I also like how they almost universally mention being a team player with a strong work ethic, and a passion for video games, as important. Translation: you need to love working yourself to death!
A more detailed translation would be "You don't care about what part of the game you are assigned to work on, and are willing to work long hours on low pay to fix the pile of code that the previous programmer threw together before running off to set up his own company".
There's an article in the BBC's technology section relating to the progress of the UK games industry.
The sad truth is that the actual number of developers in the UK declined by 6% last year. Every time a company goes bust, the animators/programmers are forced to relocate. And given the difference in the cost of living across the UK and the world, it's preferable to move abroad.
Anything with six or more legs always has a stable centre-of-gravity, and doesn't have to worry about maintaining a stable configuration. With three or four legs, you have unstability as soon as you take one leg off the ground. With only two legs, you always have unstability and need sophisticated real-time circuitry to maintain balance.
Whats next, rude phone calls? Or how about ringing the door bell and then running away?
Ultimately, this will lead to fanatical protesters hanging around the entrances to the company offices while waving photographs of applications with unreleased source code while shouting "Those are dead-end projects!".
If they created a raytracing card, they would have needed to invent a new API to run it.
Not necessarily. You can have a hybrid ray-tracer/triangle rasteriser that generates rays from the scan-conversion each triangle/line/point. Then the OpenGL texturing functions remain the same, as well as all the calculations required to support features like bump-mapping (TBN vectors). Fragment shaders can easily do the calculations to support reflection and refraction as well as Fresnel effects, chromatic aberration and thin-film interference.
If you look around, you will see that people have implemented ray-tracers using OpenGL fragment-programs, although most of scenes are fairly small (100 sphere/triangles). The current limitation is being able to encode a complex scene into a format that can be interpreted by the fragment processor; For such a scene, you need to store all the generated geometry for a single frame on the card's memory along with an efficient space subdivision method to reduce the number of comparisons, then make ray-intersection queries into this database per sub-pixel.
If you get any type of nuisance phone call, you should report them to ICTSIS. They will investigate your complaint (providing you can give them a telephone number) and if necessary, bar the company from operating premium rate phone services, require the company to return all billed costs, as well as fine them several thousand grand for the privilege of being investigated.
This is an image processing technique known as segmentation, which is an active area of research. Combined with "texture classification", and you can easily break up a scene into regions of distinct visual appearance.
"DrinkOrDie is one of the oldest and most sophisticated software pirate groups within the 'Warez' community, which is a loose, global network of Internet pirate gangs."
If these guys don't have eye patches and peg legs I am going to be SO disappointed.
Obviously, if they were real pirates, they would have their own boat and stay in International waters.
I know this is News for Nerds and all, but isn't that a bit excessive? I don't think my car needs 168 1GHz processors. (or is that 336 processors?) What's it going to do with that much power?
Be the top contributor to the SETI project?
Solve protein folding research during your morning coffee break?
I cannot think of an instance where Microsoft used one of its patents aggressively against a competitor
They don't need to use litigation. All Microsoft need to do is to scare the investors, with a few words:
"We are planning to enter this market in the near future...".
No VC will consider funding a company if Microsoft intend to enter that market.
Microsoft also uses EULA agreements with their compiler software to restrict the development of products that rival Microsoft Word.
Another line used by Microsoft is:
"Microsoft claims to own unspecified patents related to this field".
This frequently comes up when you read about programmable graphics hardware. A recently slashdot comment described how Electronic Arts was scared to develop games for the Linux for fear of litigation from Microsoft.
At the height of the dot com boom, the front page of the New York Times was covered by a photograph of the most expensive flat to rent in Manhattan - going for around $500,000/month, minimum lease six months. I can only imagine what the pay-cheque for the accepted tenant must be like (Bank CEO, football/basketball/baseball player, international pop-star?).
The few women I know in the IT field seem to have gotten into it for the money or because they couldn't think of anything else to do, rather than because they like working with computers. Now the money's gone, so are they.
That's the motivation for 95% of the population. In your final year, our school careers office used to invite various professions to visit and give presentations on careers in their particular specialty; accounting, law, management, engineering. On one particular day, the accounting and computer industries were visiting. Of 110 students, who took time off to attend, 100 wanted to do accounting because that's where the maximum earnings for the minimum work were. The other ten were interested in computing because of their interest in technology.
Given enough redundant servers and its safe until the Big One.
Which is when the water mains burst and the repair crew cut accidently through the cable while trying to find the source of the leak. And will be guaranteed to always happen on the evening you decide to have an quiet evening together with your spouse/partner.
... I've lost the name and author of the story, but still have the book which is somewhere in my collection of four boxes of second hand sci-fi books. The hard way is going to read every book again...
And the crazy thing is that the government was happier to let an unpredictable lahar occur than to let contractors onto the mountain to breach the wall when it was possible (not possible any more due to the height of the water behind it now).
Surely it would be possible to drill a drainage channel through the solid rock underneath, and allow the water to drain out?
I would believe that most developers have their own method for dealing with physics - from simple collision to ragdoll and the like.
Basic collision detection methods are bounding planes, spheres, capsules, and axis-aligned boxes, along with Binary Space Partitions, Quadtrees and Octrees combined with particle systems. It would be fairly straight forward design an instruction set to perform these operations between the simple primitives (spheres, planes). But BSP Trees, Quadtrees and Octrees would require a high level data format.
If all the collision testing could be done within a single thread within the time limit of a single frame, it would be no different from the player-missile and sprite graphics implemented on early home PC's (Atari computers could do hardware base per-pixel collision detection). Although, it would probably seem easier to have additional vector processors like Sony's Cell processor.
Re:Perhaps there is a reason...
on
DVHS on a Budget
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· Score: 1
Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.
Slashdot Mirror
I also like how they almost universally mention being a team player with a strong work ethic, and a passion for video games, as important. Translation: you need to love working yourself to death!
A more detailed translation would be "You don't care about what part of the game you are assigned to work on, and are willing to work long hours on low pay to fix the pile of code that the previous programmer threw together before running off to set up his own company".
There's an article in the BBC's technology section relating to the progress of the UK games industry.
The sad truth is that the actual number of developers in the UK declined by 6% last year. Every time a company goes bust, the animators/programmers are forced to relocate. And given the difference in the cost of living across the UK and the world, it's preferable to move abroad.
I wondered why my Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses suddenly turned black.
... have they found where the black obelisk is located?
Anything with six or more legs always has a stable centre-of-gravity, and doesn't have to worry about maintaining a stable configuration. With three or four legs, you have unstability as soon as you take one leg off the ground. With only two legs, you always have unstability and need sophisticated real-time circuitry to maintain balance.
Whats next, rude phone calls? Or how about ringing the door bell and then running away?
Ultimately, this will lead to fanatical protesters hanging around the entrances to the company offices while waving photographs of applications with unreleased source code while shouting "Those are dead-end projects!".
If they created a raytracing card, they would have needed to invent a new API to run it.
Not necessarily. You can have a hybrid ray-tracer/triangle rasteriser that generates rays from the scan-conversion each triangle/line/point. Then the OpenGL texturing functions remain the same, as well as all the calculations required to support features like bump-mapping (TBN vectors).
Fragment shaders can easily do the calculations to support reflection and refraction as well as Fresnel effects, chromatic aberration and thin-film interference.
If you look around, you will see that people have implemented ray-tracers using OpenGL fragment-programs, although most of scenes are fairly small (100 sphere/triangles). The current limitation is being able to encode a complex scene into a format that can be interpreted by the fragment processor; For such a scene, you need to store all the generated geometry for a single frame on the card's memory along with an efficient space subdivision method to reduce the number of comparisons, then make ray-intersection queries into this database per sub-pixel.
If you get any type of nuisance phone call, you should report them to ICTSIS. They will investigate your complaint (providing you can give them a telephone number) and if necessary, bar the company from operating premium rate phone services, require the company to return all billed costs, as well as fine them several thousand grand for the privilege of being investigated.
This is an image processing technique known as segmentation, which is an active area of research. Combined with "texture classification", and you can easily break up a scene into regions of distinct visual appearance.
"DrinkOrDie is one of the oldest and most sophisticated software pirate groups within the 'Warez' community, which is a loose, global network of Internet pirate gangs."
If these guys don't have eye patches and peg legs I am going to be SO disappointed.
Obviously, if they were real pirates, they would have their own boat and stay in International waters.
It will stop the US military computers from being used as a 'botnet' but it won't stop the rest of the world from being used to launch DoS attacks.
I know this is News for Nerds and all, but isn't that a bit excessive? I don't think my car needs 168 1GHz processors. (or is that 336 processors?) What's it going to do with that much power?
Be the top contributor to the SETI project?
Solve protein folding research during your morning coffee break?
Run a 1000+ player MMORPG
Hire out your system as a render-farm?
If you can type at 100 cps with a single Pentium 4 processor, just think how fast you'll be able to type with dual processors!
I cannot think of an instance where Microsoft used one of its patents aggressively against a competitor
They don't need to use litigation. All Microsoft need to do is to scare the investors, with a few words:
"We are planning to enter this market in the near future...".
No VC will consider funding a company if Microsoft intend to enter that market.
Microsoft also uses EULA agreements with their compiler software to restrict the development of products that rival Microsoft Word.
Another line used by Microsoft is:
"Microsoft claims to own unspecified patents related to this field".
This frequently comes up when you read about programmable graphics hardware. A recently slashdot comment described how Electronic Arts was scared to develop games for the Linux for fear of litigation from Microsoft.
At the height of the dot com boom, the front page of the New York Times was covered by a photograph of the most expensive flat to rent in Manhattan - going for around $500,000/month, minimum lease six months. I can only imagine what the pay-cheque for the accepted tenant must be like (Bank CEO, football/basketball/baseball player, international pop-star?).
The few women I know in the IT field seem to have gotten into it for the money or because they couldn't think of anything else to do, rather than because they like working with computers. Now the money's gone, so are they.
That's the motivation for 95% of the population. In your final year, our school careers office used to invite various professions to visit and give presentations on careers in their particular specialty; accounting, law, management, engineering. On one particular day, the accounting and computer industries were visiting. Of 110 students, who took time off to attend, 100 wanted to do accounting because that's where the maximum earnings for the minimum work were. The other ten were interested in computing because of their interest in technology.
If anything, the only good thing about this whole SCO fiasco is we had someone to laugh at during a rainy day.
And man, was this the longest monsoon season we ever had, since records began.
Given enough redundant servers and its safe until the Big One.
Which is when the water mains burst and the repair crew cut accidently through the cable while trying to find the source of the leak. And will be guaranteed to always happen on the evening you decide to have an quiet evening together with your spouse/partner.
... I've lost the name and author of the story, but still have the book which is somewhere in my collection of four boxes of second hand sci-fi books. The hard way is going to read every book again...
The enemy would turn around slowly, and reply "I'm a tank! chug chug chug ... Boom!"
And the crazy thing is that the government was happier to let an unpredictable lahar occur than to let contractors onto the mountain to breach the wall when it was possible (not possible any more due to the height of the water behind it now).
Surely it would be possible to drill a drainage channel through the solid rock underneath, and allow the water to drain out?
They'll have this problem "fixed" in six weeks time.
I would believe that most developers have their own method for dealing with physics - from simple collision to ragdoll and the like.
Basic collision detection methods are bounding planes, spheres, capsules, and axis-aligned boxes, along with Binary Space Partitions, Quadtrees and Octrees combined with particle systems. It would be fairly straight forward design an instruction set to perform these operations between the simple primitives (spheres, planes). But BSP Trees, Quadtrees and Octrees would require a high level data format.
If all the collision testing could be done within a single thread within the time limit of a single frame, it would be no different from the player-missile and sprite graphics implemented on early home PC's (Atari computers could do hardware base per-pixel collision detection). Although, it would probably seem easier to have additional vector processors like Sony's Cell processor.
If this directive is passed, European software researchers like my firm are basically put out of business.
It also has the potential to severely damage the UK games industry - there are around 400+ game development teams. These would be seen as a cash cow for McKool Smith given their litigation with Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Activision, Atari, THQ, Vivendi Universal Games, Sega, Square Enix, Tecmo, LucasArts, and Namco Hometek
Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.
NVIDIA GeForceFX cards can be converted into use as professional Quadro cards.
Identical chips, but graded according to maximum clock speed and control circuitry on the circuit board.