't evil
Burn Slashdot!
Need I go on? Or can you accept the idea that Christians don't have to take the Bible literally? There's a fraction of ultra-bigots in the US who are ready to take everything in the Bible literally, save for "thou shalt not kill" when it applies to a deer or restricts their right to bear arms. I demand that Christians (or Americans, for that matter) not be judged by this standard.
Equating any Christian to this stereotype is as insulting to the majority of Christians as equating all Linux kernel hacker to a lowly -1 Slashdot troll.
If I understand correctly, the idea is that a simulation would put some observable limits on, say, the energy of particles.
For some reason, this reminds me of another interesting thought exercise, but going backwards. Patrick Demichel is looking for the first of all Skewes' numbers. He devised a method which results, roughly, in "1.397162914×10^316 is the first Skewes' number, or there's not enough energy in the Universe find the actual value." See http://grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/the-number-you-cant-compute. I see that he kept working on it since then, I wonder if that statement (dating back 2008) still holds...
3D visualization of GeoRSS earthquakes database available here.
We created a Gitorious project to share sample code. The first sample shows the location of earthquakes in real-time.
I must confess that I also missed the point. The headline of the submission focuses on the RSS feed in 3D, making me believe that it really is the "RSS feed" that is important. Perhaps you should frame this demo differently to convey your intent to the reader. "Create Dynamic 3D documents easily" sounds quite diffferent from "3D RSS reader" as a headline.
You are right I guess. I'll take that into account for my next Slashdot submission :-)
I looked as this tool as I would be interested in displaying my computer network / sysadmin type stuff dynamically in 3D. Stock market performance. That sort of stuff. But I can't see that this tool makes that easier.
Let's try making something like that together. Here's one way to do it:
1) Create a small web server somewhere that returns the stuff you are interested it, for example in CSV format. Say you get lines with X,Y,Z,"label".
2) Read that web server with Tao Presentations, using code that looks like this:
get_url_csv "http://myserver/data.csv", "drawit"
drawit X,Y,Z,Label ->
locally
translate X,Y,Z
text Label
drawit MalformedInput -> false
Of course, your server could also send color, or a sphere diameter, so you could have something like:
drawit X,Y,Z,Color,Radius,Label ->
locally
translate X,Y,Z
color Color
sphere Radius
translate Radius, 0, 0
text Label
If you don't want to access the network to get your data, you can also read that from a local file. For example, you can have a Perl script that munches your input data and writes it to a given local file. Then, your Tao Presentations document does something similar to the above, but with load_csv instead of get_url_csv.
You could obviously send data in other formats and parse it with regexps (XML and JSON are coming soon, hopefully). But at the moment, CSV is by far the fastest way to read relatively big amounts of data for Tao Presentations. In this 3D star map example, we use that very technique to show about 15000 stars from the Hipparcos catalog, and it runs smoothly on a modern laptop.
I understand your position. To be honest, we didn't really expect to hit the Slashdot front page (not that I will complain). We were content with people who look at the Firehose.
But to respond to you point, I think there is a lot of value in this new brand of journalism made of first person straight talk: blogs, video posts on YouTube, etc. You talk to me, I respond to you. Nobody in between. You know it's me, an individual, who loves his product and is clearly biased, and not some abstract and distant entity who doesn't care and just pushes "information" just because they're paid to pretend they are unbiased.
What I love first about Slashdot is that posts are from people who care about stuff, not about anonymous drones. When we get a story about Intel unveiling a new 10 watt chip (right below ours), isn't that also blatant advertising? But my hope is that this was actually submitted by some Intel guy who actually works on the chip.
The second thing I love about Slashdot is that the small guys (like us) have a fighting chance in telling their story. Hey, I'm right next to Intel, and we are a gazillion times smaller. Sure, it's free advertising too. But I've put a lot of my money in that stuff, it's paying relatively little at the moment, so do you really think that I can pass on this opportunity of reaching a wide audience on a level playing field?
The third thing about Slashdot are the comments. Granted, I would have loved to see just a little more positive feedback to what we have to offer. Still, the comments generally crack me up (this is an acquired taste, though, the rest of the team is just looking at them and just going "Huh?"). And more importantly, they are very valid data points.
If someone tells me that the language is hard to read, I need to dig further to see what we can do about it. If someone else tells me that you can do that in OpenGL in no time flat, I have to deduce that most readers, even on Slashdot, don't realize what it really took to make interactive 3D that simple. Yes, our app is written in OpenGL, and no it didn't take us "no time flat", and yes, we are good (I personally wrote the first 3D platform game, back in 1989, a year or so before Carmack's Hovertank 3D). So now, we need to explain better why this matters. Without Slashdot, I have no chance to get such live feedback.
So I understand your point, but believe me, the fact that articles about a noname startup from the south of France show up on Slashdot is a good sign. It demonstrates IMO that the Slashdot spirit is still alive and kicking. But hey, I'm biased ;-)
Apparently we need a nice high level 3D presentation library but we don't want to work out how to use libxml2.
The idea here was precisely to show the kind of things you could do with mere regular expressions (we introduced a regexp module recently). Yes, I know it is theoretically wrong, and if you knew how much I don't care, you wouldn't bother insulting me with the suggestion that we wouldn't know how to use libxml2. XML parsing is on its way, but if you want to add it yourself, Taodyne provides a C++ SDK (here is an example to get you started).
(Also, what language did you base that on? It's surprisingly hard to read.)
As mentioned in the story, it's called XL. Can you elaborate why you think it is hard to read? As an aside, I completely disagree with that statement. Here is for example how you create a slide in Reveal.js:
<section>
<h2>Heads Up</h2>
<p>
reveal.js is an easy to use, HTML based, presentation tool.
</p>
</section>
Here is how you create a similar slide in Tao Presentations:
slide "My page",
title
text "Heads up"
story
text "Tao Presentations is an easy to use, XL-based presentation tool"
For me, I already know which one I find easier to read (or to copy-paste in Slashdot for that matter). But the difference really shows when you want to add a time-dependent HSV color:
slide "My page",
title
text "Heads up"
story
color_hsv 20 * time, 30%, 80%
text "Tao Presentations is an easy to use, XL-based presentation tool"
Now, writing this in Reveal.js is left as an exercise for the reader...
It's just... pointless.
Rather, I think you just... missed the point. The point is not the end result, it is to show how you can now create dynamic 3D documents really easily.
I'd have assumed that using OpenGL or something one could knock something like this together in no time flat, probably any time in the last 10 to 15 years!
You'd assume wrong. In addition to OpenGL, you need at least: font rendering and typography, typesetting, JPEG image decoding, networking, text parsing. If you don't believe me, go ahead, do it. I did that short example over a coffee break, definitely less than 2 hours. Let me see how long your "no time flat" will be if you do "something like this" with straight OpenGL.
If you want to replicate this with another technology, you'd be much luckier starting with Reveal.js, Impress.js and combining this with Three.js. With that basis, I think you can probably get somewhere rapidly. At least, you'll have text and picture rendering.
Because Javascript isn't event driven? Excuse me?
Not transparently event-driven, no. For example, consider the following Tao Presentations code:
color "red"
rectangle 320, 200
locally
rotatez 20 * time
color "blue"
rectangle 400, 100
Because we used time in the inner block, we will re-evaluate that block more rapidly than the rest (roughly 60 times per second in that case). So we transparently detect that this or that part of the document needs this or that event. I don't think Javascript does that, does it?
Of course it was totally unreadable by humans
Are you really arguing that this is unreadable by humans?
feed "US News", "http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&charset=utf8&output=rss"
feed "Slashdot", "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot"
feed "Twitter taodyne", "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=taodyne
So the founder and president [of] Taodyne submits a "story" extolling the virtues of Taodyne's latest program/thingie and this actually makes it onto Slashdot? Am I really expecting too much of Slashdot by thinking that this shouldn't happen? I mean the entire summary is blatantly written like an advert -- perhaps you could say the guy isn't trying to deceive anyone since it's obvious to anyone looking (eg. me) what's going on, but is that really a good direction to go in? Is even the barest of journalistic integrity a lost cause on this site?
How is the fact that I'm the founder of Taodyne making the story irrelevant to Slashdot readers? What would have been unethical would have been to ask a friend to submit the story for me.
Of course, I'm biased. I've put years of my life into creating what I believe is the first interactive 3D document description language. I think that this is relevant to Slashdot readers. Remember, "News for nerds"? Our first tag line was "3D presentation software for geeks", it's still in my Slashdot signature.
My idea of being a "nerd" is not "I will the (N+1)-th post to rant about how big corporations are evil". Mine is "I will create this bleeding edge 3D language so that uber-geeks can use live tweets as bullet points next time they talk about some hot topic." YMMV. Don't like what we did? Feel free to not use it.
I am pretty sure we have moved on from individual content viewers. If they were to process https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ designed applications and use some tagging to define a distance relocating the perspective then this might have a value.
There are frameworks such as Reveal.js or Impress.js that try to present things nicely using CSS3, HTML5, etc. Taodyne didn't use markup languages on purpose. From that article:
Standard markup, yes, but still a new language
On the surface, this structure is well known, so that you can leverage what you already know about HTML.
But notice how the two examples above don't use exactly the same syntax. There's a reason for that: in both cases, the power of that code really lies in additional definitions using Javascript and CSS 3D. We no longer use a really standard language, but some kind of dialect. We still need to learn this dialect before creating presentations.
It's not like the required code is extraordinarily big. For Impress.js, we are talking about 700 lines of CSS and 800 lines of Javascript. Reveal.js is slightly more extensive, with 1238 lines of CSS and 1039 lines of Javascript, not counting a few libraries.
However, that still means that you need to learn new semantics on how to build animations. The benefits of using a "standard" language are somewhat mitigated. More importantly, it means that what makes the presentation really different, the interesting 3D animations and transitions, are not in the document description itself.
A new kind of programming language designed specifically for real-time, interactive documents has a number of benefits. For example, we don't have a linear execution model. Parts of the document execute in response to events, transparently. That way, if you have a document that refreshes only once per second, we use practically no CPU. And if only this or that part of the document executes. See Execution and Drawing Model on this description of Tao documents.
But 3D is the new 2D.
I'm just waiting for some advancements in augmented reality, so that I can see the world around me in 3D! /sarcasm
All sarcasm aside, 3D is not the new 2D, 3D is the new color. Black and white didn't go away, you can still use it to great effect. But most digital content today is in color, just because we can. It looks more natural, it allows effects that you can't do in black and white.
When you print a PDF document on a black and white printer, you expect it to look right. What's the equivalent for 3D today? Taodyne's value proposition is to make it ridiculously easy to create portable, dynamic 3D documents that will show at their best on Mac, PCs or Linux, on 2D, active 3D, passive 3D, 3D DLP projectors, 3D polarized projectors, multiscopic glasses-free 3D displays, 2D+Z, you name it.
Sure, glasses-free 3D displays today are expensive and have limited resolution. But when Adobe launched Postscript, laser printers were prohibitively expensive, and only black and white. Today, you can practically get a color laser printer with a Happy Meal. I'm willing to bet that in 5 years, glasses-free 3D panels with resolutions of 4K or more will be commonplace. Google glasses will be the new iPhone. And you'll want to be able to create cool interactive, real-time 3D contents for these devices.
It's time to learn how to do that now.
New definition of 3D: Stick 2D pictures on a box and spin them.
Well, you should see our virtual Giacometti head on a glasses free 3D display. That might change your mind.
But then I click on the links and see RSS FEEDS IN THREE DEES! Not even really in 3D, just with perspective.
Use the "View->Display Mode" menu and select your favorite 3D mode, and you'll have actual 3D. Including 3D without glasses if you are lucky enough to own Alioscopy, Dimenco or Tridelity displays.
And what's with the "120 lines of code" crap? I could probably do the same thing in 5 lines of Processing.
Why don't you do just that? But knowing Processing, I seriously doubt this is more than trolling.
But this is a stupid thing that should never have been done. And not "stupid as in awesome" like launching flaming pianos with a trebuchet or "stupid as in a challenge" like getting a toaster to play Oregon Trail, but stupid as in pointless with no redeeming value.
And someone modded this insightful? Ach, Slashdot.
*sigh* slashdot
And we had tried to use Coral to minimize the load. Silly Slashdotters who actually follow links :-)
I kept on getting a "not available in your country" notice.
I'm in Canada - anyone in Europe able to see past the first page?
I think this should be fixed now. Thanks for reporting. Believe it or not, Canada was not listed in the "known countries" in our database. Sorry...
I'm getting a strong, familiar VRML-era stench about this hype.
We thought of it more like an innovative way to create tweeter walls than virtual words. Just like Powerpoint is not about re-creating realistic pictures, Tao Presentation is not about creating virtual worlds, but about telling a story.
It should have atleast been events around the world (a globe with blob points each resprenting a news article, sized as large as the importance of the article).
Yes. And if you RTFA, you'll see:
Unfortunately, I didn't find any good way to obtain latitude and longitude reliably for each piece of news, otherwise we could have created a much cooler effect, showing each picture and news at the right spot on the surface of Earth... If anybody has an idea on how to do that, I'm interested.
The best there is GeoRSS, but Google News doesn't use that. So we can show the earthquakes on a globe if you wish. Hit the 'w' key for a small animation.
Now, if you know of a good database of geolocalized news, I'm very interested.
if you can't make it good, make it 3d?
Just making it 3D doesn't make it good. Our goal is simply to provide a tool to create dynamic 3D contents easily. Remember the first HTML pages with the blink tag? They all looked horrible, it took a while for designers to catch up with this new technology.
So I'm not a good graphic designer? Not surprised. Well, we are looking for good designers to help us fix that. Do something beautiful with Tao Presentations, and we'll be sure to talk about it.