When I was at college, there was one corridor in the whole building where I feel as if my face had just been stung by nettles every time I went along there. Months later, that corner of the building has been sealed off with transparent plastic, the walls stripped down to the joists and a hazmat team is walking around removing chunks of wood contaminated with a fur of black mold. Either the waterproofing in the ground or the roof had been breached and water was migrating through the wood.
Our high-school English/Drama teachers did an exercise like that - they set up a classroom skit where they got into an argument or something, and started messing about with hitting each other with fake glass bottles. When it came to the class being given the exercise of writing down an eyewitness account, every person saw a different order of events, even though it was quite obvious the order from a recorded video.
Developers still like to have everything on a "main loop" - render static scenery, get user move, render player, get network player moves, render network players, render auxiliary data). Other stuff will be spinning and bobbing up and down on its own based on timers. Some frames might never be rendered, but they help keep the "tempo" or the smoothness of the animation. As each PC screen can have a different screen resolution, it will have a different refresh rate, anything from 50Hz to 120/240Hz. Every rendered frame is only going to be visibile for several milliseconds (50Hz = 20 milliseconds, 100Hz = 10 milliseconds). If a frame is rendered, it will be perceived even if not consciously.
Early home computers allowed the program to synchronize animation updates to the VBI (Vertical Blank Interrupt) and HBI (Horizontal Blank Interrupt). That way, you could do smooth jitter-free physics synchronised to the frame flipping.
16-bit console system programmers would render out lines across the current scan-line to see how much processing they could do in each frame. While the tiles were updated during the VBI, the physics could be updated during the CRT scanning.
These days, I would guess you would need either a vertical blank callback for the CPU or shader for the GPU.
In every house or apartment that has frosted windows in the doors or skylight windows above the doors, a single laptop screen would light up the entire floor - much to the annoyance of those who went to bed early to sleep vs. those who wanted to read slashdot.
One time I used to do my weekly shopping at a supermarket where the time between the bus arriving and department was about an hour. Left me 30 minutes between the checkout and catching the bus home. Not leaving much to do, except just sit around and watch the world go by. One time, I see a meteor trail in the sky, just over the rooftops of the local buildings - just a sudden white line that appeared and disappeared in the sky in less than a second. Nobody in the surrounding area noticed.
The other events that fascinate me were being in the top floor of buildings and hearing a massive bang on the roof like someone hitting it with a sledgehammer. In the first case I then heard a roof slate slide downwards and fall on the ground. We did have the chance to check the ground and rain gutters, but the only object found was a yellowish-orange stone. Other time was being in a metal-framed fitness center with corrugated metal roof. The whole building reverberated with that sound but there wasn't anyone outside for 100 meters.
Given that you have to be a millionaire to afford to live on the SF Bay Area penisula, it wouldn't be profitable to spend more time in court that at work.
There was an account back in the 1800's of a comet or the tail end of a comet hitting Earth in the North American continent. Nothing reached the ground except that the sky glowed red and light enough to read, and that the atmosphere became unbearably hot for the whole night.
How about 380+ camera sensors built into a telescope array giving a 1.8 Gigapixel resolution? Imagine if they could cool this system down to absolute zero, and use it for infra-red sensing:
You can do things like augmented reality on a smartphone. Use the built-in camera to take a live video stream of a particular location, the MEMS gyroscope and tilt sensors to determine the orientation of the system and GPS to determine the latitude and longitude. Combine this information together and render 3D information on top of this view. Maybe it's a terrain map, geological layers, the direction to the nearest public bar, train station, police station or A&E.
Easy enough to do with early days DOS programming. PC's would cache various disk drive information in unprotected system memory (disk type, number of sectors, number of tracks, number of platters, clusters/sectors chains of open files), then write that stuff back when the file was closed. Anything that corrupted this area of memory would make the PC unbootable. Things could be well and truly messed up if you didn't use the same memory model as third-party API's (tiny, small, medium, large, huge), so 32-bit pointers became 16-bit pointers and vice versa.
Just about everyone those days used Norton Utilities to defragment their drives, clean up lost cluster chains, cluster rings, shared sectors, and everything else that could go wrong like losing files if the PC crashed while the files were still open. Recovering deleted files was the biggest selling point. Fortunately, journaled file systems were invented because of this.
I remember tracing through the BIOS instructions to do basic VGA graphics like drawing a single pixel; save *all* registers, unlock *all* VGA registers, mask, shift, add and write pixel byte, relock *all* VGA registers, restore *all* registers.
Sometimes the driver uses special optimized paths depending on the name of the executable. That was known in the past, so they could optimize for benchmarks and games. Even certain configurations of GL function calls were faster than others eg. glDrawArrays
My parents wanted the ability to call me at any time - they really got annoyed that I wasn't going around with a mobile while downtown or going to work by bus. Some workplaces want to know when you are being held up in traffic and won't be able to get into the office for an early meeting. Being able to call a taxi or emergency services is a big help, especially when there are no longer telephone boxes. Other employers are using Skype to handle IRC style discussions that don't require reserving meeting rooms.
Having a smartphone helps you navigate your way round a new town with unfamilar streets. The Google maps have helped me avoid getting lost several times. The worst time before I had the smartphone was when I went for dinner into a Burger King with entrances on two corners of the building, and ended up having my return path rotated 90 degrees, ended up in a completely different area of the city.
Graphs, bar charts and selection lines are still too complex. A smart cooker would see what was going into the oven, determine the current temperature and know how long the item should be cooked for in order to achieve a perfect temperature.
I know that for my cooker, fish fingers from the freezer need 10 minutes at 200C, burgers take 15 minutes each side at 200C, chips take 15 minutes at 200C, so they should be put in halfway through
What would replace them? The obvious architecture would be a node based system like a scene graph or composition editor that would allow data-flow programming. Most of the components are already in place.
At each end of the systems, you would need framebuffers objects (GL Framebuffer Objects, GL multiple render targets), uncompressed and compressed textures (GL Texture Objects), geometry objects (Vertex buffer objects), program objects to transform vertex and texture data (GL vertex, geometry, fragment shaders). You would need occlusion culling (GL occlusion queries).
You could add mesh objects which would define the type of connectivity (regular square mesh, regular triangle mesh, either open or closed, list of triangles), though for the desktop GL these are represented as display lists. You have transform feedback, but geometry feedback and fragment feedback could also be added.
OpenGL ES is adding the following features which were on desktop GL:
Framebuffer Objects - you can bundle up a color buffer, depth buffer and stencil buffer into a single framebuffer object. Basically the equivalent of a SDL surface. You can have as many as the hardware supports. This eliminates the need to render-to-backbuffer and read-into-texture for shadowing effects.
Multiple Render Targets - now you don't just get one framebuffer color buffer, depth buffer and stencil plane as destinations, you can get as many as the hardware can support. New Compressed texture formats (ASTC) - requires the use of external texture compression software to get 1-bit per pixel, working with 2D, cubemap and 3D textures. But you can't use compressed textures as render target destinations. Shaders are evolving too - there are precision specifiers for floating point (high, medium and low), You can also have uniform blocks which are a bit like C++ namespaces. Transform feedback with varying values - you can tap into the data being sent out from the vertex shader.
OpenCL is also becoming available in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be implemented as kernels, rather than mangled into shaders.
That's not the fault of Microsoft - many other vendors brought out their own 2D and 3D API's
Borland - BGI - Borland Graphics Interface - designed for monochrome, 4-color and 8-color graphics CGA and EGA screens. Disappeared when VGA came out. TIGA - Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture - designed for 256, 16-bit and 32-bit VGA, Super-VGA screens. Featured programmable pixblitting, point and line-drawing chip. Up to four TMS34082 floating-point coprocessors could be paired with the.Disappeared when Intel brought out the video bus Phigs - An early high-level 3D API.
Many have evolved - either an API evolved or it went extinct.
Slashdot Mirror
Human Botflys - you couldn't make that one up.
"Make mine an apple cider, I'm the designated pilot"
When I was at college, there was one corridor in the whole building where I feel as if my face had just been stung by nettles every time I went along there. Months later, that corner of the building has been sealed off with transparent plastic, the walls stripped down to the joists and a hazmat team is walking around removing chunks of wood contaminated with a fur of black mold. Either the waterproofing in the ground or the roof had been breached and water was migrating through the wood.
Our high-school English/Drama teachers did an exercise like that - they set up a classroom skit where they got into an argument or something, and started messing about with hitting each other with fake glass bottles. When it came to the class being given the exercise of writing down an eyewitness account, every person saw a different order of events, even though it was quite obvious the order from a recorded video.
Developers still like to have everything on a "main loop" - render static scenery, get user move, render player, get network player moves, render network players, render auxiliary data). Other stuff will be spinning and bobbing up and down on its own based on timers. Some frames might never be rendered, but they help keep the "tempo" or the smoothness of the animation. As each PC screen can have a different screen resolution, it will have a different refresh rate, anything from 50Hz to 120/240Hz. Every rendered frame is only going to be visibile for several milliseconds (50Hz = 20 milliseconds, 100Hz = 10 milliseconds). If a frame is rendered, it will be perceived even if not consciously.
Early home computers allowed the program to synchronize animation updates to the VBI (Vertical Blank Interrupt) and HBI (Horizontal Blank Interrupt). That way, you could do smooth jitter-free physics synchronised to the frame flipping.
16-bit console system programmers would render out lines across the current scan-line to see how much processing they could do in each frame. While the tiles were updated during the VBI, the physics could be updated during the CRT scanning.
These days, I would guess you would need either a vertical blank callback for the CPU or shader for the GPU.
In every house or apartment that has frosted windows in the doors or skylight windows above the doors, a single laptop screen would light up the entire floor - much to the annoyance of those who went to bed early to sleep vs. those who wanted to read slashdot.
Your wish has come true:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ron-Paul-Revolution-Libertarian-Tea-Party-7-BobbleHead-Case-of-24-/271027788164
One time I used to do my weekly shopping at a supermarket where the time between the bus arriving and department was about an hour. Left me 30 minutes between the checkout and catching the bus home. Not leaving much to do, except just sit around and watch the world go by. One time, I see a meteor trail in the sky, just over the rooftops of the local buildings - just a sudden white line that appeared and disappeared in the sky in less than a second. Nobody in the surrounding area noticed.
The other events that fascinate me were being in the top floor of buildings and hearing a massive bang on the roof like someone hitting it with a sledgehammer. In the first case I then heard a roof slate slide downwards and fall on the ground. We did have the chance to check the ground and rain gutters, but the only object found was a yellowish-orange stone. Other time was being in a metal-framed fitness center with corrugated metal roof. The whole building reverberated with that sound but there wasn't anyone outside for 100 meters.
Given that you have to be a millionaire to afford to live on the SF Bay Area penisula, it wouldn't be profitable to spend more time in court that at work.
Happens in the UK too:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2232954/Innocent-female-motorist-34-killed-gang-staged-crash-cash-insurance-scam-busy-motorway.html
Sounds like Santa Claus coming home drunk again ...
Or even just a recording of one or more ...
Going by the circular shape of that hole in the ice, anyone in that region needs to get their flamethrowers, petri dishes and hot wires at the ready.
There was an account back in the 1800's of a comet or the tail end of a comet hitting Earth in the North American continent. Nothing reached the ground except that the sky glowed red and light enough to read, and that the atmosphere became unbearably hot for the whole night.
How about 380+ camera sensors built into a telescope array giving a 1.8 Gigapixel resolution? Imagine if they could cool this system down to absolute zero, and use it for infra-red sensing:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/28/darpa-builds-a-1-8-gigapixel-camera-that-can-spot-six-inch-targets-from-20000-feet/
You can do things like augmented reality on a smartphone. Use the built-in camera to take a live video stream of a particular location, the MEMS gyroscope and tilt sensors to determine the orientation of the system and GPS to determine the latitude and longitude. Combine this information together and render 3D information on top of this view. Maybe it's a terrain map, geological layers, the direction to the nearest public bar, train station, police station or A&E.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWrDaYP5w58
Easy enough to do with early days DOS programming. PC's would cache various disk drive information in unprotected system memory (disk type, number of sectors, number of tracks, number of platters, clusters/sectors chains of open files), then write that stuff back when the file was closed. Anything that corrupted this area of memory would make the PC unbootable. Things could be well and truly messed up if you didn't use the same memory model as third-party API's (tiny, small, medium, large, huge), so 32-bit pointers became 16-bit pointers and vice versa.
Just about everyone those days used Norton Utilities to defragment their drives, clean up lost cluster chains, cluster rings, shared sectors, and everything else that could go wrong like losing files if the PC crashed while the files were still open. Recovering deleted files was the biggest selling point. Fortunately, journaled file systems were invented because of this.
I remember tracing through the BIOS instructions to do basic VGA graphics like drawing a single pixel; save *all* registers, unlock *all* VGA registers, mask, shift, add and write pixel byte, relock *all* VGA registers, restore *all* registers.
Like Africa - they take a standard openbed truck, add a mounting point for a machine gun and turn it into a "technical".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(fighting_vehicle)
Sometimes the driver uses special optimized paths depending on the name of the executable. That was known in the past, so they could optimize for benchmarks and games. Even certain configurations of GL function calls were faster than others eg. glDrawArrays
http://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.static/Rulesv16.html
My parents wanted the ability to call me at any time - they really got annoyed that I wasn't going around with a mobile while downtown or going to work by bus.
Some workplaces want to know when you are being held up in traffic and won't be able to get into the office for an early meeting. Being able to call a taxi or emergency services is a big help, especially when there are no longer telephone boxes. Other employers are using Skype to handle IRC style discussions that don't require reserving meeting rooms.
Having a smartphone helps you navigate your way round a new town with unfamilar streets. The Google maps have helped me avoid getting lost several times. The worst time before I had the smartphone was when I went for dinner into a Burger King with entrances on two corners of the building, and ended up having my return path rotated 90 degrees, ended up in a completely different area of the city.
Graphs, bar charts and selection lines are still too complex. A smart cooker would see what was going into the oven, determine the current temperature and know how long the item should be cooked for in order to achieve a perfect temperature.
I know that for my cooker, fish fingers from the freezer need 10 minutes at 200C, burgers take 15 minutes each side at 200C, chips take 15 minutes at 200C, so they should be put in halfway through
What would replace them? The obvious architecture would be a node based system like a scene graph or composition editor that would allow data-flow programming. Most of the components are already in place.
At each end of the systems, you would need framebuffers objects (GL Framebuffer Objects, GL multiple render targets), uncompressed and compressed textures (GL Texture Objects), geometry objects (Vertex buffer objects), program objects to transform vertex and texture data (GL vertex, geometry, fragment shaders). You would need occlusion culling (GL occlusion queries).
You could add mesh objects which would define the type of connectivity (regular square mesh, regular triangle mesh, either open or closed, list of triangles), though for the desktop GL these are represented as display lists. You have transform feedback, but geometry feedback and fragment feedback could also be added.
OpenGL ES is adding the following features which were on desktop GL:
Framebuffer Objects - you can bundle up a color buffer, depth buffer and stencil buffer into a single framebuffer object. Basically the equivalent of a SDL surface. You can have as many as the hardware supports. This eliminates the need to render-to-backbuffer and read-into-texture for shadowing effects.
Multiple Render Targets - now you don't just get one framebuffer color buffer, depth buffer and stencil plane as destinations, you can get as many as the hardware can support.
New Compressed texture formats (ASTC) - requires the use of external texture compression software to get 1-bit per pixel, working with 2D, cubemap and 3D textures. But you can't use compressed textures as render target destinations.
Shaders are evolving too - there are precision specifiers for floating point (high, medium and low), You can also have uniform blocks which are a bit like C++ namespaces.
Transform feedback with varying values - you can tap into the data being sent out from the vertex shader.
OpenCL is also becoming available in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be implemented as kernels, rather than mangled into shaders.
That's not the fault of Microsoft - many other vendors brought out their own 2D and 3D API's
Borland - BGI - Borland Graphics Interface - designed for monochrome, 4-color and 8-color graphics CGA and EGA screens. Disappeared when VGA came out. .Disappeared when Intel brought out the video bus
TIGA - Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture - designed for 256, 16-bit and 32-bit VGA, Super-VGA screens. Featured programmable pixblitting, point and line-drawing chip. Up to four TMS34082 floating-point coprocessors could be paired with the
Phigs - An early high-level 3D API.
Many have evolved - either an API evolved or it went extinct.