Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine?
Uhm... because one $300 ATI or nVidea GPU has many 10's of Glops available (someone above said >50 in the shader unit alone) and your average $500 Linux box has maybe 5 Gflops?
But also it is in a message dump from 09/2000 and was a sig from a guy who didn't work for Diebold (he posted from gesn.com -- does anyone know what that was?). Also his name doesn't appear anywhere else in the message log.
He could have been a temp there to refill the drink machines, for all we know.
Why should we be forced to become criminals, just to keep doing something that we've been able to do legit for years?
That's what everyone always says when society changes the rules (purportedly for the common good). It's exactly what the Germans say about imposing speed limits on the Autobahns.
I'd sure love to have your gas prices (ours are about 100% higher). On the other hand, you'd sure love to have our electricity prices (about C$ 0.045 / KWh).
Only people in the coldest climates run nothing but heat.
True. That's why I run seti@home on 18 machines from October through May and only 3 the rest of the year.
Moreover, electrical resistance is a horribly expensive way to heat a building.
I don't where you buy power/oil/gas, but here electricity is a much cheaper way to heat than either of the other two. A heat pump is even better, but is only usable for a small part of the year.
This is true, except that PC's also radiate energy in several bands that easily penetrate walls, whereas heaters don't. If you don't believe this, take the cover of your machine and go listen to an AM radio in your neighbour's house. However, this loss is presumably neglidgable, so they are effectively the same.
You are making the erroneous assumption that money spent on power that's converted to heat is wasted money.
If you are running any other device to keep your house warm, the money spent on the computer power is not wasted, as an equivalent amount (depending on relative costs) is saved on your heating.
I actually had such an argument about this with some friends (one of them an EE professor at a local university) that I ponied up $20 for an answer on Ask Google.
The debate was about whether or not the running computer under my desk was just as efficient a heater as the baseboard one across the room that's on anyway as it's October here (there too, I bet). In this part of the world, electricity is the cheapest form of energy available.
It turns out that the answer is that except for the (very low percentage of) emissions that are in the microwave range, which go through the walls, everything else is converted to heat anyway.
So I now leave all my computers on all winter, and my central furnace gets to run less as a result.
Firstly, phone signals (i.e. conversation / modem signals) are indeed low current, but ring signals are much higher. It's a "current-loop", which essentially means that the source keeps raising the voltage (up to maximum) until a certain amount of current flows.
Secondly, people can be electrocuted by relatively low currents. Usually, when you touch an electrical source, the voltage (and thus the current) across your heart is very low. This because the (low-impedance) heart is part of a classic series voltage-divider circuit that twice includes (high-impedance) skin (entry and exit). This skin-heart-skin "load" of the circuit means that only a very small proportion of the total voltage is applied across the heart.
My college Electrotech 101 instructor was on an industry board that investigated industrial electrocutions. He told us that electrocutions from 12 volts or less were fairly common on operating room tables because the patients had needles piercing their high-resistance skin, allowing 12v right across the heart. Fortunately, it rarely was fatal as they have all the equipment to restart the heart right at hand!
Since the US is surely a net exporter of software, does that mean you think it would be a good idea for the EU, Japan, etc to put import tariffs on Oracle, IBM and yes, even Windows?
Taken a look at the life expectancy figures lately?
Last time I looked - admittedly some years ago - Canada had significantly longer life expectancies for both genders plus a lower infant mortality rate.
Binocular vision is - in all but a few special cases - insignificant beyond 10-20m. The reason flight simulators don't deal with this is that anything that's so close will be hit by the plane in about 0.1 seconds anyway, so who cares. In entertainment (and in real life, for that matter) anything important is almost always within that distance.
That being said, the depth cues you mention are important, but there are lots of others too. The order of precedence / importance varies depending on the distance of the object, the viewer, the setting, the ambient lighting etc.
If (and it's a big if) there are no contradictory references visible (such as frame borders), 2D (monocular) viewing effectively recreates all the cues except for two: stereo and depth of focus (of the eyeball, not the camera). 3D presentation adds the stereo vision and leaves only the depth of focus.
Strange you say "the concept died in moviemaking" in light of the very successful NASA / Imax 3D film recently released about the building of the space station, which was shot using a special, purpose-built, light-weight camera that takes two 65mm frames simultaneously.
Re:One angle + heightmap means inflexible view ang
on
3D TV For The Masses?
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· Score: 1
You're thinking of gaming applications. Nobody rotates anything in realtime either in cinema or (non-live) TV. It's all done long before in some studio.
The point is, can you take a pre-existing bitmap (i.e. one 2D frame) and change it into the two (slightly different) bitmaps - one left eye and one right eye - needed for a 3D presentation system. There is no other view ever needed because no self-respecting movie-maker would ever let you look at a scene from anywhere else except exactly where it was intended to be seen from!
Note that: 1) you can take as long as you want to figure it out, 'cause it's all happening offline. 2) essentially, you're trying to create something from nothing - or at most just some hints. 3) however, you can use earlier or later frames to help. For example, if the camera is moving left, the previous frame makes an excellent right eye view, and the subsequent one can be used for the right eye!
/stillconfused
3D works really poorly on TV-sized screens
on
3D TV For The Masses?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Having spent the last 8 years developing content preparation technology for 3D presentation systems, I'd like to add my 2 cents.
The problem with 3D TV, apart from all the viewing paraphenalia, is that it's not wide enough. Even in Imax 3D, with a field of view approaching 80 degrees, directors have problems composing shots that fit in the "viewable pyramid" formed by the viewer's nose and the four corners of the screen. (It's fairly well established that anything in 3D projection that clips this pyramid destroys the illusion of 3D, because one eye view clips before the other, causing the audience to be subconsiously disturbed in their viewing). In any case, the 3D effect only operates within this pyramid.
This company has been pumped on and off for some time on various message boards that cover 3D - especially Imax boards. AFAIC, maybe their technology will do well on good 3D presentation systems, but TV-sized screens just won't cut it - all the tests I've seen of 3D on a TV are pretty much limited to novelty value.
99% of your (or at least) my stuff can be recreated from something or somewhere else.
My home server has a 120GB data drive (actually 2 spanned 60GB drives). This is mirrored - not as a "hot" mirror, but as an automatic update (using RoboCopy - highly recommended) at 2AM every night - by another two spanned drives in the same server. This way, I can recover stuff I didn't really mean to overwrite from last night's copy.
My "users" (actually my wife and kids) are told that anything they don't save on the server can disappear at any time.
For longer term, off site stuff I just burn CDs. I take one full backup every six months or so, and then take an incremental backup once or twice a week. The files actually changed each week take far less than one CD. In fact, you could automate it as part of the nightly backup process and leave the CD in the burner all week.
Of course, I don't have to back up 120 GB. About half is MP3s. Another 30% is apps, drivers, updates etc. downloaded from the web. I usually just back up my digital photos, projects, and documents - less than 20GB.
I used to do a lot of installing drives just to take a backup, and then moving them off-site. In fact, I used to carry drives all over the world in the eighties because it was the only practial way to move large (for the 80's) amounts of data and apps to customers.
The problem is that drives that are handled that way really are much more likely to fail. Eventually they get dropped or zapped by static or just plain fail for no reason...
As one who was writing S/360 assembler code 10 years before the Z80, 8085 et al., I must tell you that you're wrong about why MS/DOS (and later, WinTel) succeeded: they won because they made something the managers approving purchases could be confident would be around for a while.
30 years later, I insist on W2K on every new machine not because it's superior, but because if something doesn't work I don't need any gurus to fix it, just an MCSE or two.
Think of Fedex and their trucks: a geek would buy BMWs or even design a whole new "Fedex Delivery Unit". A responsible (i.e. successful) manager would buy Chevrolet - and if one broke down, scrap it a buy another.
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Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine?
Uhm... because one $300 ATI or nVidea GPU has many 10's of Glops available (someone above said >50 in the shader unit alone) and your average $500 Linux box has maybe 5 Gflops?
I'd happily pay C$100 (US$75) / yr for a static IP. I'd also unhappily pay $200.
Yes, neither has mine, but it's in the "residential range", which means some ISPs won't accept mail from my server.
Yes, so do I, and I also would like to know where to get a reasonably-priced static IP.
But also it is in a message dump from 09/2000 and was a sig from a guy who didn't work for Diebold (he posted from gesn.com -- does anyone know what that was?). Also his name doesn't appear anywhere else in the message log.
He could have been a temp there to refill the drink machines, for all we know.
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. /me mods this up +1 Insightful
Why should we be forced to become criminals, just to keep doing something that we've been able to do legit for years?
That's what everyone always says when society changes the rules (purportedly for the common good). It's exactly what the Germans say about imposing speed limits on the Autobahns.
Thank you for enlightening me.
I'd sure love to have your gas prices (ours are about 100% higher). On the other hand, you'd sure love to have our electricity prices (about C$ 0.045 / KWh).
And, yes, Montreal
Only people in the coldest climates run nothing but heat.
True. That's why I run seti@home on 18 machines from October through May and only 3 the rest of the year.
Moreover, electrical resistance is a horribly expensive way to heat a building.
I don't where you buy power/oil/gas, but here electricity is a much cheaper way to heat than either of the other two. A heat pump is even better, but is only usable for a small part of the year.
This is true, except that PC's also radiate energy in several bands that easily penetrate walls, whereas heaters don't. If you don't believe this, take the cover of your machine and go listen to an AM radio in your neighbour's house. However, this loss is presumably neglidgable, so they are effectively the same.
>that saves $65 per year
You are making the erroneous assumption that money spent on power that's converted to heat is wasted money.
If you are running any other device to keep your house warm, the money spent on the computer power is not wasted, as an equivalent amount (depending on relative costs) is saved on your heating.
I actually had such an argument about this with some friends (one of them an EE professor at a local university) that I ponied up $20 for an answer on Ask Google.
The debate was about whether or not the running computer under my desk was just as efficient a heater as the baseboard one across the room that's on anyway as it's October here (there too, I bet). In this part of the world, electricity is the cheapest form of energy available.
It turns out that the answer is that except for the (very low percentage of) emissions that are in the microwave range, which go through the walls, everything else is converted to heat anyway.
So I now leave all my computers on all winter, and my central furnace gets to run less as a result.
Surely they must use a team of monkeys with typewriters...
What they can't use as replacement content they try to pass of as Shakespeare
So why is this really any different from cash and making people pay for a licence?
They phrased it that way because it matches the way the statute is written.
This practice contravenes subsection 27(2) of the Telecommunications Act which prohibits unjust discrimination and undue preference.
Two things:
Firstly, phone signals (i.e. conversation / modem signals) are indeed low current, but ring signals are much higher. It's a "current-loop", which essentially means that the source keeps raising the voltage (up to maximum) until a certain amount of current flows.
Secondly, people can be electrocuted by relatively low currents. Usually, when you touch an electrical source, the voltage (and thus the current) across your heart is very low. This because the (low-impedance) heart is part of a classic series voltage-divider circuit that twice includes (high-impedance) skin (entry and exit). This skin-heart-skin "load" of the circuit means that only a very small proportion of the total voltage is applied across the heart.
My college Electrotech 101 instructor was on an industry board that investigated industrial electrocutions. He told us that electrocutions from 12 volts or less were fairly common on operating room tables because the patients had needles piercing their high-resistance skin, allowing 12v right across the heart. Fortunately, it rarely was fatal as they have all the equipment to restart the heart right at hand!
Since the US is surely a net exporter of software, does that mean you think it would be a good idea for the EU, Japan, etc to put import tariffs on Oracle, IBM and yes, even Windows?
Taken a look at the life expectancy figures lately?
Last time I looked - admittedly some years ago -
Canada had significantly longer life expectancies for both genders plus a lower infant mortality rate.
I'm afraid your comparison is somewhat flawed:
Binocular vision is - in all but a few special cases - insignificant beyond 10-20m. The reason flight simulators don't deal with this is that anything that's so close will be hit by the plane in about 0.1 seconds anyway, so who cares. In entertainment (and in real life, for that matter) anything important is almost always within that distance.
That being said, the depth cues you mention are important, but there are lots of others too. The order of precedence / importance varies depending on the distance of the object, the viewer, the setting, the ambient lighting etc.
If (and it's a big if) there are no contradictory references visible (such as frame borders), 2D (monocular) viewing effectively recreates all the cues except for two: stereo and depth of focus (of the eyeball, not the camera). 3D presentation adds the stereo vision and leaves only the depth of focus.
Strange you say "the concept died in moviemaking" in light of the very successful NASA / Imax 3D film recently released about the building of the space station, which was shot using a special, purpose-built, light-weight camera that takes two 65mm frames simultaneously.
You're thinking of gaming applications. Nobody rotates anything in realtime either in cinema or (non-live) TV. It's all done long before in some studio.
The point is, can you take a pre-existing bitmap (i.e. one 2D frame) and change it into the two (slightly different) bitmaps - one left eye and one right eye - needed for a 3D presentation system. There is no other view ever needed because no self-respecting movie-maker would ever let you look at a scene from anywhere else except exactly where it was intended to be seen from!
Note that:
1) you can take as long as you want to figure it out, 'cause it's all happening offline.
2) essentially, you're trying to create something from nothing - or at most just some hints.
3) however, you can use earlier or later frames to help. For example, if the camera is moving left, the previous frame makes an excellent right eye view, and the subsequent one can be used for the right eye!
/stillconfused
Having spent the last 8 years developing content preparation technology for 3D presentation systems, I'd like to add my 2 cents.
The problem with 3D TV, apart from all the viewing paraphenalia, is that it's not wide enough. Even in Imax 3D, with a field of view approaching 80 degrees, directors have problems composing shots that fit in the "viewable pyramid" formed by the viewer's nose and the four corners of the screen. (It's fairly well established that anything in 3D projection that clips this pyramid destroys the illusion of 3D, because one eye view clips before the other, causing the audience to be subconsiously disturbed in their viewing). In any case, the 3D effect only operates within this pyramid.
This company has been pumped on and off for some time on various message boards that cover 3D - especially Imax boards. AFAIC, maybe their technology will do well on good 3D presentation systems, but TV-sized screens just won't cut it - all the tests I've seen of 3D on a TV are pretty much limited to novelty value.
/stillconfused
Yes, but do the same time calculation for the time and money you spend doing backups.
Better to spend $12K on backups and $12K on recoveries than $40K on backups and $2K on recoveries.
Yes, I have to agree.
99% of your (or at least) my stuff can be recreated from something or somewhere else.
My home server has a 120GB data drive (actually 2 spanned 60GB drives). This is mirrored - not as a "hot" mirror, but as an automatic update (using RoboCopy - highly recommended) at 2AM every night - by another two spanned drives in the same server. This way, I can recover stuff I didn't really mean to overwrite from last night's copy.
My "users" (actually my wife and kids) are told that anything they don't save on the server can disappear at any time.
For longer term, off site stuff I just burn CDs. I take one full backup every six months or so, and then take an incremental backup once or twice a week. The files actually changed each week take far less than one CD. In fact, you could automate it as part of the nightly backup process and leave the CD in the burner all week.
Of course, I don't have to back up 120 GB. About half is MP3s. Another 30% is apps, drivers, updates etc. downloaded from the web. I usually just back up my digital photos, projects, and documents - less than 20GB.
I used to do a lot of installing drives just to take a backup, and then moving them off-site. In fact, I used to carry drives all over the world in the eighties because it was the only practial way to move large (for the 80's) amounts of data and apps to customers.
The problem is that drives that are handled that way really are much more likely to fail. Eventually they get dropped or zapped by static or just plain fail for no reason...
As one who was writing S/360 assembler code 10 years before the Z80, 8085 et al., I must tell you that you're wrong about why MS/DOS (and later, WinTel) succeeded: they won because they made something the managers approving purchases could be confident would be around for a while. 30 years later, I insist on W2K on every new machine not because it's superior, but because if something doesn't work I don't need any gurus to fix it, just an MCSE or two. Think of Fedex and their trucks: a geek would buy BMWs or even design a whole new "Fedex Delivery Unit". A responsible (i.e. successful) manager would buy Chevrolet - and if one broke down, scrap it a buy another.