There are some software-licensing modules which will actively shut down all licenses if they detect any discontinuity of the system clock time. One time our admin resynced all the workstation time-clocks to GMT and several animation applications expired their license keys.
That would have been back in the mid to late 1990's. The Indy's (those flattish sparkly blue workstations) were the first to have a software implementation of OpenGL.
OpenGL was designed primarily so that third party graphics card manufacturers could write device drivers compatibile with the CAD and scientific-visualisation markets. The developers didn't really care much about 3D sound, real-time physics engines or AI. All they needed was a GUI and one or more hardware accelerated 3D graphics contexts for applications to run. The most complicated lighting models at the time were smooth shaded textures geometry using point light sources.
Now, modern game engines will be using multiple vertex and fragment shaders for things like relief mapping, occlusion mapping, reflection, refraction, BRDF, BTF, spherical harmonics, environment mapping, ambient shadow-mapping, real-time radiance, particle systems animated using textures and feed-back loops. Current research is attempting to include Computation Fluid Dynamics for animating dust around racing cars (EA), the use of Partial Differential Equations to synthesize the spots, stripes and spirals for virtual creatures (Spore), and that's just the visual part of the game. Then there is 3D surround sound, the physics (collision detection between animated characters, their environment, and everything else), along with multi-player network support (sockets).
To make a PC game that sells, it is going to have the visual appeal that takes the graphics hardware to its full potential. This means having people experienced in all of these fields or having the budget to afford middleware. Only large companies can really do this now.
Current 3D applications use 32-bit textures that are 512x512 in size - a single texture takes up 1 Mbyte. Volume visualisation requires data sets that are anything from 256 cubed to 2048 cubed in size with 16-bit or 32-bit floating point in size (around 64 Megabytes to 34 Gigabytes in size. There isn't any way of doing the higher end of the latter in real-time on a CPU just now.
People who grew up with VCR's, Sony walkmans, FM radio's with dual cassette tape recorders, just see downloading from the web as the same as using the VCR to record their favorite music video, or the radio to record their favorite track. The obvious difference is that creating a mix tape requires a blank tape (paying a less revenues royalty tax), recording from TV had the TV station paying distribution rights or advertising fees, while transferring a copy from another PC results in no fees being paid whatsoever.
That trend has been happening for the past 40 years. If you looked at a 1990's graphics accelerator card (Hercules Graphics Station Card or a Voodoo 5000/6000, you would see that all the different components (RAMDAC, graphics processor, memory controllers) were all on different parts of the circuit board. Now, most of that logic is within a single chip Geforce 9800GTX
Memory chips keep changing as rapidly as the CPU's do. Assuming that a CPU manufacturer wanted to enter the memory chip market, by the time they had caught up with current state-of-the-art in memory technology, bus communication and got the product onto market, the memory chip manufacturers would already be designing, producing and marketing the next generation.
Some people were experimenting with thermoaccoustic cooling. The idea is that pressure waves in air and fluids can give off heat (compression) and move heat around (standing waves?).
This idea of solid thermoelectric blocks seems to be comparable to sliding around trays of ice-cubes or solid CO2, except that you would need a secondary refrigerator unit to convert the water or gas back into a solid.
(1) Country A attacks Country B (2) Country B launches a retaliatory strike against country A (3) Country C forms an alliance with country A (4) Countries D, E and F send supples to country B.
Of course, the order of events in the news is only trivial.
Sequence (1,2,3,4) is no different from sequence (4,1,2,3)
Haven't you seen the Jakks Atari classics 10 games in a joystick? They have miniaturised the console electronics so that you get a whole Atari 2600 system plus 10 games (Gravitar, Asteroids, Real Sports Volleyball, Centipede, Adventure, Pong, Missile Command, Breakout, Yars' Revenge and Circus Atari) all in a single joystick.
What if all airlines take up a similar policy? What are you going to do then, hm?
Take the ferry across instead - it might be a bit rough riding seas for six hours in Winter, but at least you don't have to put up with the roulette wheel of boarding pass numbers when being prioritized to to get on the plane, especially the priority boarding fee that nearly all passengers now seem to pay for.
Not that anyone could use a pair of wirecutters to cut one of the pins to the LED. The only workaround to this would be use the LED as a a power supply to the CCD. But even then, someone could always solder in a patch wire.
And at the same time, the factory owners are moving to the inner provinces as wages demands keep increasing, thus increasing the demand for transportation.
I heard this story about Cray. If you bought a supercomputer and support contract from them, they would throw in the free construction of an office block to run the computer in.
A friend once put a password BIOS on his laptop - but forgot the password. So he called up a local PC support company, "Yes, we can reset the password for you, but you won't be able to watch us doing it.". So, it wasn't too difficult to figure out that there was a way of resetting the BIOS password without having to send the machine in. A quick exploration of all the removable panels on the underside of the laptop revealed the BIOS password reset dip-switch. Once flipped, the BIOS password was disabled. Now he doesn't bother installing a BIOS password.
I was always annoyed that an Atari computer could display 256 colors simultaneously (with some assembly), while an IBM PC clone could only do four colors (1986 - CGA graphics). EGA could do 16 colors, but it wasn't until the late 1980's that VGA came out with 320x200x256 colors, and if you were lucky, your card would support SVGA with 1024x768 with 256 colors, and if you had a $1000+ coprocessor board, Windows 3.1 would support 16-bit (65536 color) graphics at 800x600 pixels.
Some people infiltrate and study how a botnet works, find out how its command and control structure works, and at the right time (eg. election time), direct a spam or denial-of-service attack at a particular government network, then use this as an excuse to tighten up access to the Internet.
You can find a list of vacancies in the california state government at the State Personnel Board.
The vacancies don't have any reference codes or pay spine acronyms. It really looks like every employment position will be paid according to a keyword match with the job title.
More importantly, what was the personal data on 33,000 customers doing on a laptop anyway?. Was this some kind of backup, or was one of their developers working from home? For that amount of data for that may people, the memory would probably take up less than 15 Mbytes of memory, which could easily have been stored in a memory stick plugged into a socket of the laptop.
The whole site (NSFW) has also been stored at archive.org
The guy is just a high school class clown - but at least class clowns had the common sense not to go around messing wit other peoples personal lives. He thought that anonymity in a large city would protect him, but that has been proven wrong.
The Commodore 64 and Atari computers did have basic pixel framebuffers and sprite programming (much like a mouse cursor). Sprites could be programmed to have a multi-colored (16 color) pixelmap and moved around just by setting XY coordinates.
The most advanced demo I saw was in PCW, where someone has implemented a basic physics engine to run during the vertical blank interrupt. It handled position, velocity, acceleration and gravity. Collision detection was done automatically by the sprite hardware.
Have you seen the latest graphing calculators - they have a small LCD display that is enough to display 3D wireframe grids.
I certainly agree. The assembly language used for texture mapping actually took advantage of the separate add/multiply processor units so that the divide-by-z for perspective projection took no extra clock cycles. The geometry for the environment was designed to fit into cache pages. Combined with light-mapping and a complex environment, it was an amazing experience to see.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some software-licensing modules which will actively shut down all licenses if they detect any discontinuity of the system clock time. One time our admin resynced all the workstation time-clocks to GMT and several animation applications expired their license keys.
There is the Mesa-3D Implementation of OpenGL. The most recent version offers support for the Cell processor.
That would have been back in the mid to late 1990's. The Indy's (those flattish sparkly blue workstations) were the first to have a software implementation of OpenGL.
OpenGL was designed primarily so that third party graphics card manufacturers could write device drivers compatibile with the CAD and scientific-visualisation markets. The developers didn't really care much about 3D sound, real-time physics engines or AI. All they needed was a GUI and one or more hardware accelerated 3D graphics contexts for applications to run. The most complicated lighting models at the time were smooth shaded textures geometry using point light sources.
Now, modern game engines will be using multiple vertex and fragment shaders for things like relief mapping, occlusion mapping, reflection, refraction, BRDF, BTF, spherical harmonics, environment mapping, ambient shadow-mapping, real-time radiance, particle systems animated using textures and feed-back loops. Current research is attempting to include Computation Fluid Dynamics for animating dust around racing cars (EA), the use of Partial Differential Equations to synthesize the spots, stripes and spirals for virtual creatures (Spore), and that's just the visual part of the game. Then there is 3D surround sound, the physics (collision detection between animated characters, their environment, and everything else), along with multi-player network support (sockets).
To make a PC game that sells, it is going to have the visual appeal that takes the graphics hardware to its full potential. This means having people experienced in all of these fields or having the budget to afford middleware. Only large companies can really do this now.
Current 3D applications use 32-bit textures that are 512x512 in size - a single texture takes up 1 Mbyte. Volume visualisation requires data sets that are anything from 256 cubed to 2048 cubed in size with 16-bit or 32-bit floating point in size (around 64 Megabytes to 34 Gigabytes in size. There isn't any way of doing the higher end of the latter in real-time on a CPU just now.
People who grew up with VCR's, Sony walkmans, FM radio's with dual cassette tape recorders, just see downloading from the web as the same as using the VCR to record their favorite music video, or the radio to record their favorite track. The obvious difference is that creating a mix tape requires a blank tape (paying a less revenues royalty tax), recording from TV had the TV station paying distribution rights or advertising fees, while transferring a copy from another PC results in no fees being paid whatsoever.
That trend has been happening for the past 40 years. If you looked at a 1990's graphics accelerator card (Hercules Graphics Station Card or a Voodoo 5000/6000, you would see that all the different components (RAMDAC, graphics processor, memory controllers) were all on different parts of the circuit board. Now, most of that logic is within a single chip Geforce 9800GTX
Memory chips keep changing as rapidly as the CPU's do. Assuming that a CPU manufacturer wanted to enter the memory chip market, by the time they had caught up with current state-of-the-art in memory technology, bus communication and got the product onto market, the memory chip manufacturers would already be designing, producing and marketing the next generation.
Some people were experimenting with thermoaccoustic cooling. The idea is that pressure waves in air and fluids can give off heat (compression) and move heat around (standing waves?).
This idea of solid thermoelectric blocks seems to be comparable to sliding around trays of ice-cubes or solid CO2, except that you would need a secondary refrigerator unit to convert the water or gas back into a solid.
That's the problem:
(1) Country A attacks Country B
(2) Country B launches a retaliatory strike against country A
(3) Country C forms an alliance with country A
(4) Countries D, E and F send supples to country B.
Of course, the order of events in the news is only trivial.
Sequence (1,2,3,4) is no different from sequence (4,1,2,3)
Better still, Atari Flashback 2.
It totally amazed me that these console systems are still on sale after 30 years, but make great entertainment for a 80's themed party.
Haven't you seen the Jakks Atari classics 10 games in a joystick? They have miniaturised the console electronics so that you get a whole Atari 2600 system plus 10 games (Gravitar, Asteroids, Real Sports Volleyball, Centipede, Adventure, Pong, Missile Command, Breakout, Yars' Revenge and Circus Atari) all in a single joystick.
Or better still, a plain-text to spam encryption/decryption plugin for our E-mail applications.
What if all airlines take up a similar policy? What are you going to do then, hm?
Take the ferry across instead - it might be a bit rough riding seas for six hours in Winter, but at least you don't have to put up with the roulette wheel of boarding pass numbers when being prioritized to to get on the plane, especially the priority boarding fee that nearly all passengers now seem to pay for.
Not that anyone could use a pair of wirecutters to cut one of the pins to the LED. The only workaround to this would be use the LED as a a power supply to the CCD.
But even then, someone could always solder in a patch wire.
And at the same time, the factory owners are moving to the inner provinces as wages demands keep increasing, thus increasing the demand for transportation.
Riot at McDonalds toy making factory
I heard this story about Cray. If you bought a supercomputer and support contract from them, they would throw in the free construction of an office block to run the computer in.
A friend once put a password BIOS on his laptop - but forgot the password. So he called up a local PC support company, "Yes, we can reset the password for you, but you won't be able to watch us doing it.". So, it wasn't too difficult to figure out that there was a way of resetting the BIOS password without having to send the machine in. A quick exploration of all the removable panels on the underside of the laptop revealed the BIOS password reset dip-switch. Once flipped, the BIOS password was disabled.
Now he doesn't bother installing a BIOS password.
I was always annoyed that an Atari computer could display 256 colors simultaneously (with some assembly), while an IBM PC clone could only do four colors (1986 - CGA graphics). EGA could do 16 colors, but it wasn't until the late 1980's that VGA came out with 320x200x256 colors, and if you were lucky, your card would support SVGA with 1024x768 with 256 colors, and if you had a $1000+ coprocessor board, Windows 3.1 would support 16-bit (65536 color) graphics at 800x600 pixels.
Some people infiltrate and study how a botnet works, find out how its command and control structure works, and at the right time (eg. election time), direct a spam or denial-of-service attack at a particular government network, then use this as an excuse to tighten up access to the Internet.
You can find a list of vacancies in the california state government at the State Personnel Board.
The vacancies don't have any reference codes or pay spine acronyms. It really looks like every employment position will be paid according to a keyword match with the job title.
More importantly, what was the personal data on 33,000 customers doing on a laptop anyway?. Was this some kind of backup, or was one of their developers working from home? For that amount of data for that may people, the memory would probably take up less than 15 Mbytes of memory, which could easily have been stored in a memory stick plugged into a socket of the laptop.
The whole site (NSFW) has also been stored at archive.org
The guy is just a high school class clown - but at least class clowns had the common sense not to go around messing wit other peoples personal lives. He thought that anonymity in a large city would protect him, but that has been proven wrong.
The Commodore 64 and Atari computers did have basic pixel framebuffers and sprite programming (much like a mouse cursor). Sprites could be programmed to have a multi-colored (16 color) pixelmap and moved around just by setting XY coordinates.
The most advanced demo I saw was in PCW, where someone has implemented a basic physics engine to run during the vertical blank interrupt. It handled position, velocity, acceleration and gravity. Collision detection was done automatically by the sprite hardware.
Have you seen the latest graphing calculators - they have a small LCD display that is enough to display 3D wireframe grids.
First quad-core laptop hits U.S.
Xtremenotebooks launches quad core laptop
Quad-core notebook
Dell launches new quad-core laptop
Build your own quad-core laptop
I certainly agree. The assembly language used for texture mapping actually took advantage of the separate add/multiply processor units so that the divide-by-z for perspective projection took no extra clock cycles. The geometry for the environment was designed to fit into cache pages. Combined with light-mapping and a complex environment, it was an amazing experience to see.
It's in the cake-box along with the cat. As soon as we know the state of the cat, we'll know the state of the cake.