Didn't DARPA sponsor a research project where every 100 metres of freeway was photographed and archived onto a video disc, with the goal of preparing military drivers to know the route before actually driving a heavy load between destinations?
Darl: I was trying to explain this to my father the other day.
We grew up on a ranch, and he was asking the question
"What was up with all the lawsuits - sounds very complicated?"
"Well, it's quite simple, it's like our days growing up on the ranch
If you took the cattle up on the mountains in the Summer-time,
and in the fall, you went to round them up, you had to bring the
cattle back in, and whenever they had a brand on their side, you
could establish which brands were yours. In the meantime, if
somebody came and took your cattle, you had the rights to go track
them down. When I was growing up we had a case very similar to this.
Someone stole our cattle, we went and found our brands. The Brand
inspector helped us get restoration of those cows back to us, and we
were whole again with our property. That's exactly what's going here.
Copyrights of software are very similar to brands on cattle. And what
we're doing is we've found that the copyright [works] we have here
have made their way into other properties. We're in the process of
rounding these up, and once we have them rounded up, then we will
feel that we have restitution and justice, for our intellectual
properties demands that we have out there."
Well, if he'd tell us what his brand looked like, we could return the lines of source code to him. Unfortunately, until we know what his brand looks like, these
could be the stolen lines
of SCO UNIX for all we know:
I had a go some time back. The camera rays were pre-calculated. A bounding box was calculated for each triangle in image space. These were ordered by starting row and column. Lists of the possibly visible triangles were maintained as the image space was scanned. Groups of geometry had bounding spheres. I was getting around 15 seconds/frame.
However, there seem to be many open source real-time ray-tracing projects going on:
OpenRT, with it's own FAQ. This project seems to have several games written for it.
Rearview is another game-engine based on ray-tracing
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that the big names haven't started looking at raytracing. Sure, it has a reputation for being slow, but graphics technology has grown by leaps and bounds.
To match the quality of anti-aliased triangle rendering, you need at least 4 samples per pixel. Then you need to support full-screen resolutions (2048x1536). To be officially real-time, you need at least 15 frames/second, if not the full 60/80 that most games provide now. That would give you a budget requirement of at least 200 million rays/second. However, most outdoor scenes need a ray depth of seven to be indistinguishable from a photograph (Looking through the windows of a house for example). So, you'd need to increase this requirement to 1 billion rays/second to completely achieve this goal (although not all surfaces are partially transparent). Remember that level designers would want to use all the possible visual effects including multiple mirrors/volumetric fog.
To some extent 3D API's already do two-level ray tracing through surface reflections/transparency. For a 3D API to support ray-tracing in hardware, you wouldn't have to change much. First level rays are achieved through standard triangle rasterisation. But to achieve full ray-tracing, you would need to have a fragment program that could handle as many as (antialiasing level)^(ray tracing depth) reflection/refraction calculations and triangle-ray intersection tests per pixel -assuming the worst case, a room full of mirrors.
You can define triangles using combinations of texture coordinates/vertices and ID numbers, so memory space isn't that difficult (128 bytes for three vertices/texture coordinates + material/texture ID). However, you then have to test every generated ray against every other triangle. Octrees/BSP's can help but that still adds another magnitude to the requirement.
Re:Too easy to send
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think a good solution would be on the ISP end of things, and have them throttle connections to port 25 on remote machines.
The problem is, you have to consider the worst case scenario where the spammer is an offshore ISP renting T1 lines from a major backbone provider. Only when you have a solution for this example, can you block spam. Otherwise, the spammers will just adapt to whatever loopholes are available.
The electromechanical machines had odds of winning based entirely on the distribution of symbols on reels. These were arranged to comply with the odds of winning required by law. The electronic machines would be more "intelligent" in that they would "manage" their win/lose ratio by starting to give out small wins if a punter had a constant run of losses. Then when the punter had a constant run of wins, the machine would make it harder to win. It's basic psychology - the punter's feel that they are on a winning streak, and that the machine is stopping them from hitting the jackpot.
So why don't I just go to the website and remove myself? Do you honestly think I have the userID and password that Joe Numbnut used to sign me up for this shit?
There is a simple way. Assuming you have a domain name that was previously owned by Joe Numbnuts, you will probably have a catch-all E-mail address, which is catching all of Joe's E-mails. In this case, you can go to the relevant website, and click the box that states that Joe Numbnuts has forgotten his password. A replacement password will be sent to Joe, ie. your domain, and you can then use that to cancel the subscription.
(Note: I think there was a project to essentially create a sort of Java-enabled OS rather than a virtual one, which could natively run compiled Java code without a VM. I haven't heard anything about it since)
One of the ideas behind Java was that a object-orientated CPU (manipulating objects rather than ordinary registers) would actually be faster than the equivalent CISC or RISC instructions. This was going to be the PicoJava I core. But a Google search picks up nothing in the last four years.
...wear a black suit, a black pair of sunglasses, an earphone in one ear, and a mobile phone in your hand on the opposite side. Then no-one will mess with you.
For Winter you could wear a large thick anorak with plenty of inside pockets, and a light jacket for Summer.
Carrying a standard sports bag with hand/should straps is probably your best way to remain inconspicuous.
A similar thing happened to me - I accepted an interview for a startup in London - they gave me the registered business address, not the actual interview address. As a consequence I ended up having my PDA stolen while trying to find the correct address. I mentioned this at the interview, and they just thought that was funny.
They may have been desparate for staff, and willing to pay any price, but with that attitude, I had no interest in working for them.
I'm glad they caught him: I've been putting up with his types at college for the past two years. At times I feel like I'm the only one *learning* something.
But many universities consider using a single essay of yours for two different assignments to be plagiarizing, so why should your case be any different?
The justification is that he did the research in the first place, and wrote an original piece of work. Since it was in the public domain, it's out there standing up to public scrutiny. If anyone noticed that there plagiarism taking place, they could immediately complain.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do a search on Slashdot for previous articles before posting and/or approving articles!
Going to the Search page, typing "Rugrat", and clicking the "Search" button already brings up a story about the first 64-bit Windows virus from Thursday, May 27th, 2004.
An even quicker method is to click on the symbol that the article is talking about (in this case, the combination lock). This immediately brings up the two stories side by side.
How difficult would it be to modify the slashdot submit story to display the previous stories submitted under a particular symbol?
Sandbags seem to be the preferred option. They're cheap, and the contents can be easily found anywhere in the world. Other methods of containment include using a U shaped metal barrel pointing upwards towards the sky. Apparently when this was used once, it actually shot a hole through the clouds above. The closest anyone has come up with using a flexible but strong substance has probably been with airlines experimenting with kevlar straps tied around baggage containers. The straps were flexible enough to stretch with the blast, but strong enough to keep the container in shape.
From an article I read, it appeared Google wanted to maintain a publicly available list documenting the keywords/phrases people were talking about. What if Google picked up on some event that happened at a company or high-school. How would the search engines be able to discriminate between celebrity names and ordinary people? In some cases the name of a school principal/company director might be in the public domain, but a student/employee would not.
Games could allow more than two players. Perhaps even enough to play a full game of soccer or football! (The picture showed a "dome" with controls in a ring around it.)
There are networked arcade racing games. While they may not have been that popular at $0.50 for 1 minute, they are much more playable for a kid's birthday party, where the cost is included for a whole afternoon's entertainment.
Games will be able to be played over great distances! (The picture showed a chess board with a wireless antenna on it.)
You can play a chess game with another person using your mobile phone.
Games will be so much more realistic! (Shows a handheld game with a full scene of a motor bike jumping a dirt ramp.)
The latest handheld games are going to be able to do this.
For anyone who's interested, I've scanned in some old Byte magazines from 15-20 years ago.
Well, I am suprised because I thought that radiation damages all DNA no matter what cell it's in.
I can understand that the effects
on humans, but still suprised that bacteria can handle this. It turns out that the DNA in the bacteria IS damaged, but it is able to repair at a fast enough rate and accurately too:
There was an article on the analysis of the effects of Chernobyl. Apparently one side effect of the radiation was that plants and other organisms had tripled the number of copies of various genes. I guess it goes down to probability: Given a radiation level of a known amount, how many copies of enzymes/RNA do you need to guarantee that repair can be performed before the enzyme/RNa/whatever is damaged itself.
I tend to personalize it a bit: "If you believe that ___* is 'just a theory,' be aware that gravity is 'just a theory' as well. I invite you to try jumping off a skyscraper because, surely, nothing that is 'just a theory' can hurt you."
It's not the falling due to gravity that hurts you. It's the sudden deacceleration trauma incurred when attempting to occupy the same volume of space as the planet.
I don't think games in themselves are really that useful, unless they are forcing you to learn facts and chain them together coherently.
way.
Although, I do believe there is a lot of potential for 3D rendering technology to recreate the various environments that people lived in. We used to have education TV programmes at school where actors would do this, but that wasn't much fun when you're sitting on the floor 20 feet away from a TV that's shelved 6 feet up in the air.
One thing I did find useful was writing programs to solve basic Physics (projectile motion with gravity). Having a program which could be given the known variables, identify which equations could be used, calculate unknown variables, and continue until all variables were known, was a great help to me.
Virus researchers have just announced that they developed a proof-of-concept virus that can spread on an 256-bit operating system that has as yet to be designed.
According to spokesperson who didn't wish to be identified, he claimed that this had been the most infectious virus that he had seen in the twenty years of his career and had also proved to be worst to remove. He also recommended that all users should immediately buy the latest version of Anti-Virus-Sponge-Sentinel which would mop up all traces of the virus before it reached the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't DARPA sponsor a research project where every 100 metres of freeway was photographed and archived onto a video disc, with the goal of preparing military drivers to know the route before actually driving a heavy load between destinations?
Maybe that would have route 66 on archive?
There's an interesting interview with Darl at The SCO 2004 forum
Darl: I was trying to explain this to my father the other day. We grew up on a ranch, and he was asking the question "What was up with all the lawsuits - sounds very complicated?"
"Well, it's quite simple, it's like our days growing up on the ranch If you took the cattle up on the mountains in the Summer-time, and in the fall, you went to round them up, you had to bring the cattle back in, and whenever they had a brand on their side, you could establish which brands were yours. In the meantime, if somebody came and took your cattle, you had the rights to go track them down. When I was growing up we had a case very similar to this. Someone stole our cattle, we went and found our brands. The Brand inspector helped us get restoration of those cows back to us, and we were whole again with our property. That's exactly what's going here. Copyrights of software are very similar to brands on cattle. And what we're doing is we've found that the copyright [works] we have here have made their way into other properties. We're in the process of rounding these up, and once we have them rounded up, then we will feel that we have restitution and justice, for our intellectual properties demands that we have out there."
Well, if he'd tell us what his brand looked like, we could return the lines of source code to him. Unfortunately, until we know what his brand looks like, these could be the stolen lines of SCO UNIX for all we know:
I had a go some time back. The camera rays were pre-calculated. A bounding box was calculated for each triangle in image space. These were ordered by starting row and column. Lists of the possibly visible triangles were maintained as the image space was scanned. Groups of geometry had bounding spheres. I was getting around 15 seconds/frame.
However, there seem to be many open source real-time ray-tracing projects going on:
OpenRT, with it's own FAQ. This project seems to have several games written for it.
Rearview is another game-engine based on ray-tracing
There's also the Avalon Project. There was also an article discussing the use of SSE Instructions. The Source code to a demo is available at RAVI-Demo. Other projects include RealStorm.
It certainly seems to be an active area.
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that the big names haven't started looking at raytracing. Sure, it has a reputation for being slow, but graphics technology has grown by leaps and bounds.
To match the quality of anti-aliased triangle rendering, you need at least 4 samples per pixel. Then you need to support full-screen resolutions (2048x1536). To be officially real-time, you need at least 15 frames/second, if not the full 60/80 that most games provide now.
That would give you a budget requirement of at least 200 million rays/second. However, most outdoor scenes need a ray depth of seven to be indistinguishable from a photograph (Looking through the windows of a house for example). So, you'd need to increase this requirement to 1 billion rays/second to completely achieve this goal (although not all surfaces are partially transparent). Remember that level designers would want to use all the possible visual effects including multiple mirrors/volumetric fog.
To some extent 3D API's already do two-level ray tracing through surface reflections/transparency. For a 3D API to support ray-tracing in hardware, you wouldn't have to change much. First level rays are achieved through standard triangle rasterisation. But to achieve full ray-tracing, you would need to have a fragment program that could handle as many as (antialiasing level)^(ray tracing depth) reflection/refraction calculations and triangle-ray intersection tests per pixel -assuming the worst case, a room full of mirrors.
You can define triangles using combinations of texture coordinates/vertices and ID numbers, so memory space isn't that difficult (128 bytes for three vertices/texture coordinates + material/texture ID). However, you then have to test every generated ray against every other triangle. Octrees/BSP's can help but that still adds another magnitude to the requirement.
I think a good solution would be on the ISP end of things, and have them throttle connections to port 25 on remote machines.
The problem is, you have to consider the worst case scenario where the spammer is an offshore ISP renting T1 lines from a major backbone provider. Only when you have a solution for this example, can you block spam. Otherwise, the spammers will just adapt to whatever loopholes are available.
... and an in depth article investigating claims that Beta releases of software may contain bugs.
... I thought it was going to be a WWF match. I could only imagine what the commentary would sound like with interviews from their sponsors/trainers.
The electromechanical machines had odds of winning based entirely on the distribution of symbols on reels. These were arranged to comply with the odds of winning required by law. The electronic machines would be more "intelligent" in that they would "manage" their win/lose ratio by starting to give out small wins if a punter had a constant run of losses. Then when the punter had a constant run of wins, the machine would make it harder to win. It's basic psychology - the punter's feel that they are on a winning streak, and that the machine is stopping them from hitting the jackpot.
So why don't I just go to the website and remove myself? Do you honestly think I have the userID and password that Joe Numbnut used to sign me up for this shit?
There is a simple way. Assuming you have a domain name that was previously owned by Joe Numbnuts, you will probably have a catch-all E-mail address, which is catching all of Joe's E-mails. In this case, you can go to the relevant website, and click the box that states that Joe Numbnuts has forgotten his password. A replacement password will be sent to Joe, ie. your domain, and you can then use that to cancel the subscription.
(Note: I think there was a project to essentially create a sort of Java-enabled OS rather than a virtual one, which could natively run compiled Java code without a VM. I haven't heard anything about it since)
One of the ideas behind Java was that a object-orientated CPU (manipulating objects rather than ordinary registers) would actually be faster than the equivalent CISC or RISC instructions. This was going to be the PicoJava I core. But a Google search picks up nothing in the last four years.
...wear a black suit, a black pair of sunglasses, an earphone in one ear, and a mobile phone in your hand on the opposite side. Then no-one will mess with you.
For Winter you could wear a large thick anorak with plenty of inside pockets, and a light jacket for Summer.
Carrying a standard sports bag with hand/should straps is probably your best way to remain inconspicuous.
A similar thing happened to me - I accepted an interview for a startup in London - they gave me the registered business address, not the actual interview address. As a consequence I ended up having my PDA stolen while trying to find the correct address. I mentioned this at the interview, and they just thought that was funny.
They may have been desparate for staff, and willing to pay any price, but with that attitude, I had no interest in working for them.
I'm glad they caught him: I've been putting up with his types at college for the past two years. At times I feel like I'm the only one *learning* something.
You should have gone to Edinburgh or Glasgow University. They caught around 90 first year Computer Science students in their first year. A similar thing then happened at Glasgow University.
But many universities consider using a single essay of yours for two different assignments to be plagiarizing, so why should your case be any different?
The justification is that he did the research in the first place, and wrote an original piece of work. Since it was in the public domain, it's out there standing up to public scrutiny. If anyone noticed that there plagiarism taking place, they could immediately complain.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do a search on Slashdot for previous articles before posting and/or approving articles! Going to the Search page, typing "Rugrat", and clicking the "Search" button already brings up a story about the first 64-bit Windows virus from Thursday, May 27th, 2004.
An even quicker method is to click on the symbol that the article is talking about (in this case, the combination lock). This immediately brings up the two stories side by side.
How difficult would it be to modify the slashdot submit story to display the previous stories submitted under a particular symbol?
Sandbags seem to be the preferred option. They're cheap, and the contents can be easily found anywhere in the world. Other methods of containment include using a U shaped metal barrel pointing upwards towards the sky. Apparently when this was used once, it actually shot a hole through the clouds above. The closest anyone has come up with using a flexible but strong substance has probably been with airlines experimenting with kevlar straps tied around baggage containers. The straps were flexible enough to stretch with the blast, but strong enough to keep the container in shape.
... all our missiles are guaranteed to hit the ground if they fail to reach the target...
I've Combined the cooling system of my PC with a beer making kit, so I can new brew my own beer at the same time as my PC is being overclocked.
From an article I read, it appeared Google wanted to maintain a publicly available list documenting the keywords/phrases people were talking about. What if Google picked up on some event that happened at a company or high-school. How would the search engines be able to discriminate between celebrity names and ordinary people? In some cases the name of a school principal/company director might be in the public domain, but a student/employee would not.
Games could allow more than two players. Perhaps even enough to play a full game of soccer or football! (The picture showed a "dome" with controls in a ring around it.)
There are networked arcade racing games. While they may not have been that popular at $0.50 for 1 minute, they are much more playable for a kid's birthday party, where the cost is included for a whole afternoon's entertainment.
Games will be able to be played over great distances! (The picture showed a chess board with a wireless antenna on it.)
You can play a chess game with another person using your mobile phone.
Games will be so much more realistic! (Shows a handheld game with a full scene of a motor bike jumping a dirt ramp.)
The latest handheld games are going to be able to do this.
For anyone who's interested, I've scanned in some old Byte magazines from 15-20 years ago.
What can I get for 1$? "Oompa Loompa"? "Ugnaught"?
"Amoeba" ($1)
"Bacterium" ($0.50)
"Virus" ($0.01)
Well, I am suprised because I thought that radiation damages all DNA no matter what cell it's in. I can understand that the effects on humans, but still suprised that bacteria can handle this. It turns out that the DNA in the bacteria IS damaged, but it is able to repair at a fast enough rate and accurately too:
There was an article on the analysis of the effects of Chernobyl. Apparently one side effect of the radiation was that plants and other organisms had tripled the number of copies of various genes. I guess it goes down to probability: Given a radiation level of a known amount, how many copies of enzymes/RNA do you need to guarantee that repair can be performed before the enzyme/RNa/whatever is damaged itself.
I tend to personalize it a bit: "If you believe that ___* is 'just a theory,' be aware that gravity is 'just a theory' as well. I invite you to try jumping off a skyscraper because, surely, nothing that is 'just a theory' can hurt you."
It's not the falling due to gravity that hurts you. It's the sudden deacceleration trauma incurred when attempting to occupy the same volume of space as the planet.
I don't think games in themselves are really that useful, unless they are forcing you to learn facts and chain them together coherently. way.
Although, I do believe there is a lot of potential for 3D rendering technology to recreate the various environments that people lived in. We used to have education TV programmes at school where actors would do this, but that wasn't much fun when you're sitting on the floor 20 feet away from a TV that's shelved 6 feet up in the air.
One thing I did find useful was writing programs to solve basic Physics (projectile motion with gravity). Having a program which could be given the known variables, identify which equations could be used, calculate unknown variables, and continue until all variables were known, was a great help to me.
Virus researchers have just announced that they developed a proof-of-concept virus that can spread on an 256-bit operating system that has as yet to be designed.
According to spokesperson who didn't wish to be identified, he claimed that this had been the most infectious virus that he had seen in the twenty years of his career and had also proved to be worst to remove. He also recommended that all users should immediately buy the latest version of Anti-Virus-Sponge-Sentinel which would mop up all traces of the virus before it reached the system.