Does it help 3d graphics? No. I have it on good authority (my game programming teacher is one of the 3d gurus over at RockStar San Diego, his site: http://www.hipergames.com/ that modern 3d hardware can do a trig function in a single cycle. I'm pretty sure that means a "32-bit float trig function". There's no point to further optimization.
But software renderers could probably get quite a bit out of it, yes. OTOH software renderers have been using various tricks to speed up those trig functions for quite some time now... using tricks like lookup tables with LERPing to fill in the gaps.
PS: LERP == Linear IntERPolation. Draw a line between two data points, and use your position on that line as an intermediate value. Not exact, but pretty darn good when your data is fine-grained enough.
PPS: As long as we're on the subject of 3d graphics and efficiency, allow me to bust out My New Joke (made it up myself):
Q: Why are rectangular trees so inefficient? A: Too many square roots.
Thank you, thank you. Don't forget to tip your servers. I'm here all week.
As I recall, those superconducting lines draw power from the line itself for cooling. So there's still some "line loss", but it's much less than what would be lost to copper lines over a similar span.
Or so the story went on slashdot several years ago when Detriot (IIRC) was trying it out.
No idea how successful it was though... I haven't seen any followup stories.
Furthermore, SC lines have a limit to how much power they can carry, so even if all those lines into NYC where SC, there'd still be a maximum capacity.
That "bugged" me too. I was expecting this huge gout of steam to come shooting up out of the river, but all we get is this shot of Doc Ock and his baby sun sinking into the Hudson.
I just googled for Impressive Syndrome, and it was described as having a potassium-related side effect. Horses with IS can have spells of temporary paralysis. This is (according to the article I just read) controllable with a low-potassium diet.
So there may be some correlation. It may be that Der Uber-Squirt will have potassium issues. Or it may be that they are two seperate conditions.
I think it more likely that this was the result of an incestuous relationship than of some secret genetic manipulation.
But where one gene can be found, so can others. It's entirely possible that the father is just a secretive person who did not wish to be bothered by the press.
If I had to lay money on something, I'd go with incest... but I wouldn't give that good odds either.
Actually, the PDF said that the GPS/whatever guidance system would be $3k. The total price per round was estimated at about $10k.
US $ of course.
It also said they expected the projectiles to be traveling at around mach 5 when it reached it's target. And that it would then create a 10 meter radius crater, and be capable of penetrating 40 meters into a hardend structure.
Or something. Meters? Yards? Inches? Furlongs? Whatever. Let NASA figure it out.
Seriously though. All profanity and TV promotion aside, the class-action thing stands on it's own. That'd be headline news. EVERYONE has a cell phone, and every news agency in the world would fall on that story "like a pack of ravening wolves".
Quick! Name that movie. No, I don't have ADD, why do you... OOh! Pretty!
There is no proof that RF causes cancer. Heard of an class action suits against cell phone manufacturers? No. You haven't.
Why?
Because this is horse shit.
Those little healing magnets you wear to align your shakras/amplify your aura/whatever-BS-they-foisted-off-on-you? Horse Shit.
Yes. You heard it here first.
As penence, you must watch no less than 5 episodes of Myth Busters. (not really punishment, but at least you'll be less likely to fall for this stuff in the future)
And here's a counter argument (the the point I myself was going to make):
Modern games are often using pixel-based lighting/shading these days, rather than vertex-based... so this isn't as big a deal as it used to be.
All those programmable pixel shaders have to be good for something.;)
Re:Can I have an infinite budget to write the code
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 1
" "No doubt, such a thing is possible. But we are all convinced there is NO WAY we could have done it with as little effort."
Sorry but when you use 4 engineers for 6 months you can't claim no to little effort. "
He didn't say "no to little effort". He said NO WAY with AS LITTLE effort. The original poster believes that it took less time because of his choice of language.
I'd say it was the proper design up front, but that's me. I'd guess that the original imaging app was a hack, held together with chewing gum and bailing wire by their description. The new app has an actual design.
Language choice? Pretty much a wash. It boils down more to APIs than keywords, in my experience. He who has the easiest architechture wins the "ease of implementation" award, regardless of how you define a loop or how you terminate a line.
The suplicant wants to send out one stream with one encryption key. Not a zillion streams each with their own little DRM (rights? what rights?) key.
Down boy. Thou shalt chill.
All they need is a fast encrypt-decrypt with some way of allowing the clients to do the decryption FAST.
So what's wrong with SSL? Put the crypto in the network layer instead of the video app. User/pass protect the video stream URL and away you go...... but SSL requires per-session data, doesn't it. Killed that.
A fast crypto algorithm? AES is fast, strong, good. It and several dozen other algorithms are available in the OS crypto library at: http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/cryptlib.html I've used it's AES implementation in the past, no worries mate. Of course I wasn't concerned with performance either... but it's supposed to be Really Fast.
Encoding the outgoing stream shouldn't be too hard to code up. And the client end could be built as a custom CODEC in the media player of your choice. Just wrap some other CODEC in your encryption system, and throw up a password dialog when you first open the stream.
Sounds relatively simple... but then I've never written a CODEC before, so I'm pretty much just guessing here.
I'm using OpenAL right now in my own little game project. It's kind of a cross between Robotron 2084 and Asteroids. It represents upwards of 20 hours of work and it shows (meh). As does my utter lack of artistic ability. The particle effects aren't bad though.
I'm not doing a whole lot with OpenAL, but I *am* using it. Positional audio, which is the only sound I have in game. No music (yet).
My project, "Bubble Cruiser", is using OpenAL on top of the default sound engine (DirectX I believe). I had some initial trouble but have massaged it into something pretty decent.
Advice: Start from their sample code. The Creative SDK comes with a couple samples that will get you started.
I tried writing the code from scratch at first but ran home to the samples almost immediately.
And I wasn't terribly impressed with the docs either. Typical. But between the API reference and the sample code, you'll do fine.
I can understand your confusion though, because TORQUE, from www.garagegames.com, does use OpenAL. Torque is a pay-for-the-source version of the Tribes 2 engine. Lots of cool stuff going on over there.
Sadly, the OpenAL implementation in Torque isn't that widely reguarded in its development community because... (drum roll) the sound engine was originally written for FMOD. OpenAL was shoe-horned in to remove that particular royalty from the engine.
I would think that at higher pressure, the bubbles wouldn't expand as much, so you wouldn't get any extra energy that way.
However, at higher temperatures, things could get "interesting". And at higher pressures, water's boiling point rises, so I guess we'll see.
Or they might try a liquid other than water, one that exists only at much higher temperatures... something like liquid Titanium. That's, what? 3500 farenheit? How hot does uranium have to get to liquify?
Make that 3034 F... oh and apparently tungsten is way up there too, with a melting point of 6192 F. Yow. Oh, and according to webelements.com, uranium melts at 2070F, and boils at 7101F. Uranium gas? That sounds unpleasant.
And I'm assuming that all that temperature data holds true at 1 atmosphere, piling on a couple thousand bars (or pascals or whatever) ought to drive those numbers up further.
If they can come up with an "approachable" fusion reaction, it should be much easier to look at. Yes, you're looking at it filtered through some liquid, but you can use different liquids to let you look at different things.
And that looking could lead to something useful to magnetic-confinement style fusion.
Or they just might figure out how to use this variety of fusion directly. Either way, a good thing.
And it does sound like this is a valid paper. The press release came AFTER someone decided to publish the paper after peer review, not before. Important distinction.
We already bought a couple at the local Frys (which is decked out like Atlantis... Very Cool). But she saw one with a clear plastic casing last time we were there and just HAD to have it. I said "wait till Valentines Day" and she went for it.
I bought my wife a (fake) gun for VD. And a hockey jersey for our anniversary (Marty Turco, of the Dallas Stars).
background: I have a license for Torque, loved tribes 2, and am eagerly awaiting tribes 3. I'm working on two different Torque projects right now, though "working" is a bit of an exageration on one of them.
I think they went with UT for a number of reasons:
1) Eye candy. The UT engine just plain looks better (out of the box) than Torque. Sure you can strap new features to Torque (like any other engine), but an engine designed with the latest-n-greatest graphics features in mind will do significantly better than one with those features bolted on after the fact.
2) Integrated physics. Theres already a physics engine in place, though I understand they've tweaked it quite a bit to handle high speed ground collisions and the like.
3) ???
4) Profit
5) Sever links with the past. There may well be political reasons for not going with Torque as well. This is a wholly different company. I don't know of any Dynamix employees working on T3 (though I have heard that Kinetic Poet _is_ working on it).
6) Going with an established engine means more modders that already know how to work on your stuff. This strikes me as more of a bonus than a deciding factor.
I doubt it was the net code... Tribe's/Torque's network library has always rocked. Top-of-the-line stuff.
B: You're kinda missing the whole "conservation of energy" thing. It could never come close to making up the difference.
C: After reading the article, it's clear that converting vibration into current will never create a large ammount of electricity. It WILL create small ammounts just about anyplace, allowing electronics to go without a battery or powercord. Pizo in the road might for various sensors to be included into a kind of "smart streets" (as opposed to "street smarts"). The sensors could then trigger de-icing gear, for example.
Lots of cool little applications. Emphasis on the "little".
I suppose a massive-scale deployment would get useful ammounts of power, but wouldn't be cost effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no.
The math is easier, yes.
Does it help 3d graphics? No. I have it on good authority (my game programming teacher is one of the 3d gurus over at RockStar San Diego, his site: http://www.hipergames.com/ that modern 3d hardware can do a trig function in a single cycle. I'm pretty sure that means a "32-bit float trig function". There's no point to further optimization.
But software renderers could probably get quite a bit out of it, yes. OTOH software renderers have been using various tricks to speed up those trig functions for quite some time now... using tricks like lookup tables with LERPing to fill in the gaps.
PS: LERP == Linear IntERPolation. Draw a line between two data points, and use your position on that line as an intermediate value. Not exact, but pretty darn good when your data is fine-grained enough.
PPS: As long as we're on the subject of 3d graphics and efficiency, allow me to bust out My New Joke (made it up myself):
Q: Why are rectangular trees so inefficient?
A: Too many square roots.
Thank you, thank you. Don't forget to tip your servers. I'm here all week.
In that case, I would think "address" would be more accurately interpretted as "Consume", "eat", or perhaps "mutilate".
That'd rule.
As I recall, those superconducting lines draw power from the line itself for cooling. So there's still some "line loss", but it's much less than what would be lost to copper lines over a similar span.
Or so the story went on slashdot several years ago when Detriot (IIRC) was trying it out.
No idea how successful it was though... I haven't seen any followup stories.
Furthermore, SC lines have a limit to how much power they can carry, so even if all those lines into NYC where SC, there'd still be a maximum capacity.
That "bugged" me too. I was expecting this huge gout of steam to come shooting up out of the river, but all we get is this shot of Doc Ock and his baby sun sinking into the Hudson.
Boo! Hiss!
Minus the "hiss". Feh.
I just googled for Impressive Syndrome, and it was described as having a potassium-related side effect. Horses with IS can have spells of temporary paralysis. This is (according to the article I just read) controllable with a low-potassium diet.
So there may be some correlation. It may be that Der Uber-Squirt will have potassium issues. Or it may be that they are two seperate conditions.
Not enough information to tell.
I think it more likely that this was the result of an incestuous relationship than of some secret genetic manipulation.
But where one gene can be found, so can others. It's entirely possible that the father is just a secretive person who did not wish to be bothered by the press.
If I had to lay money on something, I'd go with incest... but I wouldn't give that good odds either.
Actually, the PDF said that the GPS/whatever guidance system would be $3k. The total price per round was estimated at about $10k.
US $ of course.
It also said they expected the projectiles to be traveling at around mach 5 when it reached it's target. And that it would then create a 10 meter radius crater, and be capable of penetrating 40 meters into a hardend structure.
Or something. Meters? Yards? Inches? Furlongs? Whatever. Let NASA figure it out.
If they can HIT satilites, then they can launch satilites. That'd be huge.
Oh, the sat's would be small, and with some small range of uses, but still...
You're right about the EM weaponry though. I'd think that would be a better satilite killer by a pretty wide margin.
Ever so glad to be of service.
Seriously though. All profanity and TV promotion aside, the class-action thing stands on it's own. That'd be headline news. EVERYONE has a cell phone, and every news agency in the world would fall on that story "like a pack of ravening wolves".
Quick! Name that movie. No, I don't have ADD, why do you... OOh! Pretty!
Horse shit.
There is no proof that RF causes cancer. Heard of an class action suits against cell phone manufacturers? No. You haven't.
Why?
Because this is horse shit.
Those little healing magnets you wear to align your shakras/amplify your aura/whatever-BS-they-foisted-off-on-you? Horse Shit.
Yes. You heard it here first.
As penence, you must watch no less than 5 episodes of Myth Busters. (not really punishment, but at least you'll be less likely to fall for this stuff in the future)
That's pretty much what I was thinking.
;)
And here's a counter argument (the the point I myself was going to make):
Modern games are often using pixel-based lighting/shading these days, rather than vertex-based... so this isn't as big a deal as it used to be.
All those programmable pixel shaders have to be good for something.
"
"No doubt, such a thing is possible. But we are all convinced there is NO WAY we could have done it with as little effort."
Sorry but when you use 4 engineers for 6 months you can't claim no to little effort.
"
He didn't say "no to little effort". He said NO WAY with AS LITTLE effort. The original poster believes that it took less time because of his choice of language.
I'd say it was the proper design up front, but that's me. I'd guess that the original imaging app was a hack, held together with chewing gum and bailing wire by their description. The new app has an actual design.
Language choice? Pretty much a wash. It boils down more to APIs than keywords, in my experience. He who has the easiest architechture wins the "ease of implementation" award, regardless of how you define a loop or how you terminate a line.
DRM requires quite a bit more than crypto.
... but SSL requires per-session data, doesn't it. Killed that.
The suplicant wants to send out one stream with one encryption key. Not a zillion streams each with their own little DRM (rights? what rights?) key.
Down boy. Thou shalt chill.
All they need is a fast encrypt-decrypt with some way of allowing the clients to do the decryption FAST.
So what's wrong with SSL? Put the crypto in the network layer instead of the video app. User/pass protect the video stream URL and away you go...
A fast crypto algorithm? AES is fast, strong, good. It and several dozen other algorithms are available in the OS crypto library at:
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/cryptlib.html
I've used it's AES implementation in the past, no worries mate. Of course I wasn't concerned with performance either... but it's supposed to be Really Fast.
Encoding the outgoing stream shouldn't be too hard to code up. And the client end could be built as a custom CODEC in the media player of your choice. Just wrap some other CODEC in your encryption system, and throw up a password dialog when you first open the stream.
Sounds relatively simple... but then I've never written a CODEC before, so I'm pretty much just guessing here.
Good luck to ya.
I live in north San Diego county, California (Vista).
I pay around $2.30 to $2.40 a gallon for the 87 octane "cheap" stuff.
Diesel is usually 10 cents cheaper, give or take.
And if you think that's bad, you should check the real estate prices around here. YOW!
I'm using OpenAL right now in my own little game project. It's kind of a cross between Robotron 2084 and Asteroids. It represents upwards of 20 hours of work and it shows (meh). As does my utter lack of artistic ability. The particle effects aren't bad though.
I'm not doing a whole lot with OpenAL, but I *am* using it. Positional audio, which is the only sound I have in game. No music (yet).
My project, "Bubble Cruiser", is using OpenAL on top of the default sound engine (DirectX I believe). I had some initial trouble but have massaged it into something pretty decent.
Advice: Start from their sample code. The Creative SDK comes with a couple samples that will get you started.
I tried writing the code from scratch at first but ran home to the samples almost immediately.
And I wasn't terribly impressed with the docs either. Typical. But between the API reference and the sample code, you'll do fine.
False.
Tribes 2 used FMOD.
I can understand your confusion though, because TORQUE, from www.garagegames.com, does use OpenAL. Torque is a pay-for-the-source version of the Tribes 2 engine. Lots of cool stuff going on over there.
Sadly, the OpenAL implementation in Torque isn't that widely reguarded in its development community because... (drum roll) the sound engine was originally written for FMOD. OpenAL was shoe-horned in to remove that particular royalty from the engine.
"with the possibility of inexpensive and clean energy"
Eh... Fusion byproducts take decades rather than fission's centuries to loose their radioactivity, but I still wouldn't call it "clean".
But who knows? Maybe this technology will hit over-unity at higher temperatures and pressures.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
I would think that at higher pressure, the bubbles wouldn't expand as much, so you wouldn't get any extra energy that way.
However, at higher temperatures, things could get "interesting". And at higher pressures, water's boiling point rises, so I guess we'll see.
Or they might try a liquid other than water, one that exists only at much higher temperatures... something like liquid Titanium. That's, what? 3500 farenheit? How hot does uranium have to get to liquify?
Make that 3034 F... oh and apparently tungsten is way up there too, with a melting point of 6192 F. Yow. Oh, and according to webelements.com, uranium melts at 2070F, and boils at 7101F. Uranium gas? That sounds unpleasant.
And I'm assuming that all that temperature data holds true at 1 atmosphere, piling on a couple thousand bars (or pascals or whatever) ought to drive those numbers up further.
...but fusion study.
If they can come up with an "approachable" fusion reaction, it should be much easier to look at. Yes, you're looking at it filtered through some liquid, but you can use different liquids to let you look at different things.
And that looking could lead to something useful to magnetic-confinement style fusion.
Or they just might figure out how to use this variety of fusion directly. Either way, a good thing.
And it does sound like this is a valid paper. The press release came AFTER someone decided to publish the paper after peer review, not before. Important distinction.
A: This will damage competition.
B: This will NOT destroy it.
You've got a number of local phone options:
1) your local provider
2) Cell phones.
3) Your cable company (though I could be wrong here, it's entirely possible that digital cable/phone will be torpedoed by this. Does anyone know?)
So that's at least two, possibly three seperate groups vying to give you local service.
I'm sure the cost will go up, and features may be cut. But I don't think this is some telco apocalypse.
We already bought a couple at the local Frys (which is decked out like Atlantis... Very Cool). But she saw one with a clear plastic casing last time we were there and just HAD to have it. I said "wait till Valentines Day" and she went for it.
I bought my wife a (fake) gun for VD. And a hockey jersey for our anniversary (Marty Turco, of the Dallas Stars).
Nobody's perfect, but my wife can Rock!
background: I have a license for Torque, loved tribes 2, and am eagerly awaiting tribes 3. I'm working on two different Torque projects right now, though "working" is a bit of an exageration on one of them.
I think they went with UT for a number of reasons:
1) Eye candy. The UT engine just plain looks better (out of the box) than Torque. Sure you can strap new features to Torque (like any other engine), but an engine designed with the latest-n-greatest graphics features in mind will do significantly better than one with those features bolted on after the fact.
2) Integrated physics. Theres already a physics engine in place, though I understand they've tweaked it quite a bit to handle high speed ground collisions and the like.
3) ???
4) Profit
5) Sever links with the past. There may well be political reasons for not going with Torque as well. This is a wholly different company. I don't know of any Dynamix employees working on T3 (though I have heard that Kinetic Poet _is_ working on it).
6) Going with an established engine means more modders that already know how to work on your stuff. This strikes me as more of a bonus than a deciding factor.
I doubt it was the net code... Tribe's/Torque's network library has always rocked. Top-of-the-line stuff.
A: Interesting idea.
B: You're kinda missing the whole "conservation of energy" thing. It could never come close to making up the difference.
C: After reading the article, it's clear that converting vibration into current will never create a large ammount of electricity. It WILL create small ammounts just about anyplace, allowing electronics to go without a battery or powercord. Pizo in the road might for various sensors to be included into a kind of "smart streets" (as opposed to "street smarts"). The sensors could then trigger de-icing gear, for example.
Lots of cool little applications. Emphasis on the "little".
I suppose a massive-scale deployment would get useful ammounts of power, but wouldn't be cost effective.
(! / $) 1
where did you get that? It says there's more ozone present... that has zero to do with heat.
;) )
RTFA. (As should I
And we're right. ;)