Was that BBC Horizon - Painting with Numbers? That was my all time documentary back then. Horizon's intro sequence was art itself.
That documentary showed some fascinating animations - wireframe drive-through of a down-town area, terrain fly-overs, a textured cube with some animated textures (Sunstone?), and a light pen system which demonstrated cartoon animation - a little cartoon character had a nose that expanded balloon style and pulled him upwards. There was a African-American kid who did some sprite programming with a TI system.
3D Expo did a great talk some time ago about the different eras of animation (The "Era of the Flying Logo" for one, The "Era of animated characters"). Some of those early videos can be found on DVD.
The biggest innovation back then was getting 24-bit framebuffers. Basically just three 8-bit monochrome framebuffers piggybacked into the RGB sockets for a composite monitor. Each one took around 128K of memory the size of an A3 card. Then it was just a matter of writing algorithms to render lines, circles, triangles and shade them. Each frame could be saved as video or film output.
Back then, the patents related to hardware implementations for lighting calculations. Those patents would have expired. Basic 3D API calls are just to draw lines, fill triangles using texture mapping. There isn't anything to patent there now. Even those low-power GPU's support programmable shading models.
If there is anything worth patenting, it will be related to parallel processing at the ASIC level and advanced lighting models at the mathematics level.
ID Software did get threatened with a lawsuit from Creative Labs over the use of some shadow-mapping algorithms - bounding plane intersection counts or something similar. Creative Labs wanted them to support their sound cards.
If I were going to college now, I'd aim for Engineering with Computer Science, given the opportunity to gain parallel processing experience rather than purely Computer Science.
Having qualified mathematics skills combined with parallel processing experience seems to be a big plus for employers.
I was visiting a website, clicked on a sub-link and the browser timed out. Instead I got a Java-Script link to a Visual-DNA script. Looked at the website, and it looked like one of those freaky advertising agencies that tracks everything:
An Atari 400/800/1200(XL) emulator requires copies of the contents of the ROM chips to run (BASIC, Atari-DOS, ASSEMBLER). But for many third-party games that booted directly from disk, that wouldn't apply.
For the games (consoles, computers) themselves, the ROM codes of many games have been put online. In the past you would need the original hardware and some EPROMS to play the games, but now you can just run the emulator.
Atari did bring out a retro style joystick controller that had about 100+ original 2600 games in memory. Saw them at the post office for about £10.
âoeThe Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Departmentâ(TM)s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.â Gibson Guitar tangled in Madagascar wood law
Gibson has now become the first company in the world to be investigated, though not yet charged, with violating new provisions of a 100-year-old law called the Lacy Act. It says a plant can't be taken or a tree cut in another country against its own laws, and secondly, that illegal plant can't be taken into the United States.
But was the wood found at Gibson cut or traded illegally?
"Historically and currently, the laws of Madagascar have allowed for the exportation of ebony and rosewood in certain finished forms, fingerboards being one," said Bruce Mitchell, Gibson's attorney.
Guitar components called fingerboards were taken in the raid. The inlay and fret lines were added in Nashville, but Gibson said even what appeared to be bare pieces were not unfinished.
"Finished isn't an English dictionary term; it's a legal term in Madagascar. It's defined, and the law specifically defines a fingerboard blank as a finished good," said Juszkiewicz. "It's not illegal. It's not illegal under Madagascar law. You can't argue with the facts."
Just read today that Gibson guitars from Nashville are facing their second federal shakedown to make them offshore jobs.
The first time was in 2009, when they were found to be importing wood from Madagascar in contravention of the Lacey Act 2008 Amendment. However, the lawsuit would be dropped in exchange for them offshoring some jobs.
Second time around, they have been raided with computers seized, and wood supplies confiscated. The charges are that India has a law that makes it illegal to export wood that hasn't been "finished" by local workers (varnished, polished etc...) Once again they are being asked to offshore jobs in return for the lawsuit being dropped.
Still remember that day back in the 80's. Getting the Atari 800 with 100+ free programs and games on a couple of tape cassettes.
Most seemed to be memory games where you try and match pairs of patterns. Others were generating Moire patterns and doing color cycling tricks. About the coolest at the time was that Byte article on drawing a landscape with trees, fallen leaves, grass, and a color cycled stream and waterfall. The tutorials on making sound effects seem funny now...
[If anyone wants a copy, I'll put them online - managed to archive them and restore the data just recently].
Things done back them, the light pen from Silica Shop, the graphics tablet interfaced using paddle controllers don't seem so ancient. It's like we knew where the user interface was going to go, but didn't know how to design the silicon.
These days, you could still use an emulator to play these programs, but more advanced animations can be done with tools like Blender or 3DMax/Maya with scripts. There are any number of Youtube tutorials on making such animations.
Those are Californian or New York salaries . In the UK, Financial companies would pay £50K for "whizz kids" from red-brick universities and with degrees in Financial Mathematics or theoretical Computer Science.
From what I've seen they can't get enough SAP, Fortran or Cobol programmers. Fortran + parallel programming experience seems to be a nice little earner.
I'd say the success is because it's smaller than a netbook but still has wireless access.
That was the major failing of early tablet computers. They didn't have any wireless network access, so you had to at some point perform a resync with your network server or PC. Tablets looked great with the stylus - seemed perfect for artists to do Photoshop. But they didn't have enough memory space for editing large images. They also seemed great for doctors, ending the need for paper clipboards. But if a doctor needed to retrieve a file while doing the rounds, they still needed a technician or whoever to do the running for them.
It gets the droplets large enough and heavy enough to start falling and reach the ground before evaporating. But that doesn't solve the fundamental atmospherics of these latitudes.
Problem with these dry areas isn't that they don't get enough rain during the day, it's the fact the cold dry air falling from high altitudes night desiccates the moisture and dust from the surface.
Places like the Sahara desert are right on the boundary of two Hadley cells where the night-time temperatures go below zero.
In the days of MSDOS and the first 8086, there wasn't any hardware based security. About the only multitasking was the CLI/SLI (clear interrupt mask/set interrupt mask) and the 18.2Hz interrupt. There wasn't even any boundary between system files and users files except for a few bits in the directory structure for read-only, hidden and system files.
DosBox recreates the MSDOS environment perfectly. Every service device driver depended on interrupts. Int 10h for this, Int 31h for that.
Want mouse support? Install MSDOS v3.1 to get those. Need IPX support? Install packet drivers for that. Need Adlib/Sound-Blaster support? Install sound drivers for that. Want higher resolution SVGA modes. Update your BIOS/graphics card for those.
To run Windows, required rendering GUI widgets all the different framebuffer sizes and formats in software (CGA- 4 color, EGA - 16 color, VGA EGA+ 256 color, SVGA: VGA+16-bit/24-bit color). Hardware accelerated blitting was a luxury then, let alone texture mapping. Having clock speeds less that 33MHz didn't help with the GUI desktop rendering.
Writing an application back then involved making your own interrupt calls to the mouse, audio, keyboard and display drivers, to set up and shut down these services.
First edition of Windows just slapped on a set of GUI calls to set these up consistently between different hardware setups. It was a layer of bureaucracy but it simplified the process of writing applications so that users just had to worry about GUI design and events.
From "The Micro Revolution Revisited" (1984), p103
Steve Jobs was twenty one when he formed Apple with his fellow inventor Stephen Wozniak who was twenty-six. They sold a Volkswagen minibus and a programmable calculator to raise $1,300 dollars. They built their first computer in the Jobs garage in Cupertino. Six months was spent designing the prototype, which was sold to a computer store. The store promptly ordered fifty."
Look at a desktop PC - first thing, it's filled mostly with air - that's the actual cooling system - although air is an insulator, blowing it around actually helps cool the components. Next thing, the actual CPU and GPU are tiny bits of silicon. An intel i-7 CPU is only 263mm^2 or about 17mmx17mm. Similarly for a Geforce 9800 GTX+ (= 260mm^2). That's about a size of a pair of standard keys on a desktop keyboard. They could fit together into a single chip die.
On a desktop, to connect these two together alone (CPU & GPU), you need the die packaging for both chips, the chip boards and sockets (Socket-7 for the I-7, PCIe-2.0 for the GPU), the various glue logic, smoothing capacitors for power, plus the bus backplane. While the GPU and CPU may be clocked at the GHz speeds, PCI Express operates at 250MB/s or 500MB/s per lane, or 16GB combined, but that is shared with other cards like sound, disk drive controllers, embedded network port.
On a mobile phone, the GPU and CPU are on the same die and packaging. There is no need for the sockets, PCI motherboard, glue logic, bus backplane and everything else. That reduces power demands. The direct connection means that a trade-off between clock-speed and number of stream processors can be made against the latency of the bus connection, thus reducing the need for cooling.
ARM processors also tend to combine different operation together like DSP chips. You would have a single instruction to add and multiply vector data together as well as increment or decrement the two pointers. That also helps to reduce code size, cache and memory transfers.
When I was an undergrad, our computer lab rooms had a 5 key mechanical combination lock which had the default sequence [2 4][3] to open. Twenty years later, I'm trying to get into a secure corporate car-park via a side gate which has exactly the same type of lock. And the combination was the same....
We had a 10 KiloWatt trip switch on our mains power supply. Doing two things like having the cooker and the washing machine/dryer (combined machine) on at the same time would cause the trip switch to cut out. Not fun having to find our way to the back end of the basement in the dark.
Energy rating websites will list the power needs of big appliances (dryers and cookers, fridges and air-cons are the hungriest).
To me, it's the person walking along a shopping mall, busy texting with any make of mobile phone, with their head down, and heading on a collision path with a concrete column, other shoppers or a ornamental pool.
You've got several choices depending on what you are contributing...
If it's something you remember from reading an article, reference the article. That's informative to other readers.
If it's something you have encountered in the past, that's experience and informative too.
As a researcher, you will be expected to maintain a research profile by publishing articles and papers. In your conclusions, you are going to have to express an opinion. It should be unbiased and based on empirical research. Slashdot articles are a good way of practising.
I know the pain. But it can be mitigated by using external USB drives and the 'dd' command, which allows an entire file system to be stored as an image file and then restored or even mounted temporarily.
For Linux, you should have separate partitions for kernels, configuration files, applications, projects, and user accounts. That way, you only need to upgrade a few partitions (kernels, applications and configuration files).
For me, the best way to upgrading to a new Linux OS, is to install the new OS on an external hard disk drive, then make sure every existing package is matched by its most recent replacement. Then swap the two disk drives. If there is any problems with drivers I can go back to the old OS. Then copy over all user/project files.
Being able to swap drives, allows for a free "code-freeze" backup copy to be made.
Slashdot Mirror
Was that BBC Horizon - Painting with Numbers? That was my all time documentary back then. Horizon's intro sequence was art itself.
That documentary showed some fascinating animations - wireframe drive-through of a down-town area, terrain fly-overs, a textured cube with some animated textures (Sunstone?), and a light pen system which demonstrated cartoon animation - a little cartoon character had a nose that expanded balloon style and pulled him upwards.
There was a African-American kid who did some sprite programming with a TI system.
3D Expo did a great talk some time ago about the different eras of animation (The "Era of the Flying Logo" for one, The "Era of animated characters"). Some of those early videos can be found on DVD.
The biggest innovation back then was getting 24-bit framebuffers. Basically just three 8-bit monochrome framebuffers piggybacked into the RGB sockets for a composite monitor. Each one took around 128K of memory the size of an A3 card. Then it was just a matter of writing algorithms to render lines, circles, triangles and shade them. Each frame could be saved as video or film output.
Back then, the patents related to hardware implementations for lighting calculations. Those patents would have expired.
Basic 3D API calls are just to draw lines, fill triangles using texture mapping. There isn't anything to patent there now. Even those low-power GPU's support programmable shading models.
If there is anything worth patenting, it will be related to parallel processing at the ASIC level and advanced lighting models at the mathematics level.
ID Software did get threatened with a lawsuit from Creative Labs over the use of some shadow-mapping algorithms - bounding plane intersection counts or something similar. Creative Labs wanted them to support their sound cards.
If I were going to college now, I'd aim for Engineering with Computer Science, given the opportunity to gain parallel processing experience rather than purely Computer Science.
Having qualified mathematics skills combined with parallel processing experience seems to be a big plus for employers.
Has anyone heard of Visual DNA?
I was visiting a website, clicked on a sub-link and the browser timed out. Instead I got a Java-Script link to a Visual-DNA script. Looked at the website, and it looked like one of those freaky advertising agencies that tracks everything:
Visual DNA
Given the bit sizes of the roms (8K), you could probably figure out a mathematical expression that would generate the identical bits ie.
a0 **b0 + a1 **b1 .. + an ** bn
Might take some time to find a combination... but it would be an impressive compression algorithm.
An Atari 400/800/1200(XL) emulator requires copies of the contents of the ROM chips to run (BASIC, Atari-DOS, ASSEMBLER). But for many third-party games that booted directly from disk, that wouldn't apply.
For the games (consoles, computers) themselves, the ROM codes of many games have been put online. In the past you would need the original hardware and some EPROMS to play the games, but now you can just run the emulator.
Atari did bring out a retro style joystick controller that had about 100+ original 2600 games in memory. Saw them at the post office for about £10.
Sounds crazy but it is documented:
Gibson Guitar Corp. Responds to Federal Raid
âoeThe Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Departmentâ(TM)s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.â
Gibson Guitar tangled in Madagascar wood law
Gibson has now become the first company in the world to be investigated, though not yet charged, with violating new provisions of a 100-year-old law called the Lacy Act. It says a plant can't be taken or a tree cut in another country against its own laws, and secondly, that illegal plant can't be taken into the United States.
But was the wood found at Gibson cut or traded illegally?
"Historically and currently, the laws of Madagascar have allowed for the exportation of ebony and rosewood in certain finished forms, fingerboards being one," said Bruce Mitchell, Gibson's attorney.
Guitar components called fingerboards were taken in the raid. The inlay and fret lines were added in Nashville, but Gibson said even what appeared to be bare pieces were not unfinished.
"Finished isn't an English dictionary term; it's a legal term in Madagascar. It's defined, and the law specifically defines a fingerboard blank as a finished good," said Juszkiewicz. "It's not illegal. It's not illegal under Madagascar law. You can't argue with the facts."
Average speed in downtown is 5 miles/hour. I'd say that's a fair match.
You young un's. Always arguing when us old-timers are trying to get some shut-eye... :)
Just read today that Gibson guitars from Nashville are facing their second federal shakedown to make them offshore jobs.
The first time was in 2009, when they were found to be importing wood from Madagascar in contravention of the Lacey Act 2008 Amendment. However, the lawsuit would be dropped in exchange for them offshoring some jobs.
Second time around, they have been raided with computers seized, and wood supplies confiscated. The charges are that India has a law that makes it illegal to export wood that hasn't been "finished" by local workers (varnished, polished etc...) Once again they are being asked to offshore jobs in return for the lawsuit being dropped.
Still remember that day back in the 80's. Getting the Atari 800 with 100+ free programs and games on a couple of tape cassettes.
Most seemed to be memory games where you try and match pairs of patterns. Others were generating Moire patterns and doing color cycling tricks. About the coolest at the time was that Byte article on drawing a landscape with trees, fallen leaves, grass, and a color cycled stream and waterfall. The tutorials on making sound effects seem funny now...
[If anyone wants a copy, I'll put them online - managed to archive them and restore the data just recently].
Things done back them, the light pen from Silica Shop, the graphics tablet interfaced using paddle controllers don't seem so ancient. It's like we knew where the user interface was going to go, but didn't know how to design the silicon.
These days, you could still use an emulator to play these programs, but more advanced animations can be done with tools like Blender or 3DMax/Maya with scripts. There are any number of Youtube tutorials on making such animations.
Those are Californian or New York salaries . In the UK, Financial companies would pay £50K for "whizz kids" from red-brick universities and with degrees in Financial Mathematics or theoretical Computer Science.
From what I've seen they can't get enough SAP, Fortran or Cobol programmers. Fortran + parallel programming experience seems to be a nice little earner.
I'd say the success is because it's smaller than a netbook but still has wireless access.
That was the major failing of early tablet computers. They didn't have any wireless network access, so you had to at some point perform a resync with your network server or PC. Tablets looked great with the stylus - seemed perfect for artists to do Photoshop. But they didn't have enough memory space for editing large images. They also seemed great for doctors, ending the need for paper clipboards. But if a doctor needed to retrieve a file while doing the rounds, they still needed a technician or whoever to do the running for them.
You would have every possible Quake, Doom level as well as all the cheat codes.
It gets the droplets large enough and heavy enough to start falling and reach the ground before evaporating.
But that doesn't solve the fundamental atmospherics of these latitudes.
Problem with these dry areas isn't that they don't get enough rain during the day, it's the fact the cold dry air falling from high altitudes night desiccates the moisture and dust from the surface.
Places like the Sahara desert are right on the boundary of two Hadley cells where the night-time temperatures go below zero.
In the days of MSDOS and the first 8086, there wasn't any hardware based security. About the only multitasking was the CLI/SLI (clear interrupt mask/set interrupt mask) and the 18.2Hz interrupt. There wasn't even any boundary between system files and users files except for a few bits in the directory structure for read-only, hidden and system files.
DosBox recreates the MSDOS environment perfectly. Every service device driver depended on interrupts. Int 10h for this, Int 31h for that.
Want mouse support? Install MSDOS v3.1 to get those.
Need IPX support? Install packet drivers for that.
Need Adlib/Sound-Blaster support? Install sound drivers for that. Want higher resolution SVGA modes. Update your BIOS/graphics card for those.
To run Windows, required rendering GUI widgets all the different framebuffer sizes and formats in software (CGA- 4 color, EGA - 16 color, VGA EGA+ 256 color, SVGA: VGA+16-bit/24-bit color). Hardware accelerated blitting was a luxury then, let alone texture mapping. Having clock speeds less that 33MHz didn't help with the GUI desktop rendering.
Writing an application back then involved making your own interrupt calls to the mouse, audio, keyboard and display drivers, to set up and shut down these services.
First edition of Windows just slapped on a set of GUI calls to set these up consistently between different hardware setups. It was a layer of bureaucracy but it simplified the process of writing applications so that users just had to worry about GUI design and events.
From "The Micro Revolution Revisited" (1984), p103
Steve Jobs was twenty one when he formed Apple with his fellow inventor Stephen Wozniak who was twenty-six. They sold a Volkswagen minibus and a programmable calculator to raise $1,300 dollars. They built their first computer in the Jobs garage in Cupertino. Six months was spent designing the prototype, which was sold to a computer store. The store promptly ordered fifty."
From the Wikipedia entry, it was the strategic decision of Apple to "create a portfolio of professional and consumer digital production software" that got the media people hooked on Apple products.
That was the time SGI bought Alias|Wavefront and Microsoft bought Softimage.
It's like watching a star falling through the event horizon of a black hole.
Some bright spark also thought it would be clever to charge VAT on hot meals and not cold ones.
Look at a desktop PC - first thing, it's filled mostly with air - that's the actual cooling system - although air is an insulator, blowing it around actually helps cool the components. Next thing, the actual CPU and GPU are tiny bits of silicon. An intel i-7 CPU is only 263mm^2 or about 17mmx17mm. Similarly for a Geforce 9800 GTX+ (= 260mm^2). That's about a size of a pair of standard keys on a desktop keyboard. They could fit together into a single chip die.
On a desktop, to connect these two together alone (CPU & GPU), you need the die packaging for both chips, the chip boards and sockets (Socket-7 for the I-7, PCIe-2.0 for the GPU), the various glue logic, smoothing capacitors for power, plus the bus backplane. While the GPU and CPU may be clocked at the GHz speeds, PCI Express operates at 250MB/s or 500MB/s per lane, or 16GB combined, but that is shared with other cards like sound, disk drive controllers, embedded network port.
On a mobile phone, the GPU and CPU are on the same die and packaging. There is no need for the sockets, PCI motherboard, glue logic, bus backplane and everything else. That reduces power demands. The direct connection means that a trade-off between clock-speed and number of stream processors can be made against the latency of the bus connection, thus reducing the need for cooling.
ARM processors also tend to combine different operation together like DSP chips. You would have a single instruction to add and multiply vector data together as well as increment or decrement the two pointers. That also helps to reduce code size, cache and memory transfers.
When I was an undergrad, our computer lab rooms had a 5 key mechanical combination lock which had the default sequence [2 4][3] to open. Twenty years later, I'm trying to get into a secure corporate car-park via a side gate which has exactly the same type of lock. And the combination was the same....
Some things never change
We had a 10 KiloWatt trip switch on our mains power supply. Doing two things like having the cooker and the washing machine/dryer (combined machine) on at the same time would cause the trip switch to cut out. Not fun having to find our way to the back end of the basement in the dark.
Energy rating websites will list the power needs of big appliances (dryers and cookers, fridges and air-cons are the hungriest).
To me, it's the person walking along a shopping mall, busy texting with any make of mobile phone, with their head down, and heading on a collision path with a concrete column, other shoppers or a ornamental pool.
As caught on camera Woman sues for walking into pool while texting
You've got several choices depending on what you are contributing...
If it's something you remember from reading an article, reference the article. That's informative to other readers.
If it's something you have encountered in the past, that's experience and informative too.
As a researcher, you will be expected to maintain a research profile by publishing articles and papers. In your conclusions, you are going to have to express an opinion. It should be unbiased and based on empirical research.
Slashdot articles are a good way of practising.
I know the pain. But it can be mitigated by using external USB drives and the 'dd' command, which allows an entire file system to be stored as an image file and then restored or even mounted temporarily.
For Linux, you should have separate partitions for kernels, configuration files, applications, projects, and user accounts. That way, you only need to upgrade a few partitions (kernels, applications and configuration files).
For me, the best way to upgrading to a new Linux OS, is to install the new OS on an external hard disk drive, then make sure every existing package is matched by its most recent replacement. Then swap the two disk drives. If there is any problems with drivers I can go back to the old OS. Then copy over all user/project files.
Being able to swap drives, allows for a free "code-freeze" backup copy to be made.