You will see this happening a lot with anything to do with materials analysis (defect analysis/ quality control).
Project proposal #1 : Develop a method of acquiring the data Project proposal #2 : Build up a database of samples Project proposal #3 : Classify new samples based on database Project proposal #4 : Develop methods of creating synthetic data from existing database entries
If they were to apply this method to security, they would have to get samples of different home-made, industrial and military explosives. Probably not too easy to purchase from the local Walmart.
On page 14 of the PDF document there is a graph showing the variation in pricing between graphics boards of equivalent performance.
Between the time the Geforce FX 5800 ($399 5/2003) / Radeon 9800 ($399 5/5/2003) came out and the time the GeForce 7900 GS ($200 9/6/2006 ) / Radion X1650 Pro ($199 9/15/2006), there was less than $1 variation in prices. At the same time, the variation in release dates was also substantially lower than outside this period of time.
For a period of time Nvidia and ATI agreed to boost the market value of GPU's by arranging for similarly powered products to be sold at the same price.
The following PDF document describes the entire case: GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS ANTITRUST LITIGATION
Both of us have spent the last three years trying to bring the perceived value of our products up to the level of Intel. The "GPU" category is clean and has served us well that way. We both have increased the price of our high end product several fold over the last 4 years while Intel's high end prices have more than halved. Creating another category serves to work contradictory to that. How does one cleanly position it versus a GPU and a CPU?? It will tear down what we have both built.
The usual punishment will be a large fine - maybe a donation to charity - donating money to a charity allowing poor families to buy GPU pc's for Christmas or education.
The simplest solution is to make it a legal requirement for everyone to vote, and to provide a "none-of-the-above" for those who can't make a choice (otherwise they would just spoil their voting paper anyway).
It happens anywhere there is an election. There will always be "safe seats" where the population will always vote for one party (rich wealthy areas vote for the "lower taxes for rich people" party, and the low income areas vote for the "tax the middle classes for social services" party. In the end, the party campaigners only go after the swing seats where there is no outright majority for any party. Changing election boundaries might be one way of solving this, but low income areas tend to have a higher housing density and so have a smaller catchment area.
Japan's Trade Ministry will require special permits to export the new, hot-selling game after labeling it a device that can be adapted for military use, the Mainichi newspaper reported Sunday.
Parts of the machine resemble a small supercomputer in their ability to process high-quality images quickly-a characteristic of missile guidance systems, according to another newspaper, Asahi.
Trade Ministry officials were not available to comment Sunday, but Sony spokesman Kenichi Fukunaga confirmed that special export regulations had been imposed on the game, which is due to hit U.S. and European markets this fall. He declined to comment on the reported military applications.
Under Japanese export and trade law, those who wish to export more than $472 worth of products that can be used for military purposes must get a license from the Trade Ministry, the Mainichi said.
Given PlayStation2's $376 price tag, anybody wishing to ship or carry more than one machine out of Japan would first have to obtain special government permission. Failure to do so could result in a maximum five-year prison sentence or a $18,900 fine, the Asahi said.
Fukunaga said that the company expects to receive an export permit to market the PlayStation2 machines, 1.4 million of which have been sold in Japan since it debuted there in March.
He added that other Sony products have in the past come under the export control law for goods that have potential military uses.
The PlayStation2 can carry four times as much information as the original PlayStation system, which was released in 1994. The console has stereo-quality sound and vivid graphics and can connect the user to the Internet.
Missile-guidance systems typically consist of a missile-mounted camera that transmits images to a remote firing station, where an operator can send signals to adjust the rocket's trajectory. Officials are apparently concerned about rogue states that have military hardware but lack the sophisticated technological components.
Fukunaga said government regulation will do little to hinder already intense competition among game makers to produce more powerful machines.
"The technology in this machine is at the cutting edge, but the competition is catching up, so the regulations will eventually have to be reviewed," Fukunaga said.
Sony rival Sega Enterprises launched its Dreamcast game console with Internet access last year. Nintendo Co., maker of N64 and the portable Game Boy, will release its new machine this year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp. plans to introduce its own video game machine, the X-Box, in late 2001.
Sony owns about 60% of the game-machine market in the United States and Japan.
It is not just a card with a photograph (like an armed force ID card or driving license). It will be linked to *ALL* personal data that you have ever had - your previous addresses, your current address(es), your SSN number, benefits, bank accounts for social security deposits, current employer) and so on. The idea is to eliminate the need for a dozen or so different government databases (one per department) and have one super-database with everything stored on it.
Re:This should come naturally but...
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 1
What one programmer's definition of documented, is another programmer's definition of over-documented. Should the documentation for a function be at the top of the file, above the function definition, or between the function definition and the first opening brace?
Should comments be alongside the lines of code they are describing, above them at the start of the line, or are they simply index points numbers (eg.// 1.1) with the actual definition above the function?
They get paid bonuses based upon how much they have reduced costs from the previous year - that has been done for the past 20 years in the UK.
Lord Weinstocks favorite rule: If a company, department or division hasn't increased profits by over 10% in two successive quarters, liquidate that group and redeploy staff in something else that looks more profitable.
I would think twice about accepting any job which required a Non-Compete Agreement to be signed or a work visa that didn't allow you to change employers. Being pigeon-holed working on yesterday's technology while everyone else is moving to next-generation is worse than being at home or at college learning new skills.
# LF through HF Receive,10 kHz - 30 MHz R-1051 H/URR; twelve receivers R-2368 H/URR; three receivers # HF Transmit; 2-30 MHz AN/URT-23D; nine transmitters # VHF Transmit and Receive, 30-162 MHz AN/GRR-211; two transceivers for non-secure voice ANNRC-46A; two FM transceivers for secure voice AN/URC-80 (V)6; one transceiver for bridge-to-bridge communications # UHF Transmit and Receive, 220-400 MHz AN/URC-93 (V)1; two transceiver for Link 4A AN/WSC-3 (V)7,11; fourteen transceivers AN/WSC-3 (V)11, have-quick transceiver # SATCOM Transmit and/or Receive AN/SSR-1A; one receiver for fleet broadcast ANNWSC-3A (V)3; five transceivers for digital voice # Infra-Red, Transmit and Receive AN/SAR-7A; two IR Viewers # Land Line Terminations, Transmit and/or Receive AN/SAT-2B, one IR Transmitter Single Channel DC Secure TTY # Telephone Special Communications Channel AN/USQ-69 (V)7; OTCIXS AN/USQ-69 (V)8; TADIXS AN/SYQ-7 (V)5 and AN/USQ-69 (V)6; NAVMACS/CUDIX AN/USQ-83 (V) and AN/USQ-125 (V); Link 11 AN/SSW-1 D; Link 4A AN/SRQ-4; HawkLink (LAMPS MK III) AN/ARR-75 Sonobouy antenna
A Blackberry operates on the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz GSM network.
The traditional solution to stopping people climbing over your back garden walls, breaking into your house and stealing your stuff was to cement broken glass onto the top of your walls. On a sunny day, it would look quite pretty, especially if you used different colored bottles. Alternatively there is the metal railing with the fake spear tips on the top. These can be seen around public parks, although they do spear the occasional delinquent who tries to climb a tree to escape from the police.
I've seen both the Apple and Microsoft adverts. Apple tried to demonstrate that their OS was the 'next generation' by representing their OS as a couple of smart students while PC's were represented by an overweight middle-aged office worker in a 1970's brown suit.
While you identify with, will depend upon your age, but the Apple advert did seem to be demeaning to more mature people. From that perspective, I can see why Microsoft made their adverts in the way that they did. Apple probably shouldn't have used real people to demonstrate this difference.
Worrying about how *long* you're online is extremely irritating. Those are definitely "good old days" I wouldn't want to go back to.
That's the way wireless broadband works - if you exceed some large limit in your local region, or use your wireless modem while away from home (which is the whole point of going wireless in the first place) then you get bushwhacked for 10 pounds/megabyte. Not too fun when you are working at a remote site and need to download a PDF technical manual.
Basically because the wireless operators want to behave like airlines and charge corporate prices for business users while trying to charge consumer prices for home users.
Does this announcement mean that nVidia's OpenGL is now free software then, because of SGI's automatic license update clause?
Probably not, because the memory-mapping interface between system memory and the device driver hardware registers will still be confidential to Nvidia and board manufacturers.
That's not flame-bait - neonprimetime asked a perfectly valid set of questions.
I've always thought right-winger were more likely to own rifles, and go hunting, than the left-wingers. Wouldn't go around shooting animals desensitize people to violence?
Wouldn't both parties have been affected by watching Tom & Jerry, Roadrunner and The Muppets (remember Miss Piggy punching everyone, and the crazy chef) desensitize people to violence?
What about movies with large numbers of death scenes desensitize people to violence?
The 6502 CPU was actually clocked at the same rate as the pixels in the framebuffer were written out to the TV/monitor. All of this was documented by Chris Crawford and many others who wrote De Re Atari
There were four sprites you could program - each had its own band of memory (we would call them cursor overlay planes these days). Each byte described a single scan line. Control registers defined the horizontal position and amount of stretching (power of two) of the band. You had to write some assembly language routines to shuffle these bands up or down. If you wrote a horizontal-blank interrupt you could have multiple moving sprites, each at a different position per row. These were the player in player-missile graphics. There was a fifth band which were the missiles (the ping-pong ball in video-pong and video-olympics). Each pair of bits in a byte defined the location of the missile associated with each player. Collisions between players and missiles were detected by reading various collision registers.
It was great fun programming, but the hardware was capable of so much more than what was possible with the Basic compiler that you really needed the assembler cartridge. Otherwise you had spend your time writing assembly language using numbers rather than mnemonics. It was interesting to see that there were assembler routines to handle the floating point arithmetic, while other assembler routines handled the rendering of trapezoids - through an XIO command. Other Basic interpreters (the Dragon 32) had assembler routines for matrix/array calculations. If they had put all that together, where would the 3D industry have been now?
He blames the Sony Playstation and the lack of EA signing up to develop for the Dreamcast, as the reason it failed. Though some programmers I met said it was because it only supported tiny texture maps - 64x64 tiles rather than full-size textures.
He also blames Sony for sending out videos to FUD the competition - that I can believe - Sony would often take an animation reel and send it to their developers, saying "we want this title to look like that" eg. quad mesh characters when everyone was using billboards.
Yes, that's the one - I still remember the day I went into town with my parents to buy the cartridge and reading the manuals while taking the bus home. There were labels that were placed on top of the keypads to show which button did which. Like a ZX Spectrum, each key had at least three different color coded functions.
The Atari 800 was definitely much nicer - plus the two bonus secret graphics modes which supported four color characters although these were only 4x8 pixels in size.
There may have only been 128 bytes of RAM, but the game itself was stored in ROM. The RAM was used to store temporary variables (player scores, player positions, player state, game level, game mode). It would take more than 128 bytes to write something like the sprite tank battle game in the Combat cartridge. You would need 64 bytes to store the bitmaps for each tank orientation (8 directions x 8x8 bit sprite = 64 bytes).
The most amazing cartridge was Atari 800 Basic which attempted to implement the Basic programming language on a console system. You only had 128 bytes to write a program in (keywords were tokenised). At most that gave you 20 lines to program in and graphics simply consisted of a red square and a white square. With some keywords to read the keypad, you could do a simple game like "dodge the white square".
SGI offered a sample software implementation of an OpenGL device driver to hardware vendors. This source code would provide a software specification of the way that any hardware should behave. It could be used as a fallback if a hardware vendor didn't choose to implement a particular feature of OpenGL functionality directly in hardware. It would be the responsibility of the hardware vendor to choose what to implement in hardware and software. Early consumer boards just did the rasterization, and used the Intel MMX2/AMD 3DNow! instructions to do the TLC (transformation/lighting/clipping).
A professional board or gaming card would do everything in hardware. Because of the way OpenGL is implemented, there are a multitude of ways of sending down geometry - any combination of vertices plus optional outward normals/texture coordinates/colors for triangles, quads, triangle strips, triangle fans, line or points. And these might be integers, 16-bit/32-bit/64-bit floating point. Each particular combination might or might not be optimized for the hardware. There was a big fuss in the past, because vendors chose only to optimize the particular combinations for the Quake game. Home developers were confused why their implementations would run slower than the real Quake.
For every possible option at a particular layer (vertex transformation, vertex lighting, vertex clipping, triangle rasterization), there would be a function pointer choosing which function call to make - either to the software implementation or writing to hardware registers.
Mesa-GL is a open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification, written by the open-source community and not SGI. OpenGL was originally a rewrite of SGI proprietary SGI-GL API which worked on all workstations from Indigo's to Extreme's. SGI was charging vendors a license fee for access to their software implementation, which included a verification test suite for hardware. Because of this, they were reluctant to make the software open source.
But with the evolution of 3D hardware, the free availability of an open-source version of OpenGL and the possibility that programmers might even get to be able to use the GPU to write directly to the framebuffer once again, it is strategic for SGI to make this software open source.
Before DirectX and OpenGL, game programmers only used either Mode 13 with 320x200x256 color palette (or other VESA 256 color modes) to write directly to the hardware. Programmers could just use whatever algorithm they could think of - use the 256 color-palette as a Z-buffer for rendering spheres, depth-shading effects, color cycling, sprite animation. Have 16 sub-palettes each a shade darker than the others and you could do shadow effects. Create a pixelmap C++ class that could be memory-mapped to the framebuffer, add some block copy, point drawing line drawing, textured triangle/quad filling routines and you have your own mini 3D API. Since the framebuffer itself was a pixelmap, you could use the framebuffer itself as a texture map (this technique was actually patented in hardware).
OpenGL already has a mechanism to support variations.
The original OpenGL sample implementation was very basic - no vertex/fragment/geometry shaders. Even multi-texturing was still relatively new. There is really nothing to change there. Most developers hav moved on to using to vertex and fragment shaders to keep control of rendering (rather than use OpenGL lighting).
If anyone wishes to make modifications to OpenGL, they can do so by creating extensions. It is up to vendors and the ARB to decide whether they wish to implement them or agree to a common implementation. Both ATI and Nvidia, and many other companies have their proprietary extensions. At the last count there were well over 100 different extensions.
Sounds like the technique that TrueType fonts have to resolve the problem of trying to render fonts at low-pixel fonts. If no corrections are performed, the character (or glyphs) will either merge into each other or skip particular segments of glyphs (eg. missing out the middle bar of the letter 'm'. The font-engine actually usually a 'virtual machine' with an instruction set that performs geometric calculations (like project point to line, snap point to grid, set axis of projection line) to solve this problem.
It certainly takes motivation to remain focused on a project for two years, especially for someone so young.
I am impressed by the support environment he is in;
His school has a Math Engineering Science Achievment Club, a First Lego League team, a Science Bowl and MathCounts programs, and he is a member of the local Chess club.
That is an incredible amount of support in the local middle school.
Then he has a science teacher, participated in the Northwest Science Expo, and had a counsel of two university professors and one person in industry.
Not really. Probably, his father is a research scientist in the field.
There was an article in the LA Times about how parents were using their contacts with research labs to get resources for their kids science fair project competitions - parents would do things like (a hypothetical example) getting a time-slot allocated on a supercomputer to run CFD simulations to design a turbine to capture energy from water running down a drain-pipe. Organisers of such events eventually made the restriction on the types of resources that could be used.
Slashdot Mirror
You will see this happening a lot with anything to do with materials analysis (defect analysis/ quality control).
Project proposal #1 : Develop a method of acquiring the data
Project proposal #2 : Build up a database of samples
Project proposal #3 : Classify new samples based on database
Project proposal #4 : Develop methods of creating synthetic data from existing database entries
If they were to apply this method to security, they would have to get samples of different home-made, industrial and military explosives. Probably not too easy to purchase from the local Walmart.
On page 14 of the PDF document there is a graph showing the variation in pricing between graphics boards of equivalent performance.
Between the time the Geforce FX 5800 ($399 5/2003) / Radeon 9800 ($399 5/5/2003) came out and the
time the GeForce 7900 GS ($200 9/6/2006 ) / Radion X1650 Pro ($199 9/15/2006), there was less than $1 variation in prices. At the same time, the variation in release dates was also substantially lower than outside this period of time.
For a period of time Nvidia and ATI agreed to boost the market value of GPU's by arranging for similarly powered products to be sold at the same price.
The following PDF document describes the entire case: GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS
ANTITRUST LITIGATION
Copies of the E-mails are here E-mail evidence of price fixing
Both of us have spent the last three years trying to bring the perceived value of our products up to the level of Intel. The "GPU" category is clean and has served us well that way. We both have increased the price of our high end product several fold over the last 4 years while Intel's high end prices have more than halved. Creating another category serves to work contradictory to that. How does one cleanly position it versus a GPU and a CPU?? It will tear down what we have both built.
There are now at least 51 different anti-trust lawsuits in the pipeline
The usual punishment will be a large fine - maybe a donation to charity - donating money to a charity allowing poor families to buy GPU pc's for Christmas or education.
The simplest solution is to make it a legal requirement for everyone to vote, and to provide a "none-of-the-above" for those who can't make a choice (otherwise they would just spoil their voting paper anyway).
It happens anywhere there is an election. There will always be "safe seats" where the population will always vote for one party (rich wealthy areas vote for the "lower taxes for rich people" party, and the low income areas vote for the "tax the middle classes for social services" party. In the end, the party campaigners only go after the swing seats where there is no outright majority for any party. Changing election boundaries might be one way of solving this, but low income areas tend to have a higher housing density and so have a smaller catchment area.
Sony's High-Tech Playstation2 Will Require Military Export License
Sony's PlayStation2 may be more than just a toy.
Japan's Trade Ministry will require special permits to export the new, hot-selling game after labeling it a device that can be adapted for military use, the Mainichi newspaper reported Sunday.
Parts of the machine resemble a small supercomputer in their ability to process high-quality images quickly-a characteristic of missile guidance systems, according to another newspaper, Asahi.
Trade Ministry officials were not available to comment Sunday, but Sony spokesman Kenichi Fukunaga confirmed that special export regulations had been imposed on the game, which is due to hit U.S. and European markets this fall. He declined to comment on the reported military applications.
Under Japanese export and trade law, those who wish to export more than $472 worth of products that can be used for military purposes must get a license from the Trade Ministry, the Mainichi said.
Given PlayStation2's $376 price tag, anybody wishing to ship or carry more than one machine out of Japan would first have to obtain special government permission. Failure to do so could result in a maximum five-year prison sentence or a $18,900 fine, the Asahi said.
Fukunaga said that the company expects to receive an export permit to market the PlayStation2 machines, 1.4 million of which have been sold in Japan since it debuted there in March.
He added that other Sony products have in the past come under the export control law for goods that have potential military uses.
The PlayStation2 can carry four times as much information as the original PlayStation system, which was released in 1994. The console has stereo-quality sound and vivid graphics and can connect the user to the Internet.
Missile-guidance systems typically consist of a missile-mounted camera that transmits images to a remote firing station, where an operator can send signals to adjust the rocket's trajectory. Officials are apparently concerned about rogue states that have military hardware but lack the sophisticated technological components.
Fukunaga said government regulation will do little to hinder already intense competition among game makers to produce more powerful machines.
"The technology in this machine is at the cutting edge, but the competition is catching up, so the regulations will eventually have to be reviewed," Fukunaga said.
Sony rival Sega Enterprises launched its Dreamcast game console with Internet access last year. Nintendo Co., maker of N64 and the portable Game Boy, will release its new machine this year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp. plans to introduce its own video game machine, the X-Box, in late 2001.
Sony owns about 60% of the game-machine market in the United States and Japan.
It is not just a card with a photograph (like an armed force ID card or driving license). It will be linked to *ALL* personal data that you have ever had - your previous addresses, your current address(es), your SSN number, benefits, bank accounts for social security deposits, current employer) and so on. The idea is to eliminate the need for a dozen or so different government databases (one per department) and have one super-database with everything stored on it.
What one programmer's definition of documented, is another programmer's definition of over-documented. Should the documentation for a function be at the top of the file, above the function definition, or between the function definition and the first opening brace?
Should comments be alongside the lines of code they are describing, above them at the start of the line, or are they simply index points numbers (eg. // 1.1) with the actual definition above the function?
They get paid bonuses based upon how much they have reduced costs from the previous year - that has been done for the past 20 years in the UK.
Lord Weinstocks favorite rule: If a company, department or division hasn't increased profits by over 10% in two successive quarters, liquidate that group and redeploy staff in something else that looks more profitable.
I would think twice about accepting any job which required a Non-Compete Agreement to be signed or a work visa that didn't allow you to change employers. Being pigeon-holed working on yesterday's technology while everyone else is moving to next-generation is worse than being at home or at college learning new skills.
GlobalSecurity has a list of communications systems that the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers have.
# LF through HF Receive,10 kHz - 30 MHz
R-1051 H/URR; twelve receivers
R-2368 H/URR; three receivers
# HF Transmit; 2-30 MHz
AN/URT-23D; nine transmitters
# VHF Transmit and Receive, 30-162 MHz
AN/GRR-211; two transceivers for non-secure voice
ANNRC-46A; two FM transceivers for secure voice
AN/URC-80 (V)6; one transceiver for bridge-to-bridge communications
# UHF Transmit and Receive, 220-400 MHz
AN/URC-93 (V)1; two transceiver for Link 4A
AN/WSC-3 (V)7,11; fourteen transceivers
AN/WSC-3 (V)11, have-quick transceiver
# SATCOM Transmit and/or Receive
AN/SSR-1A; one receiver for fleet broadcast
ANNWSC-3A (V)3; five transceivers for digital voice
# Infra-Red, Transmit and Receive
AN/SAR-7A; two IR Viewers
# Land Line Terminations, Transmit and/or Receive
AN/SAT-2B, one IR Transmitter
Single Channel DC Secure TTY
# Telephone Special Communications Channel
AN/USQ-69 (V)7; OTCIXS
AN/USQ-69 (V)8; TADIXS
AN/SYQ-7 (V)5 and AN/USQ-69 (V)6; NAVMACS/CUDIX
AN/USQ-83 (V) and AN/USQ-125 (V); Link 11
AN/SSW-1 D; Link 4A
AN/SRQ-4; HawkLink (LAMPS MK III)
AN/ARR-75 Sonobouy antenna
A Blackberry operates on the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz GSM network.
Now, we digress into 1000's of web sites, /. included to exchange ideas.
Well, there's an idea for a Firefox plugin / web forum template that would allow people to view
these discussions in the form of a usenet reader.
But reality is, it is far quicker to just google for the relevent discussion (as with kibology).
The traditional solution to stopping people climbing over your back garden walls, breaking into your house and stealing your stuff was to cement broken glass onto the top of your walls. On a sunny day, it would look quite pretty, especially if you used different colored bottles. Alternatively there is the metal railing with the fake spear tips on the top. These can be seen around public parks, although they do spear the occasional delinquent who tries to climb a tree to escape from the police.
I've seen both the Apple and Microsoft adverts. Apple tried to demonstrate that their OS was the 'next generation' by representing their OS as a couple of smart students while PC's were represented by an overweight middle-aged office worker in a 1970's brown suit.
While you identify with, will depend upon your age, but the Apple advert did seem to be demeaning to more mature people. From that perspective, I can see why Microsoft made their adverts in the way that they did. Apple probably shouldn't have used real people to demonstrate this difference.
Worrying about how *long* you're online is extremely irritating. Those are definitely "good old days" I wouldn't want to go back to.
That's the way wireless broadband works - if you exceed some large limit in your local region, or use your wireless modem while away from home (which is the whole point of going wireless in the first place) then you get bushwhacked for 10 pounds/megabyte. Not too fun when you are working at a remote site and need to download a PDF technical manual.
Basically because the wireless operators want to behave like airlines and charge corporate prices for business users while trying to charge consumer prices for home users.
Does this announcement mean that nVidia's OpenGL is now free software then, because of SGI's automatic license update clause?
Probably not, because the memory-mapping interface between system memory and the device driver hardware registers will still be confidential to Nvidia and board manufacturers.
That's not flame-bait - neonprimetime asked a perfectly valid set of questions.
I've always thought right-winger were more likely to own rifles, and go hunting, than the left-wingers. Wouldn't go around shooting animals desensitize people to violence?
Wouldn't both parties have been affected by watching Tom & Jerry, Roadrunner and The Muppets (remember Miss Piggy
punching everyone, and the crazy chef) desensitize people to violence?
What about movies with large numbers of death scenes desensitize people to violence?
The 6502 CPU was actually clocked at the same rate as the pixels in the framebuffer were written out to the TV/monitor. All of this was documented by Chris Crawford and many others who wrote De Re Atari
There were four sprites you could program - each had its own band of memory (we would call them cursor overlay planes these days). Each byte described a single scan line. Control registers defined the horizontal position and amount of stretching (power of two) of the band. You had to write some assembly language routines to shuffle these bands up or down. If you wrote a horizontal-blank interrupt you could have multiple moving sprites, each at a different position per row. These were the player in player-missile graphics. There was a fifth band which were the missiles (the ping-pong ball in video-pong and video-olympics). Each pair of bits in a byte defined the location of the missile associated with each player. Collisions between players and missiles were detected by reading various collision registers.
It was great fun programming, but the hardware was capable of so much more than what was possible with the Basic compiler that you really needed the assembler cartridge. Otherwise you had spend your time writing assembly language using numbers rather than mnemonics. It was interesting to see that there were assembler routines to handle the floating point arithmetic, while other assembler routines handled the rendering of trapezoids - through an XIO command. Other Basic interpreters (the Dragon 32) had assembler routines for matrix/array calculations. If they had put all that together, where would the 3D industry have been now?
He blames the Sony Playstation and the lack of EA signing up to develop for the Dreamcast, as the reason it failed.
Though some programmers I met said it was because it only supported tiny texture maps - 64x64 tiles rather than full-size textures.
He also blames Sony for sending out videos to FUD the competition - that I can believe - Sony would often take an animation reel and send it to their developers, saying "we want this title to look like that" eg. quad mesh characters when everyone was using billboards.
Yes, that's the one - I still remember the day I went into town with my parents to buy the cartridge and reading the manuals while taking the bus home. There were labels that were placed on top of the keypads to show which button did which. Like a ZX Spectrum, each key had at least three different color coded functions.
The Atari 800 was definitely much nicer - plus the two bonus secret graphics modes which supported four color characters although these were only 4x8 pixels in size.
There may have only been 128 bytes of RAM, but the game itself was stored in ROM. The RAM was used to store temporary variables (player scores, player positions, player state, game level, game mode). It would take more than 128 bytes to write something like the sprite tank battle game in the Combat cartridge. You would need 64 bytes to store the bitmaps for each tank orientation (8 directions x 8x8 bit sprite = 64 bytes).
The most amazing cartridge was Atari 800 Basic which attempted to implement the Basic programming language on a console system. You only had 128 bytes to write a program in (keywords were tokenised). At most that gave you 20 lines to program in and graphics simply consisted of a red square and a white square. With some keywords to read the keypad, you could do a simple game like "dodge the white square".
SGI offered a sample software implementation of an OpenGL device driver to hardware vendors. This source code would provide a software specification of the way that any hardware should behave. It could be used as a fallback if a hardware vendor didn't choose to implement a particular feature of OpenGL functionality directly in hardware. It would be the responsibility of the hardware vendor to choose what to implement in hardware and software. Early consumer boards just did the rasterization, and used the Intel MMX2/AMD 3DNow! instructions to do the TLC (transformation/lighting/clipping).
A professional board or gaming card would do everything in hardware. Because of the way OpenGL is implemented, there are a multitude of ways of sending down geometry - any combination of vertices plus optional outward normals/texture coordinates/colors for triangles, quads, triangle strips, triangle fans, line or points. And these might be integers, 16-bit/32-bit/64-bit floating point. Each particular combination might or might not be optimized for the hardware. There was a big fuss in the past, because vendors chose only to optimize the particular combinations for the Quake game. Home developers were confused why their implementations would run slower than the real Quake.
For every possible option at a particular layer (vertex transformation, vertex lighting, vertex clipping, triangle rasterization), there would be a function pointer choosing which function call to make - either to the software implementation or writing to hardware registers.
Mesa-GL is a open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification, written by the open-source community and not SGI. OpenGL was originally a rewrite of SGI proprietary SGI-GL API which worked on all workstations from Indigo's to Extreme's. SGI was charging vendors a license fee for access to their software implementation, which included a verification test suite for hardware. Because of this, they were reluctant to make the software open source.
But with the evolution of 3D hardware, the free availability of an open-source version of OpenGL and the possibility that programmers might even get to be able to use the GPU to write directly to the framebuffer once again, it is strategic for SGI to make this software open source.
Before DirectX and OpenGL, game programmers only used either Mode 13 with 320x200x256 color palette (or other VESA 256 color modes) to write directly to the hardware. Programmers could just use whatever algorithm they could think of - use the 256 color-palette as a Z-buffer for rendering spheres, depth-shading effects, color cycling, sprite animation. Have 16 sub-palettes each a shade darker than the others and you could do shadow effects. Create a pixelmap C++ class that could be memory-mapped to the framebuffer, add some block copy, point drawing line drawing, textured triangle/quad filling routines and you have your own mini 3D API. Since the framebuffer itself was a pixelmap, you could use the framebuffer itself as a texture map (this technique was actually patented in hardware).
OpenGL already has a mechanism to support variations.
The original OpenGL sample implementation was very basic - no vertex/fragment/geometry shaders. Even multi-texturing was still relatively new. There is really nothing to change there. Most developers hav moved on to using to vertex and fragment shaders to keep control of rendering (rather than use OpenGL lighting).
If anyone wishes to make modifications to OpenGL, they can do so by creating extensions. It is up to vendors and the ARB to decide whether they wish to implement them or agree to a common implementation. Both ATI and Nvidia, and many other companies have their proprietary extensions.
At the last count there were well over 100 different extensions.
Sounds like the technique that TrueType fonts have to resolve the problem of trying to render fonts at low-pixel fonts. If no corrections are performed, the character (or glyphs) will either merge into each other or skip particular segments of glyphs (eg. missing out the middle bar of the letter 'm'. The font-engine actually usually a 'virtual machine' with an instruction set that performs geometric calculations (like project point to line, snap point to grid, set axis of projection line) to solve this problem.
It certainly takes motivation to remain focused on a project for two years, especially for someone so young.
I am impressed by the support environment he is in;
His school has a Math Engineering Science Achievment Club, a First Lego League team, a Science Bowl and MathCounts programs, and he is a member of the local Chess club.
That is an incredible amount of support in the local middle school.
Then he has a science teacher, participated in the Northwest Science Expo, and had a counsel of
two university professors and one person in industry.
Not really. Probably, his father is a research scientist in the field.
There was an article in the LA Times about how parents were using their contacts with research labs to get resources for their kids science fair project competitions - parents would do things like (a hypothetical example) getting a time-slot allocated on a supercomputer to run CFD simulations to design a turbine to capture energy from water running down a drain-pipe. Organisers of such events eventually made the restriction on the types of resources that could be used.