This TurboCache thing is much beter than the original AGP texturing idea (that Intel used to push with their i740 chipsets).
Imagine that when texturing instead of using 128 bit bus to the on-card memory - the card now uses a 128 bit bus to the on-card memory PLUS(!!!) another 128 bit bus to the local memory thus giving you higher bandwidth for the same cost.
Of course this can be used to boost a bit the speed of cards with crippled (slow, 64 bit) memory bus, but in the end - you get what you paid for.
The problem with aging is that with each cell division strands at the end of the DNA called telomeres are shortened. After certain number of divisions these strands are gone and DNA replication becomes impossible. This is an effective mechanism to prevent cancer.
Cancerous cells do not shorten the teloremes which enables them to divide endlessly. Though the scientists may find a way to avoid shortening the DNA you'll eventualy die of cancer. It's a catch 22
...And all these APIs are staticaly linked in the executable. This means that the game does not call some Direct3D API on the XBox firmware or loaded from the game CD that can be replaced on XBox2. The API/driver code is embedded in the executable which means that it accesses the hardware directly as a driver would do.
Check out Atrform's curvy 3d . It is quite similar to teddy but much more advanced. You can create very complex shapes with just a few strokes. The gallery and tutorials are very impressive.
No spam filtering is perfect. If some legitimate mail gets classified as spam the sender will receive the bounce message and will know that it hasn't been received. You may configure the bounce message to say something like:
"The mail was not delivered because it was classified as spam. To make sure the mail gets delivered - send the message with the word NO_SPAM_FILTERING in the Subject field".
Just listened to the conference Q&A. Not as spicy as I expected it to be. Most questions were about things like how much are they going to spend on acusitions, ligitation, about their future product lines(SCO-X), upgarde plans for their Linux custemers, etc.
The most interesting question was whether SCO asked Novell fo transfer them the copyrights. The answer was that the contract with Novell is a litle bit unclear - in one place it tells that the copyrights are transferred, in another part it says the opposite. There were 4 poeople involved in signing the contract - 2 from Novell, 2 from SCO and according to SCO all 4 of them agree that the intention was to transfer the copyrights to SCO. So because of that the SCO CEO called the Novell CEO and asked him to resolve the problem.
So don't count on SCO dropping the copyright claims yet.
The new unified driver provides robust OpenGL® 2.0 support...
If this is true than these are the first publicaly avaiable OpenGL 2 drivers. But it's probably a typo because AFAIK the gl 2 spec has not been finalized yet.
The HAL can be a very simple barebone driver that will just call the appropriate functions in the Runtime Environment. The only downside of this approach is the slightly higher function call overhead because of the redirection. As for the planet I am living on - I guess it's the same planet where the Sony engineers live.
Do what Sony did with the PS2 Linux - boot a Runtime Environment that has all the required drivers before running the linux kernel. Make open-sourced Linux device drivers that will use the Runtime Environment drivers. This is a similar to using BIOS calls from within the kernel.
Procedural shaders are not mostly about creating procedural maps.
These shaders can be used to specify how the different maps(textures or procedural) are combined togather, how they interact with the scene and object parameters (transparency,lights,fog,etc.).
Complex BRDF lighting, toon shading, smooth shadows, slimy-shiny-bumpy reflective surfaces and all the cool effects you can think of(cloak, electricity, glow, holograms, light beams and lasers) - this is what the procedural shaders are used for.
1. MS does not own OpenGL - it is an open standart 2. MS can not enforce any patents they bought from SGI because when a feature is added to OpenGL all ARB members agree to give their relevant patents under an "ARB Contributor License"(or something like that). 3. MS will have a hard time enforcing any new patents. To quote Neil Trevett from 3Dlabs: "To affect the creation of a specification, an IP claim must make it impossible to create ANY implementation of the specification that doesn't infringe that IP." You can not patent antialiasing/multitexture/shaders/etc, you can patent only specific alghos that implement that functionality.
alltheweb.com
Let's you search the web, ftp files, images, MP3s and Videos. The results are quite good though not as good as in google. It has support for more languages than google and I use it exclusively to search pages written in my native language(which isn't supported in google). Has the best ftp search.
ResearchIndex Nice scientific literature search engine. Lets you search not only documents but also citations. Keeps cached copies of the documents in multiple formats. Can show related documents or other documents viewed by users that viewed the current document.
vivisimo.com Groups the found documents by topics and subtopics. Nice interface and the sudgested topics are quite reasonable.
www.wisenut.com
Similar to vivisimo, but vivisimo(IMO) is beter.
www.searchshots.com
Lets you see screenshot of the found pages. Too bad has a content filter and the results are not very good.
www.teoma.com
Simple interface. Can group the results by their topic.
webshots.com Not exactly an image search engine. But I've had much better luck finding images there than in any image search engine. Requires you to download a program (windows only) that puts the images as a wallpaper.
Check this standart for unicode compression.
It compresses 16 bit unicode chars to 8bit using some reserved tags to switch the character windows. Sample java implementation is avaiable. The best thing is that most of the standart ASCII chars will still be encoded as 8bit ASCII after the compression. So you can still store all your data in 8bit ASCII and convert it to unicode before displaying it. And you don't have to modify your old data!!!
Slashdot Mirror
"...combine the pluses of their cultures and products to the benefit of frustrated designers & developers everywhere"
The new product that will blend the features of Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator will be called...
Macrobe Frustrator
This TurboCache thing is much beter than the original AGP texturing idea (that Intel used to push with their i740 chipsets).
Imagine that when texturing instead of using 128 bit bus to the on-card memory - the card now uses a 128 bit bus to the on-card memory PLUS(!!!) another 128 bit bus to the local memory thus giving you higher bandwidth for the same cost.
Of course this can be used to boost a bit the speed of cards with crippled (slow, 64 bit) memory bus, but in the end - you get what you paid for.
The problem with aging is that with each cell division strands at the end of the DNA called telomeres are shortened. After certain number of divisions these strands are gone and DNA replication becomes impossible. This is an effective mechanism to prevent cancer.
Cancerous cells do not shorten the teloremes which enables them to divide endlessly. Though the scientists may find a way to avoid shortening the DNA you'll eventualy die of cancer. It's a catch 22
...And all these APIs are staticaly linked in the executable.
This means that the game does not call some Direct3D API on the XBox firmware or loaded from the game CD that can be replaced on XBox2.
The API/driver code is embedded in the executable which means that it accesses the hardware directly as a driver would do.
Check out Atrform's curvy 3d . It is quite similar to teddy but much more advanced. You can create very complex shapes with just a few strokes. The gallery and tutorials are very impressive.
His OS could not detect the sound card. So he had to resort to the good ol PC speaker.
No spam filtering is perfect. If some legitimate mail gets classified as spam the sender will receive the bounce message and will know that it hasn't been received. You may configure the bounce message to say something like: "The mail was not delivered because it was classified as spam. To make sure the mail gets delivered - send the message with the word NO_SPAM_FILTERING in the Subject field".
Just listened to the conference Q&A. Not as spicy as I expected it to be. Most questions were about things like how much are they going to spend on acusitions, ligitation, about their future product lines(SCO-X), upgarde plans for their Linux custemers, etc. The most interesting question was whether SCO asked Novell fo transfer them the copyrights. The answer was that the contract with Novell is a litle bit unclear - in one place it tells that the copyrights are transferred, in another part it says the opposite. There were 4 poeople involved in signing the contract - 2 from Novell, 2 from SCO and according to SCO all 4 of them agree that the intention was to transfer the copyrights to SCO. So because of that the SCO CEO called the Novell CEO and asked him to resolve the problem. So don't count on SCO dropping the copyright claims yet.
And those heating elements will burst in flames a second after you remove the pot from them.
The HAL can be a very simple barebone driver that will just call the appropriate functions in the Runtime Environment. The only downside of this approach is the slightly higher function call overhead because of the redirection. As for the planet I am living on - I guess it's the same planet where the Sony engineers live.
Do what Sony did with the PS2 Linux - boot a Runtime Environment that has all the required drivers before running the linux kernel. Make open-sourced Linux device drivers that will use the Runtime Environment drivers. This is a similar to using BIOS calls from within the kernel.
Procedural shaders are not mostly about creating procedural maps. These shaders can be used to specify how the different maps(textures or procedural) are combined togather, how they interact with the scene and object parameters (transparency,lights,fog,etc.). Complex BRDF lighting, toon shading, smooth shadows, slimy-shiny-bumpy reflective surfaces and all the cool effects you can think of(cloak, electricity, glow, holograms, light beams and lasers) - this is what the procedural shaders are used for.
1. MS does not own OpenGL - it is an open standart
2. MS can not enforce any patents they bought from SGI because when a feature is added to OpenGL all ARB members agree to give their relevant patents under an "ARB Contributor License"(or something like that).
3. MS will have a hard time enforcing any new patents. To quote Neil Trevett from 3Dlabs:
"To affect the creation of a specification, an IP claim must make it impossible to create ANY implementation of the specification that doesn't infringe that IP." You can not patent antialiasing/multitexture/shaders/etc, you can patent only specific alghos that implement that functionality.
alltheweb.com Let's you search the web, ftp files, images, MP3s and Videos. The results are quite good though not as good as in google. It has support for more languages than google and I use it exclusively to search pages written in my native language(which isn't supported in google). Has the best ftp search.
ResearchIndex Nice scientific literature search engine. Lets you search not only documents but also citations. Keeps cached copies of the documents in multiple formats. Can show related documents or other documents viewed by users that viewed the current document.
vivisimo.com Groups the found documents by topics and subtopics. Nice interface and the sudgested topics are quite reasonable.
www.wisenut.com Similar to vivisimo, but vivisimo(IMO) is beter.
www.searchshots.com Lets you see screenshot of the found pages. Too bad has a content filter and the results are not very good.
www.teoma.com Simple interface. Can group the results by their topic.
ditto.com An image search engine.
webshots.com Not exactly an image search engine. But I've had much better luck finding images there than in any image search engine. Requires you to download a program (windows only) that puts the images as a wallpaper.
Check this standart for unicode compression.
It compresses 16 bit unicode chars to 8bit using some reserved tags to switch the character windows. Sample java implementation is avaiable. The best thing is that most of the standart ASCII chars will still be encoded as 8bit ASCII after the compression. So you can still store all your data in 8bit ASCII and convert it to unicode before displaying it. And you don't have to modify your old data!!!