the number one best practice: do something that matters. when you do, you can hire great people that really care. when people really care, they do it well and can be trusted. I know there's this whole "reality" thing that sometimes gets in the way, but reality isn't why I'm posting to slashdot at 1 am. I quit my programmer day job six years ago to raise the kids. that's what matters to me.
The seed is usually one of the parameters used to decide the look of the texture, so there ends up being nothing random about procedural texturing.:)
There ya go. I think I have always just assumed that this would end up being... boring. because they shouldn't be all the same. but then, this is jumping a bit ahead of the game.
Zooming in on a procedurally textured block of wood will give you the detail of the wood. Ideally, you'd start to see that the solid lines of the wood are actually a marbling. As you get closer, you should be able to make out the ringed texture from cutting. Even closer and all you see is the roughness of the surface.
an important question about generated stuff is how much is random and how much is predetermined. Random is more interesting, but different each time unless the result is stored. There is a balance to strike here. Personally I like the idea that the detail doesn't exist until you look at it (generated), but that detail needs to be remembered for the next time you look at it so it's the same. I suppose it could "age", and old stuff cleaned out just like our own memories. I remember thinking about these issues when I first played Ultima, in 1985...
How lame is that? Millions of dollars put into a shuttle and it can't even interpret the date correctly. Might as well just plug in my cell phone.
reminds me of the windows daylight savings time bug which I just ran into a few months ago. millions of dollars and microsoft can't get dates right either.
I love the tirades in it about "just work" and "Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty"... Yeah, like Microsoft products eliminate all that.
They don't, that's true. And everyone would be fine using Linux as an alternative, if everyone else was also using Linux. It's no longer a tech issue as much as it is the entrenched culture. You can't fight culture. Linux is a minority culture, and that's that. Steve Jobs is doing it about as well as it could possibly be done.
But what I mean is when you listen to your 128k mp3s in a recording studio style environment, you hear every defect, and it sucks. Whereas if you listen to it in a noisier environment, it actually sounds better because the noise smooths out the defects. So to improve the audio quality when starting with low bitrate digital audio, you can add noise.
You lose quality if you first convert audio from digital to analog, and then sample it again. But in the age of "CD quality" 128 kBit MP3s and crappy PC speakers, who cares about audio quality anyway...
only theoretically. you only really loose if you just reencode the digital file directly. the analog out adds a lot of information, even if it is noise, which can actually improve the perceived quality in some ways. I bet a lot of my music sounds better played in an interesting audio environment like a church or concert hall, for instance, instead of in a dark, sound isolated recording studio. But to do it well you could probably spend more money on your equipment than to replace all your music with cds. the pain of actually doing it and having to add tags to the new file is why my cassette tapes are still in a box in the basement and not on my hard drive as mp3s.
Yeah. But Mars is an oldster, while Venus is the much more exciting up and comer! Because everyone knows that the sun is a planet factory. Sure - Earth is in the sweet spot for unassisted living now, but Mars will always be on life support, while Venus is where it's at tomorrow.
I know you're joking, but for the sake of argument, let's think this through. you're willing to cause someone you "like" a great deal of pain ? Possibly a long, drawn out emotional trauma, in which she realizes what is most important and tries desperately to save her marriage? You're willing to be the cause of that - and it's because you like her? Just on the chance that she'll come around to you in her time of need, throw away her husband, and then you can both be happy together? That doesn't sound like a winning plan.
I'm not entirely pleased with the Republican party at the moment, and would love to see some new ideas pop up on the hill. But the U.S. lacks an opposition party, and only has a band of contrarians without ideas.
You're not entirely pleased with the party of corruption and torture with an unbroken record of failure and incompetence? Do you actually need, at this point, "new ideas" ? Just vote the bums out. I don't want new ideas, I want a return to a few old ideas. Like competent administration. Like the geneva convention and the non proliferation treaty. And the rule of law. This administration has demonstrated time and again that they value personal loyalty over competence and accountability. Again, annother old idea: accountability. Hire people based on their competence, and judge them based on their performance. This is why Iraq is a mess, other than the fact that we went there in the first place. Incompetence. Hold them accountable for it and kick them out. We're not looking for ideas, and we're not even at the stage where having a plan would matter because there's nobody capable of implementing it.
the "real world transition" argument is dumb, I have to say. structure is a problem when it adds complexity without functionality as kids need pure functionality with absolutely minimal extra crap. and I would also argue that people with a wider variety of experiences are better able to handle transitions and will be better with technology and programming than those who are locked down in one style and one mode of thought. old style BASIC as found on the apple ][ is great, as is LOGO and Squeak SmallTalk - morphic is pretty amazing. Although squeak is structured as well, what separates it from KPL is that the entire GUI user interface can be opened up and modified at any time; it is an extraordinary sensorial experience for the curious neophyte programmer type who likes to poke things and see what happens. It also has 30 years of experience and Alan Kay behind it.
The idea that standards will consolidate in the future is a myth. every day there are more ways to do things, not fewer. you actually do have to do research, and surely that is better than letting yourself be told what is best by the sales staff at Tweeter.
Maybe that's why the grass looks greener. Because we see all the positive and negative of our own environment, but only the "cool" stuff going on in other places. So naturally we want to go there.
on the other hand, the world is just full of interesting things places and people. it puts your own little world in perspective. I don't get the grass-is-greener thing at all; don't be satisfied with what you have and where you are just because that's what you have and where you grew up. Get up and go see all the fantastic things in the world. then you can go home... if you still want to.
Slashdot Mirror
the number one best practice: do something that matters. when you do, you can hire great people that really care. when people really care, they do it well and can be trusted. I know there's this whole "reality" thing that sometimes gets in the way, but reality isn't why I'm posting to slashdot at 1 am. I quit my programmer day job six years ago to raise the kids. that's what matters to me.
Obviously, everyone knows their QWERTY a lot better than they know their ABCs.
But what I mean is when you listen to your 128k mp3s in a recording studio style environment, you hear every defect, and it sucks. Whereas if you listen to it in a noisier environment, it actually sounds better because the noise smooths out the defects. So to improve the audio quality when starting with low bitrate digital audio, you can add noise.
Yes, you're right, Venus is not quite ripe yet, but give it a few hundred million years.
Yeah. But Mars is an oldster, while Venus is the much more exciting up and comer! Because everyone knows that the sun is a planet factory. Sure - Earth is in the sweet spot for unassisted living now, but Mars will always be on life support, while Venus is where it's at tomorrow.
I know you're joking, but for the sake of argument, let's think this through. you're willing to cause someone you "like" a great deal of pain ? Possibly a long, drawn out emotional trauma, in which she realizes what is most important and tries desperately to save her marriage? You're willing to be the cause of that - and it's because you like her? Just on the chance that she'll come around to you in her time of need, throw away her husband, and then you can both be happy together? That doesn't sound like a winning plan.
Stop blaming the women, for one.
the fa is about philips changing its focus to health and lifestyle design-driven products.
right - that's like how 40% of sick days are taken on friday and monday.
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=confi dential%7Cproprietary&btnG=Search
the in-betwee-the-lines conclusion of the study is that it's a waste of money and resources for game publishers to bribe/own game reviewers.
please. that's a terrible analogy, because you know that the value of a dollar bill isn't in the paper and ink.
the "real world transition" argument is dumb, I have to say. structure is a problem when it adds complexity without functionality as kids need pure functionality with absolutely minimal extra crap. and I would also argue that people with a wider variety of experiences are better able to handle transitions and will be better with technology and programming than those who are locked down in one style and one mode of thought. old style BASIC as found on the apple ][ is great, as is LOGO and Squeak SmallTalk - morphic is pretty amazing. Although squeak is structured as well, what separates it from KPL is that the entire GUI user interface can be opened up and modified at any time; it is an extraordinary sensorial experience for the curious neophyte programmer type who likes to poke things and see what happens. It also has 30 years of experience and Alan Kay behind it.
The idea that standards will consolidate in the future is a myth. every day there are more ways to do things, not fewer. you actually do have to do research, and surely that is better than letting yourself be told what is best by the sales staff at Tweeter.