Render-To-Texture is particularly useful for doing shadow effects (render to the buffer to get the depth information, and do a perspective transformation to transform world-space coordinates into light-source coordinates).
Even a Geforce Go 5600 supports floating point textures.
Other animation packages were built on top of proprietary API's like SGI GL and others. It was cheaper building an emulation layer mapping Phigs and SGI GL commands to OpenGL that to rewrite the applications altogether.
CAD software vendors and 3D graphics hardware developers have their own test data sets run from automatic scripts. These have evolved from the design phases and from customer bug reports. They compare the results of the current software release against "perfect test results". If there is even one pixel of difference, this is investigated. This could be caused by something as low-level as a different internal floating-point algorithm in the hardware, or a different fixed-point precision.
This difference probably doesn't matter when you are shooting demons arriving from a portal on one of the moons of Mars, but it is a big issue if a component designed back in the mid 1980's, doesn't render now as it did back then.
For me, the worst places are a lack of natural daylight (either an open plan office layouts where the window blinds were kept closed to stop the programmers from being distracted), or private cubicle rooms with no windows. Not having seniority to have a window meant you didn't have seniority to see any daylight during Winter.
Some open plan offices have sound dampening systems; loudspeakers that play white noise at a low level. You couldn't hear them, but you couldn't hear the person three desks away either.
Noise is definitely a major factor. The worst environment I had was to have someone from sales/marketing two desks away, constantly shouting down the telephone line to remote customers.
Consider yourself lucky, if you have partition walls you can decorate, natural sunlight, a window you can open/close, a quiet room shared with maybe one or two other people. Having a cafeteria with a choice of ethnic meals is also a bonus.
The majority of software written for any chip is compiled by a relatively small number of compilers, and those compilers tend to use pretty much the same subset of instructions. The UNIX portable C compiler for example used less than 30% of the Motorola 68000 instruction set.
Too true - it always amazes me how a $1000 laptop in the USA (manufactured in the Far East) somehow manages to transmogrify the price into £1000 in the UK (despite still being manufactured in the Far East) and even then, there will probably be some feature missing like video-in or DVD writing.
Having gone through the public school system (both good high stream classes, and bad mixed stream classes), there are three skills that teachers need:
1. Keeping a class under control 2. Knowledge of their subject 3. Being able to provide clear explanations and feedback 4. Being able to structure class work to fit into the school year.
1. Most teachers could do this, although there was one maths teacher I had, who would keep her head down and pretend to work at her desk, while the bozos at the back of the class were giving everyone else hassle by throwing rice and paper around.
2. This wasn't an issue - all the teachers had a degree in their field of knowledge, but now, they find it hard to find science teachers.
3. The best teacher I had, made laminated work cards which provided clear instructions on what was to copied into your notebook, which experiments to perform, and the conclusions to develop. If you didn't get all the work done in class, you could take the card home with you. The worst teachers were the ones who made up their own multi-colored notation (mathematics), or just expected everyone to copy work down off the blackboard for an hour. Other teachers (technical drawing) would just sit at their desk and mark coursework for other classes while expecting everyone to keep working
4. In my undergraduate degree course, all the professors provided a timetable of how the subject material was going to be taught for the year - which topic was going to be taught in which week. Many teachers never did this, and just charged straight into the course material and just keep going for the whole term. It would be a complete surprise to come in on a Monday morning expecting to be continuing to be learning integrals, and suddenly find out that trigonometric equations were being taught.
One of the companies I used to work for, had a corporate car park that was on a ancient right-of-way. Locals used it as a shortcut between the supermarket and a public park. In between, they would see cars as grab-all-you-can-carry sales bins, and take anything they took a fancy too.
The company did have security cameras, but all they could see was a 40x10 pixel sized human figure. All it took was some fog, and the they were useless.
The only reason the UK installed CCTV cameras in the first place was to catch IRA bombers planting bombs. Rubbish bins were removed from railway stations for that very reason.
That always puzzles me - a consumer camera like a Nikon Coolpix allows you to see the final image through the LCD (even with zoom), while Digital SLR's, costing several thousands of pounds always switch the LCD off when a picture is about to be taken.
For the amount of money that is invested in server equipment, I'm amazed that they don't have a server cam for security (sending high-res images of the room to a remote server via wireless or cable).
If you are developing open source applications with Qt, then you can use the open source release. If you are writing a commercial application, then you have to purchase a license.
I was wondering whether it would be possible for water to form from the turbulence within the outer layers of a star - the mixing of oxygen formed from fusion and the unyet fusioned hydrogen.
If you visit the webpages of the various research departments related to visualisation and parallel processing, then you can find many research papers related to this and other topics:
It's just amazing to find out how much is going on inside a star - not just the fusion of Hydrogen and Helium atoms, but intense magnetic fields that drive rivers of liquid Hydrogen and Helium through rising and falling convection cells, which in turn create new magnetic fields.
Thanks. I noticed the competition between ATI and Nvidia was related to the Stanford vs. University of Waterloo rivalry over 3D research. But I can well believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
Render-To-Texture is particularly useful for doing shadow effects (render to the buffer to get the depth information, and do a perspective transformation to transform world-space coordinates into light-source coordinates).
Even a Geforce Go 5600 supports floating point textures.
Traditional CAD packages in the 1990's were built on top of Phigs and PEX, Phigs Extension to X.
Official specification
Other animation packages were built on top of proprietary API's like SGI GL and others. It was cheaper building an emulation layer mapping Phigs and SGI GL commands to OpenGL that to rewrite the applications altogether.
At present, the latest API is CUDA
CAD software vendors and 3D graphics hardware developers have their own test data sets run from automatic scripts. These have evolved from the design phases and from customer bug reports. They compare the results of the current software release against "perfect test results". If there is even one pixel of difference, this is investigated. This could be caused by something as low-level as a different internal floating-point algorithm in the hardware, or a different fixed-point precision.
This difference probably doesn't matter when you are shooting demons arriving from a portal on one of the moons of Mars, but it is a big issue if a component designed back in the mid 1980's, doesn't render now as it did back then.
For me, the worst places are a lack of natural daylight (either an open plan office layouts where the window blinds were kept closed to stop the programmers from being distracted), or private cubicle rooms with no windows. Not having seniority to have a window meant you didn't have seniority to see any daylight during Winter.
Some open plan offices have sound dampening systems; loudspeakers that play white noise at a low level. You couldn't hear them, but you couldn't hear the person three desks away either.
Noise is definitely a major factor. The worst environment I had was to have someone from sales/marketing two desks away, constantly shouting down the telephone line to remote customers.
Consider yourself lucky, if you have partition walls you can decorate, natural sunlight, a window you can open/close, a quiet room shared with maybe one or two other people. Having a cafeteria with a choice of ethnic meals is also a bonus.
Sign a Downing Street E-petition?
Science and Technology
Education
... came for the parents who tried to send their children to a school with a good reputation?
Ars Technica has a good article on this debate
RISC vs. CISC - the Post-RISC Era, and Bibliography
In defence of RISC
The majority of software written for any chip is compiled by a relatively small number of compilers, and those compilers tend to use pretty much the same subset of instructions. The UNIX portable C compiler for example used less than 30% of the Motorola 68000 instruction set.
Too true - it always amazes me how a $1000 laptop in the USA (manufactured in the Far East) somehow manages to transmogrify the price into £1000 in the UK (despite still being manufactured in the Far East) and even then, there will probably be some feature missing like video-in or DVD writing.
Having gone through the public school system (both good high stream classes, and bad mixed stream classes), there are three skills that teachers need:
1. Keeping a class under control
2. Knowledge of their subject
3. Being able to provide clear explanations and feedback
4. Being able to structure class work to fit into the school year.
1. Most teachers could do this, although there was one maths teacher I had, who would keep her head down and pretend to work at her desk, while the bozos at the back of the class were giving everyone else hassle by throwing rice and paper around.
2. This wasn't an issue - all the teachers had a degree in their field of knowledge, but now, they find it hard to find science teachers.
3. The best teacher I had, made laminated work cards which provided clear instructions on what was to copied into your notebook, which experiments to perform, and the conclusions to develop. If you didn't get all the work done in class, you could take the card home with you. The worst teachers were the ones who made up their own multi-colored notation (mathematics), or just expected everyone to copy work down off the blackboard for an hour. Other teachers (technical drawing) would just sit at their desk and mark coursework for other classes while expecting everyone to keep working
4. In my undergraduate degree course, all the professors provided a timetable of how the subject material was going to be taught for the year - which topic was going to be taught in which week. Many teachers never did this, and just charged straight into the course material and just keep going for the whole term. It would be a complete surprise to come in on a Monday morning expecting to be continuing to be learning integrals, and suddenly find out that trigonometric equations were being taught.
One of the companies I used to work for, had a corporate car park that was on a ancient right-of-way. Locals used it as a shortcut between the supermarket and a public park. In between, they would see cars as grab-all-you-can-carry sales bins, and take anything they took a fancy too.
The company did have security cameras, but all they could see was a 40x10 pixel sized human figure. All it took was some fog, and the they were useless.
The only reason the UK installed CCTV cameras in the first place was to catch IRA bombers planting bombs. Rubbish bins were removed from railway stations for that very reason.
The vmslice.c exploit was the most impressive that I have seen. Instant root access from a little executable.
You mean this one? Police arrest man removing money from pond?
There's an open source project (Dcraw which aims to solve this problem.
The source code file can be found at this file
That always puzzles me - a consumer camera like a Nikon Coolpix allows you to see the final image through the LCD (even with zoom), while Digital SLR's, costing several thousands of pounds always switch the LCD off when a picture is about to be taken.
Awesome! Here's a true story:
Serial burglar caught by webcam
For the amount of money that is invested in server equipment, I'm amazed that they don't have a server cam for security (sending high-res images of the room to a remote server via wireless or cable).
1.7 million people signed the petition against road taxation by GPS satellite tracking. The nearest other petitions only gained 5000 votes.
Then again, 331 MP's of the party proposing this idea were de-elected in the May Day massacre.
If you are developing open source applications with Qt, then you can use the open source release. If you are writing a commercial application, then you have to purchase a license.
A google search for "eye tracking hardware" will give a good range of companies.
There are actually LCD monitors which actually have built in eye tracking hardware.
I was wondering whether it would be possible for water to form from the turbulence within the outer layers of a star - the mixing of oxygen formed from fusion and the unyet fusioned hydrogen.
38 years to the anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, when National Guard troops killed 4 students
Where do all the Oxygen atoms come from ... I'm guessing fusion from within stars?
There's already a few mail reputation systems:
Mail Abuse Prevention System
And there's also a generic checklist for all anti-spam ideas:
Anti-Spam Solutions Checklist
If you visit the webpages of the various research departments related to visualisation and parallel processing, then you can find many research papers related to this and other topics:
A study of parallel techniques for visualisation.
A parallel visualization pipeline for Terascale earthquake simulation
Scientific Discovery through Advanced Visualization
A case study in Supernovae Simulation Data
It's just amazing to find out how much is going on inside a star - not just the fusion of Hydrogen and Helium atoms, but intense magnetic fields that drive rivers of liquid Hydrogen and Helium through rising and falling convection cells, which in turn create new magnetic fields.
Thanks. I noticed the competition between ATI and Nvidia was related to the Stanford vs. University of Waterloo rivalry over 3D research. But I can well believe it.