When I worked at Microsoft, I knew one or two people who had the previous generation. Most people I saw had iphones. Now I've got a friend working on the Win7 team now and he's got one, although he still has his iphone....
I think the way MS does stuff is just so weird, they buy up everything thing that looks like a good idea, try to smash it all together, and then throw 90% of it away. And there's often some really good ideas in that 90%, but all it takes is one spooked exec or manager to chuck it all out...
I just want to point out that there are 3 different topics you're talking about there:
C++
OpenGL
Development/building on Linux
Indeed, there are pretty deep concepts behind each of them: C++ is related to fundamental programming concepts, object orientation, and metaprogramming, OpenGL deals with framebuffer rendering/graphics, and Linux development deals with source control, Makefiles, compilers, and configuration setups.
These concepts are not orthogonal by any stretch of the imagination, but it might help to keep in mind that each of them can be studied without the other.
Speaking from personal experience as a 'graphics guy', I would suggest you look further than OpenGL if you want to learn C++. OpenGL is great, don't get me wrong, but it is just an API, and a fairly limited one at that. You won't learn much C++ trying to figure out how to set up texture contexts and binding VBOs.
I would recommend writing a raytracer or your down software-based rasterizing renderer (or both!) - you'll find youself diving right into the data structures that are important to graphics and tackling 'fundamental' problems that really test your programming abilities, versus realizing that you passed GL_LINE to glBegin() instead of GL_LINES or some stupid API issue like that.
Later, you can work on your OpenGL skills; heck, you could even play with it in Python if you're curious. You'll find that any API is easier and more satisfying to use if you say 'How does this API address the following problem in graphics?' as opposed to browsing through the API reference and saying 'Ooh, what does this function do?'.
As for the Linux part, my advice would be to read up on Makefiles and spend some time writing them for various projects. When you've really got a handle on them, you can move on to CMake or autotools or whatever - but jumping into those without knowing that basic mechanism does you a disservice. I'd also recommend experimenting with one of those fancy programming editor (I recommend The One With All of the Modifier Keys), but there are several that are very good.
I don't doubt the the rocket can go faster than the speed of sound (which gets lower as you get further from the surface), but those waves distinctly lead the rocket's motion, which means that they are the product of acoustic perturbations moving at the speed of sound in the medium.
If the rocket were moving faster than the speed of sound in that medium, then we would see the usual 'shock cone', where those waves would appear an a fairly narrow cone around the rocket as it passed though - certainly not before.
I qualify 'medium' since it is possible that the rocket is moving faster than the speed of sound (in the air) but not faster than the medium that the sundog constitutes. Liquids, for example, have much higher speed-of-sounds and it is (conceptually, not physically) fairly simple for something to be moving faster than the speed of sound in air at sea level but not be anywhere close to the speed of sound in a liquid that it is travelling - and thus producing the regular u-c, u+c acoustic waves.
However, as I understand them, sundogs are collections of ice crystals and probably don't have a higher speed of sound than the air around them. But anyway, waves preceding the motion of a body in a medium are certainly not shockwaves - if we could visualize the waves any object makes in the air, you would see acoustic waves arising from the object's motion before and after it.
I don't see the problem; it seems like you should be able to easily beat the Prof. at writing equations with a (good) text editor you know well and LaTeX.
With the AUCTeX mode for Emacs, you get lots of shortcuts (like 'electric' backslashes and quick commands for environments) plus in-buffer previews.
Add in judicious copy+paste and you should be able to run circles around most professors writing on a blackboard and have plenty of time to read slashdot comments. If they are using an overhead or powerpoint, it might be a little trickier, but hopefully they are handing out notes.
There have been two big news items about child porn regulations 'gone wild' recently - this, and that business in the UK about images on Wikipedia. It was hard to trump the UK's absurd regulation, but Australia did it!
I'm absolutely against "child pornography" for reasons that I think I share with many others. However, that term is clearly very broadly interpreted.
The reasoning for child porn regulations is pretty reasonable:
Child porn requires that children be put in compromising, sexual situations. We can broadly say that children will not understand the connotation of the situation and at the very least, they will be participating in something that they don't consent to (since without understanding, there can't be consent). In short, children will come to harm through the very act of creating child porn. I think this is something that nearly everyone agrees with.
Child porn encourages people perform sexual acts with children. This conclusion is harder to support, and something that I take some issue with. We see this kind of argument in (usually well-meaning) efforts at censorship - 'violent video games make people violent', etc. I think the issue is not content in these cases, but with individuals. I don't feel that I'm really qualified to make an argument either way in this case, but I have heard of no instances where a person who realized their sexual interest in children after seeing some child porn.
Since most people agree with 1., we should prosecute those who produce and sell overtly sexual images of real children. If we just consider 1., I think it's fairly straightforward to delineate between acceptable and unacceptable images; pictures of children taking a bath or running around naked (which children do, and which parents find charming for some reason) were clearly not taken in circumstances where children were exploited.
Point 2 is where the more broad regulations come from. Perhaps there are people who would be sexually aroused at seeing an image of a child bathing, even if the picture has the most innocent of connotations. I would argue that we need to deal with the disturbed individuals in this case, not parents recording their childrens' lives.
With point 2 in hand, regulators can really go nuts - who's to say what will sexually excite an individual? Pictures of fully-clothed children playing, pictures of aspiring dancers in tutus, pictures of children's shoes, where is the line? Is there some critical number of people who have to be sexually excited to make the image illegal? Even if that is solid reasoning (and I don't think it is), how do you measure that?
I think the important thing to keep in mind is point 1 - we know that the creation sexual photographs of (real) children exploits children, so we must prevent it. Point 2 must be treated with care; we shouldn't abridge our liberties to create content just because there are mentally ill people who would use said material as a call to action. We should be devoting our resources to helping such people.
From my experience, CUDA was much harder to take advantage of then multi-core programming. CUDA requires you to use a specific model of programming that can make it difficult to take advantage of the full hardware.
The restricted caching scheme makes memory management a pain, and the global synchronization mechanism is very crude - there's a barrier after each kernel execution, and that's it.
It took me a week to 'parallelize' port some simple code I had written to CUDA, whereas it took my an hour or so to add the OpenMP statements to my 'reference' CPU code.
Sorry Nvidia - there is no silver bullet. By making some parts of parallel programming easy, you make others hard or impossible.
It's hard to say what's best, because you've given little info on the application.
The wave equation is a hyperbolic problem - I'd probably use something like Finite Volume - it's well-suited to this type of problem. People have suggested multigrid, etc - that probably won't work well.
Variable wave speeds sounds like you might end up with some shocks, depending on that velocity field. That's where FVM will really shine. I really like Randall Leveque's "Finite Volume Methods of Hyperbolic Problems". That has some info on FVM for the wave eqn.
Without more detail, that's all I can say, though - good luck!
The Caltech folks' approach (and this is actually the work of one of Desbrun's students, Sharif Elcott) is actually more pleasing mathematically than computationally. This particular paper makes a special effort to develop an intrinsic formulation of the equations of incompressible fluids, which allows for fluid simulation on meshes of arbitrary topology. That isn't terribly useful - movies and games aren't typically interested in 2d fluid simulation on a torus embedded in 3d...
Their approach is also closely tied to the properties of the static mesh, meaning that a lot of the "efficiency" that the method gains is the result of extensive pre-processing. If we want fluid with solid objects suspended in it, we're looking at a lot more computation.
Additionally, the vorticity method they use requires a very accurate Poisson solve to recover the velocity. Previous approaches to incompressible fluids typically solved a Poisson equation, but this was to project the solution onto a divergence-free space. In this case, it is acceptable to "cheat" a little on this part and only partially eliminate divergence. The approach in this paper doesn't allow this without serious sacrifices.
This paper deals with two models of fluid - incompressible, inviscid, Euler and incompressible Navier-Stokes. The latter is a widely accepted model for waters in reasonable conditions, but the former has no physical analogue. As a matter of fact, there are more efficient methods than this for solving so-called Poiseuille flow. They also claim great advantages over the popular "Stam advection" but their use of backward Euler integration is still going to be ridiculously diffusive, particularly when the CFL number is not obeyed.
This may seem very negative of me, but I should add that I think this is among the very best publications on CFD in graphics. This paper should have been published when it was first submitted to SIGGRAPH 2 years ago, rather than be relegated to a non-conference TOG issue. It's really too bad Sharif is not mentioned in the article, since this is his work more than anyone else's.
I'm a little confused as to why you decided to post a reply to an article that repeats the headline with incorrect information.
It is sad, though. I think he was a good guy; at the very least his approach was better than the Marlin Perkins "let's drug a bunch of animals and chase them in a helicopter" one.
As an aside, what's the deal with all of Australia's major cultural exports being guys with with the word "Crocodile" in their name?
I don't know if SIGGRAPH has shrunk or not (I wasn't in graphics in '97), but I wouldn't say that the GDC has taken its place. I sympathize with Ashikhmin's frustration at the conference (but not his reaction), having been on the receiving end of a few cryptic SIGGRAPH rejections.
First of all, I don't agree that it's "mostly a rendering convention now". I'd say there were about 20 papers on rendering and compression out of 80 or 90 papers (unofficial page of papers). I also think that there's lots of "technical action" going on there.
The real problem is that SIGGRAPH hasn't grown with its field. One major conference was fine for the first 20 years or so, but graphics has grown in size and diversity so much in the last 15 years that it's ridiculous that there's still only one "top-shelf" conference. Look at the proceedings for this year's conference; there are papers on rendering, compression, ray-tracing, image processing, vision, data-driven modelling, GPGPU, procedural modelling, HDR, graphics APIs, fluid simulation, photography, mocap, light fields, pcrt, computational geometry, crowd sim, animation, and npr.
EACH of these things that are getting lumped into "GRAPHICS" is enough of a field in its own right that it deserves several journals and conferences of its own.
That's not even the meat of the problem; there ARE conferences for each of these topics, but people generally only submit SIGGRAPH rejects to them! The problem is that everyone wants the prestige that goes with a SIGGRAPH publication, and it's a vicious cycle; there are reviewers who shoot down every paper they feel is a threat to their own work and get away with it, and this forces anyone else who wants to survive there to do the same.
What needs to happen, in my bull-headed opinion, is for all of those people who write good papers that never make it to SIGGRAPH start submitting the first time around to the other conferences - I3D, Pacific Graphics, SCA, IEEE VIS, Eurographics, et cetera. These are all perfectly viable venues that will become as prestigious as people would like, if only people would take them seriously.
I say, let the small-minded dweebs have SIGGRAPH; we shouldn't gauge the quality of our work solely based on SIGGRAPH's rejection policy - even if it were a totally fair process, not every good paper can make it in. Submit your awesome paper to the other conferences, and once these other conferences are packed with impressive work, it'll mean as much as SIGGRAPH.
Just wishful (and a little bitter) thinking.
I don't think "hardware" was the right category for this...
A few years ago, I as an NSF GK-12 teaching fellow at the University of Maine. Basically, University students were assigned to K-12 (non-US people, read: before college) classrooms and asked to help with science curriculum. One of the classes I was assigned to was the computer course for eigth-graders. Probably nobody remembers it, but a few years ago, the State of Maine gave all 7th and 8th graders iBooks to use in their classrooms, so the computer teacher and I conspired to teach some basic programming to the kids. In most public schools in Maine, programming is taught, even in high school, so this was almost certainly the first time any of the students saw programming, and probably the last they would be able to learn in school until college.
I eventually decided to use Starlogo, given that it was designed to teach programming, it was available, and I have fond memories of learning basic programming on Logo on the Apple IIe.
It worked as well as I could have hoped, and there were a few kids that were interested in doing more (I pointed them on to Python). Here are some things I learned that I'd like to pass on to you:
Kids don't always remember details. This can be difficult, because most computer langauges are not forgiving in their syntax. Kids are good at picking up on details, but don't expect them to memorize things like StupidConfusingClassname isn't the same as stupid_confusing_classname.
Kids like feedback. Thus, the read-eval-print-loop style is important toward keeping their interest.
Related to that, the intrinsic graphical nature of logo is very engaging.
This really just a general teaching comment (which I was totally new to when this project was given to me) - especially with totally new topics, kids will have all kinds of levels of ability and interest in the topic. It's important to have something that all of them can do, but also to have something to challenge the kids having an easier time of it. I would ususally introduce a simple topic and have everyone try it out, and then I would have a "master" level problem for the wiz kids to try.
Robustness and responsiveness is good; kids aren't very patient, as a rule, and if the programming environment crashes, or performs slowly (and Starlogo, being a Java app, did run poorly on those iBooks), the kids will lose interest in it while they wait for the app.
I should also mention that StarLogo wasn't really being maintained when I was doing this (or it was being minimally maintained), but now it looks like someone has revamped the project with StarLogo, the next generation.
Finally, whatever you end up choosing, don't teach them HTML and then tell them that it's programming. Few things irk me more than people talking about "programming in html". If you want to teach them HTML, fine, but don't let them think they're programming. By they way, youung children might have trouble with html for the first reason I gave above. The syntax is very clumsy and exacting, and worst of all, you don't get error messages from the browser when you screw it up!
Anyway, have fun!
njord
The kids who did Columbine obviously time-travelled to the future, played this game, and then went back in time to copy it. Obviously.
It's a feature, not a bug (No, really)
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Gmail Mis.delivered?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I don't see the problem with that, I thought it was common knowledge. The way I see it, how often is a period essential, or dangerous? I don't think there are many domains with say, joesmith@domain.com and joe.smith@domain.com pointing to different people. I see the period as a way of reducing typing errors.
While I give credit for the writers for trying to spice up the cliched subject matter (which, like all Tom Clancy material, revolves around terrorism) with a little infobabble (we've moved past portable nukes), I've broken down laughing many times while playing this game.
I can't speak for laymen, but as a guy who has taken quite a few classes on formal languages, algorithms, and the theory of computation, terms like "weaponized algorithms", the mystery of "512 encryption", the forbidden secret of "recursive functions", and having to steal (and use) "access algorithms" on servers always gets me going.
The writers of this game would have you believe that the fate of the world rests in the careful control of these so-called "Masse kernels", capable of some sort of uber-intrusion. I don't see how any of the possible interpretations of that (popcorn, OS, or sigproc tool) are such a threat, but maybe these writers know more than we suppose at first.
The end-all, very best line in the story (and I won't spoil it by providing the context) is the startling realization that the villians have access to an INFINITE STATE MACHINE!!! I suppose the surprise this is met with is justified, since we'd have to rewrite a lot of textbooks (and not just CS ones) to accomodate that. The only problem is, they didn't specify if it was deterministic or non....
Still, the game was a treat on almost every level and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play it.
Ok, I think I see your point. We essentially have the same problem (or would have the same problem) with content in games, and it's a question of balancing. Men and women in games should be equally distorted or not distorted at all.
Our main difference is that I think there is some of this imbalance going on in games and you think that there isn't. That's cool.
As for the boolean logic point about computers, I understand what you're saying but I think that it's very important to abstract yourself away from that very quickly. If you look at everything in terms of 0/1, it would be easy to say that just about everything a computer can do is impossible. The fact that these binary digits can represent large numbers, and that these numbers can represent characters, and that those characters can represent thought... anyway, I understand that it's easier to do yes/no but I won't call the alternative impossible.
I do think that the author neglected some important points in the article and I have issues with overdone orthodoxies. I'm all for feminism, women's rights and any argument for equality in general, but there have been times when friends of mine (both male and female) have taken it too far and lost touch with reality.
Anyway, it's pretty cool that this potential flame thread damped instead of exploded... good talkin'
njord
P.S. I had originally thought that you were talking about me when you said *this guy* and thus the troll label. I'm sorry about that, I misunderstood.
Well, I wasn't trolling for trolls (any I'd say your reply is a little trollish), but I'll bite. And I'll stop the fishing metaphors.
Are women distorted visually? Of course. So are 99.9% of all the male characters.
My arguement is that women tend to be physically distorted more often (and more seriously) than guys. I'm not about to survey video games and find actual numbers, but I'd say that 90% of women and about 50% of men are phyiscally exaggurated in games. Looking at characters like Max Payne, Gordon Freeman, Kyle Katarn, I see average-looking (albeit Causcasian) guys. 99.9%? I don't think so.
Character doesn't matter.
Character doesn't matter in video games? Why do they bother with voice acting? Why even put story in? I don't know about you, but I think that Tommy Vercetti's character had a lot to do with the game play in Vice City - I'm glad he wasn't a pacifist. Character doesn't matter to some, and that's okay. Look at just about any of id's games - they're great and they could care less about character. But I wouldn't say that character never did and never will matter.
I'd have to disagree with that. Sure, contact with things plays a part in lots of games, since they're aiming to mimic parts of the real world. Colocation is a big no-no in the real world, so collision detection is usually a part of the game.
Is that what the game is about? Almost never. Is race car driving about running into things? No. Is chocobo breeding in FFVII about tagging Regan greens? No. In fact, I don't think any of your examples are about 'tagging' things. I'm not sure any game is about that. Counterstrike is about teamwork and tactics, right? Isn't the gunplay incidental? Why is Counterstrike so popular when games like Beachhead let you shoot things too? Those F-14s shooting missles are flight sims too - there wouldn't be much of a game without it.
All this arguing about the "accurate depiction of women in videogames" is just a faux-feminist and inflammatory way to say that it's almost impossible to portray *PEOPLE* in games.
What would be the real feminist (as opposed to faux)'s view of this then? Is the gist of your statement that there is no metric that we can use to gauge how realistic a person in a video game? That Lara Croft is no different from Cate Archer?
You want realistic characters? Go play an RPG. They're basically just books with minigames and multiple endings anyway.
Last time I checked, some RPGs WERE computer games. Basically books with minigames and multiple endings huh? So the ending for every other game (i.e. win or lose) is somehow better? There's a few problems that I have with your statement. First of all, what about RPG/FPS games like Deus Ex? How do you categorize those? Are their characters realistic? Second, are you saying that the "realistic characters" in RPGs aren't subject to the debate that there may be some sexism in games?
Comparing videogames to film and books is a fundamentally unfair comparison to make.
Why? Film and games both have writers, actors, directors, producers. They tend to swap stories and work off each other quite a bit. I'd watch what I say, if I were you: "basically just books with minigames and multiple endings" sounds like a comparison.
Trying to accurately depict *real human emotion and behaviour* via computer code is like trying to solve algebraic equations through interpretive dance. It might be possible, but it just wasn't designed to work that way.
Take that, AI. So computers were designed to play tag? I don't know if I buy that. Computer were designed to manipulate data - if that's not what the human mind does, let me know. I'm not even sure how your statement here is part of your argurment.
The portrayal of women in media is not accurate, in general. While mediums such as books and music have reached a point where women are dealt with as honestly as men (which is often not very honest, mind you), games and films (to a lesser extent) have a long way to go towards balancing their portrayal of the sexes.
The issue here is not necessarily that women should portrayed in complete honesty, but that they should be subject to no more or no less exaggeration than men. Men in films are typically clever/intelligent, physically gifted, or a sort of underdog type loser. Films are certainly slanted toward the first two categories, but the last one shows up more frequently and I feel that it grounds the portrayal of men in films overall.
I feel that the film industry isn't as honest with women. In most films, it seems like they are still paraded as sexual beings that are passed around as love interests. Case in point Pirates of the Carribean, a thoroughly entertaining film with some slanted gender roles. While the men are not particularly heroic (clumsy, but witty and endearing), the female lead doesn't seem to make any significant decisions other than who to fall in love with.
Video games, because of a mostly male audience, can get away with more imbalanced depictions. Women in games, even if they are intelligent, brave, and strong-willed, are still almost always shown with ridiculously large breasts and buttocks and seem to wear outfits that emphasize these qualtities. While this is okay in small doses, the fact that nearly all women in games are shown this way disappoints me
The shining exception in my mind (as a guy who's played a lot of games) is Alice. The hero was a female whose dialogue and appearance were completely believable and admirable. Alice wasn't a "bimbo", but she wasn't a man in a dress either. Rather, she was an average-looking eighteen year-old with well-written dialogue that showed the character of this occasionally headstrong and feral young women tempered with strong feeling of guilt and depression, as is to be expected as a resident of an insane asylum in late Victorian England.
Okay, this post is long enough. That's the state of the art, as I see it. I think that women will be more fairly portrayed in games as the audience and developer base widens, just as with the film industry. It's a long way to go still, but it will happen someday.
This is the fevered dream of a romantic, but I'd pay money to see a Lisp-based PDA. An actualy Lisp Processer isn't necessarily what I mean; a powerful commercial or a free and powerful Lisp interpreted for x86 (or any von Neumann) processor would be okay. What I want is for it do have a Genera-like OS that can be re-written in real-time. Man, that would rule.
Ain't gunna happen, though. Unless someone wants to pay me to write it for the PDA of their choice.
Also, it should have a Canesta projection keyboard. I saw them at siggraph, they rock!
Slashdot Mirror
When I worked at Microsoft, I knew one or two people who had the previous generation. Most people I saw had iphones. Now I've got a friend working on the Win7 team now and he's got one, although he still has his iphone....
I think the way MS does stuff is just so weird, they buy up everything thing that looks like a good idea, try to smash it all together, and then throw 90% of it away. And there's often some really good ideas in that 90%, but all it takes is one spooked exec or manager to chuck it all out...
I just want to point out that there are 3 different topics you're talking about there:
Indeed, there are pretty deep concepts behind each of them: C++ is related to fundamental programming concepts, object orientation, and metaprogramming, OpenGL deals with framebuffer rendering/graphics, and Linux development deals with source control, Makefiles, compilers, and configuration setups.
These concepts are not orthogonal by any stretch of the imagination, but it might help to keep in mind that each of them can be studied without the other.
Speaking from personal experience as a 'graphics guy', I would suggest you look further than OpenGL if you want to learn C++. OpenGL is great, don't get me wrong, but it is just an API, and a fairly limited one at that. You won't learn much C++ trying to figure out how to set up texture contexts and binding VBOs.
I would recommend writing a raytracer or your down software-based rasterizing renderer (or both!) - you'll find youself diving right into the data structures that are important to graphics and tackling 'fundamental' problems that really test your programming abilities, versus realizing that you passed GL_LINE to glBegin() instead of GL_LINES or some stupid API issue like that.
Later, you can work on your OpenGL skills; heck, you could even play with it in Python if you're curious. You'll find that any API is easier and more satisfying to use if you say 'How does this API address the following problem in graphics?' as opposed to browsing through the API reference and saying 'Ooh, what does this function do?'.
As for the Linux part, my advice would be to read up on Makefiles and spend some time writing them for various projects. When you've really got a handle on them, you can move on to CMake or autotools or whatever - but jumping into those without knowing that basic mechanism does you a disservice. I'd also recommend experimenting with one of those fancy programming editor (I recommend The One With All of the Modifier Keys), but there are several that are very good.
Good luck!
njord
Those look like regular acoustic waves to me.
I don't doubt the the rocket can go faster than the speed of sound (which gets lower as you get further from the surface), but those waves distinctly lead the rocket's motion, which means that they are the product of acoustic perturbations moving at the speed of sound in the medium.
If the rocket were moving faster than the speed of sound in that medium, then we would see the usual 'shock cone', where those waves would appear an a fairly narrow cone around the rocket as it passed though - certainly not before.
I qualify 'medium' since it is possible that the rocket is moving faster than the speed of sound (in the air) but not faster than the medium that the sundog constitutes. Liquids, for example, have much higher speed-of-sounds and it is (conceptually, not physically) fairly simple for something to be moving faster than the speed of sound in air at sea level but not be anywhere close to the speed of sound in a liquid that it is travelling - and thus producing the regular u-c, u+c acoustic waves.
However, as I understand them, sundogs are collections of ice crystals and probably don't have a higher speed of sound than the air around them. But anyway, waves preceding the motion of a body in a medium are certainly not shockwaves - if we could visualize the waves any object makes in the air, you would see acoustic waves arising from the object's motion before and after it.
Still neat-looking, though.
I don't see the problem; it seems like you should be able to easily beat the Prof. at writing equations with a (good) text editor you know well and LaTeX.
With the AUCTeX mode for Emacs, you get lots of shortcuts (like 'electric' backslashes and quick commands for environments) plus in-buffer previews.
Add in judicious copy+paste and you should be able to run circles around most professors writing on a blackboard and have plenty of time to read slashdot comments. If they are using an overhead or powerpoint, it might be a little trickier, but hopefully they are handing out notes.
There have been two big news items about child porn regulations 'gone wild' recently - this, and that business in the UK about images on Wikipedia. It was hard to trump the UK's absurd regulation, but Australia did it!
I'm absolutely against "child pornography" for reasons that I think I share with many others. However, that term is clearly very broadly interpreted.
The reasoning for child porn regulations is pretty reasonable:
Since most people agree with 1., we should prosecute those who produce and sell overtly sexual images of real children. If we just consider 1., I think it's fairly straightforward to delineate between acceptable and unacceptable images; pictures of children taking a bath or running around naked (which children do, and which parents find charming for some reason) were clearly not taken in circumstances where children were exploited.
Point 2 is where the more broad regulations come from. Perhaps there are people who would be sexually aroused at seeing an image of a child bathing, even if the picture has the most innocent of connotations. I would argue that we need to deal with the disturbed individuals in this case, not parents recording their childrens' lives.
With point 2 in hand, regulators can really go nuts - who's to say what will sexually excite an individual? Pictures of fully-clothed children playing, pictures of aspiring dancers in tutus, pictures of children's shoes, where is the line? Is there some critical number of people who have to be sexually excited to make the image illegal? Even if that is solid reasoning (and I don't think it is), how do you measure that?
I think the important thing to keep in mind is point 1 - we know that the creation sexual photographs of (real) children exploits children, so we must prevent it. Point 2 must be treated with care; we shouldn't abridge our liberties to create content just because there are mentally ill people who would use said material as a call to action. We should be devoting our resources to helping such people.
Another example of lazy, ineffectual government.
njord
From my experience, CUDA was much harder to take advantage of then multi-core programming. CUDA requires you to use a specific model of programming that can make it difficult to take advantage of the full hardware. The restricted caching scheme makes memory management a pain, and the global synchronization mechanism is very crude - there's a barrier after each kernel execution, and that's it. It took me a week to 'parallelize' port some simple code I had written to CUDA, whereas it took my an hour or so to add the OpenMP statements to my 'reference' CPU code. Sorry Nvidia - there is no silver bullet. By making some parts of parallel programming easy, you make others hard or impossible.
It's hard to say what's best, because you've given little info on the application.
The wave equation is a hyperbolic problem - I'd probably use something like Finite Volume - it's well-suited to this type of problem. People have suggested multigrid, etc - that probably won't work well.
Variable wave speeds sounds like you might end up with some shocks, depending on that velocity field. That's where FVM will really shine. I really like Randall Leveque's "Finite Volume Methods of Hyperbolic Problems". That has some info on FVM for the wave eqn.
Without more detail, that's all I can say, though - good luck!
The Caltech folks' approach (and this is actually the work of one of Desbrun's students, Sharif Elcott) is actually more pleasing mathematically than computationally. This particular paper makes a special effort to develop an intrinsic formulation of the equations of incompressible fluids, which allows for fluid simulation on meshes of arbitrary topology. That isn't terribly useful - movies and games aren't typically interested in 2d fluid simulation on a torus embedded in 3d...
Their approach is also closely tied to the properties of the static mesh, meaning that a lot of the "efficiency" that the method gains is the result of extensive pre-processing. If we want fluid with solid objects suspended in it, we're looking at a lot more computation.
Additionally, the vorticity method they use requires a very accurate Poisson solve to recover the velocity. Previous approaches to incompressible fluids typically solved a Poisson equation, but this was to project the solution onto a divergence-free space. In this case, it is acceptable to "cheat" a little on this part and only partially eliminate divergence. The approach in this paper doesn't allow this without serious sacrifices.
This paper deals with two models of fluid - incompressible, inviscid, Euler and incompressible Navier-Stokes. The latter is a widely accepted model for waters in reasonable conditions, but the former has no physical analogue. As a matter of fact, there are more efficient methods than this for solving so-called Poiseuille flow. They also claim great advantages over the popular "Stam advection" but their use of backward Euler integration is still going to be ridiculously diffusive, particularly when the CFL number is not obeyed.
This may seem very negative of me, but I should add that I think this is among the very best publications on CFD in graphics. This paper should have been published when it was first submitted to SIGGRAPH 2 years ago, rather than be relegated to a non-conference TOG issue. It's really too bad Sharif is not mentioned in the article, since this is his work more than anyone else's.
njord
Did you mean: disappoint
Spell-checking these article submissions is a very easy task for the editors compared to evaluating their content - why isn't it done?
I'm a little confused as to why you decided to post a reply to an article that repeats the headline with incorrect information.
It is sad, though. I think he was a good guy; at the very least his approach was better than the Marlin Perkins "let's drug a bunch of animals and chase them in a helicopter" one.
As an aside, what's the deal with all of Australia's major cultural exports being guys with with the word "Crocodile" in their name?
I don't know if SIGGRAPH has shrunk or not (I wasn't in graphics in '97), but I wouldn't say that the GDC has taken its place. I sympathize with Ashikhmin's frustration at the conference (but not his reaction), having been on the receiving end of a few cryptic SIGGRAPH rejections.
First of all, I don't agree that it's "mostly a rendering convention now". I'd say there were about 20 papers on rendering and compression out of 80 or 90 papers (unofficial page of papers). I also think that there's lots of "technical action" going on there.
The real problem is that SIGGRAPH hasn't grown with its field. One major conference was fine for the first 20 years or so, but graphics has grown in size and diversity so much in the last 15 years that it's ridiculous that there's still only one "top-shelf" conference. Look at the proceedings for this year's conference; there are papers on rendering, compression, ray-tracing, image processing, vision, data-driven modelling, GPGPU, procedural modelling, HDR, graphics APIs, fluid simulation, photography, mocap, light fields, pcrt, computational geometry, crowd sim, animation, and npr.
EACH of these things that are getting lumped into "GRAPHICS" is enough of a field in its own right that it deserves several journals and conferences of its own.
That's not even the meat of the problem; there ARE conferences for each of these topics, but people generally only submit SIGGRAPH rejects to them! The problem is that everyone wants the prestige that goes with a SIGGRAPH publication, and it's a vicious cycle; there are reviewers who shoot down every paper they feel is a threat to their own work and get away with it, and this forces anyone else who wants to survive there to do the same.
What needs to happen, in my bull-headed opinion, is for all of those people who write good papers that never make it to SIGGRAPH start submitting the first time around to the other conferences - I3D, Pacific Graphics, SCA, IEEE VIS, Eurographics, et cetera. These are all perfectly viable venues that will become as prestigious as people would like, if only people would take them seriously.
I say, let the small-minded dweebs have SIGGRAPH; we shouldn't gauge the quality of our work solely based on SIGGRAPH's rejection policy - even if it were a totally fair process, not every good paper can make it in. Submit your awesome paper to the other conferences, and once these other conferences are packed with impressive work, it'll mean as much as SIGGRAPH.
Just wishful (and a little bitter) thinking.
I don't think "hardware" was the right category for this...
- Kids don't always remember details. This can be difficult, because most computer langauges are not forgiving in their syntax. Kids are good at picking up on details, but don't expect them to memorize things like StupidConfusingClassname isn't the same as stupid_confusing_classname.
- Kids like feedback. Thus, the read-eval-print-loop style is important toward keeping their interest.
- Related to that, the intrinsic graphical nature of logo is very engaging.
- This really just a general teaching comment (which I was totally new to when this project was given to me) - especially with totally new topics, kids will have all kinds of levels of ability and interest in the topic. It's important to have something that all of them can do, but also to have something to challenge the kids having an easier time of it. I would ususally introduce a simple topic and have everyone try it out, and then I would have a "master" level problem for the wiz kids to try.
- Robustness and responsiveness is good; kids aren't very patient, as a rule, and if the programming environment crashes, or performs slowly (and Starlogo, being a Java app, did run poorly on those iBooks), the kids will lose interest in it while they wait for the app.
I should also mention that StarLogo wasn't really being maintained when I was doing this (or it was being minimally maintained), but now it looks like someone has revamped the project with StarLogo, the next generation. Finally, whatever you end up choosing, don't teach them HTML and then tell them that it's programming. Few things irk me more than people talking about "programming in html". If you want to teach them HTML, fine, but don't let them think they're programming. By they way, youung children might have trouble with html for the first reason I gave above. The syntax is very clumsy and exacting, and worst of all, you don't get error messages from the browser when you screw it up! Anyway, have fun! njordThe kids who did Columbine obviously time-travelled to the future, played this game, and then went back in time to copy it. Obviously.
I don't see the problem with that, I thought it was common knowledge. The way I see it, how often is a period essential, or dangerous? I don't think there are many domains with say, joesmith@domain.com and joe.smith@domain.com pointing to different people. I see the period as a way of reducing typing errors.
Also, you can do things like this:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answI don't want to sound trollish, but this hardly sounds like story material to me.
njord
While I give credit for the writers for trying to spice up the cliched subject matter (which, like all Tom Clancy material, revolves around terrorism) with a little infobabble (we've moved past portable nukes), I've broken down laughing many times while playing this game.
I can't speak for laymen, but as a guy who has taken quite a few classes on formal languages, algorithms, and the theory of computation, terms like "weaponized algorithms", the mystery of "512 encryption", the forbidden secret of "recursive functions", and having to steal (and use) "access algorithms" on servers always gets me going.
The writers of this game would have you believe that the fate of the world rests in the careful control of these so-called "Masse kernels", capable of some sort of uber-intrusion. I don't see how any of the possible interpretations of that (popcorn, OS, or sigproc tool) are such a threat, but maybe these writers know more than we suppose at first.
The end-all, very best line in the story (and I won't spoil it by providing the context) is the startling realization that the villians have access to an INFINITE STATE MACHINE!!! I suppose the surprise this is met with is justified, since we'd have to rewrite a lot of textbooks (and not just CS ones) to accomodate that. The only problem is, they didn't specify if it was deterministic or non....
Still, the game was a treat on almost every level and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play it.
njord
I wonder where they got these ideas?
Circa 2000
So this means that dinosaurs didn't really exist after all and that GOD created them!
God 1, Science 1,000,000
You insensitive clod!
Ok, I think I see your point. We essentially have the same problem (or would have the same problem) with content in games, and it's a question of balancing. Men and women in games should be equally distorted or not distorted at all.
Our main difference is that I think there is some of this imbalance going on in games and you think that there isn't. That's cool.
As for the boolean logic point about computers, I understand what you're saying but I think that it's very important to abstract yourself away from that very quickly. If you look at everything in terms of 0/1, it would be easy to say that just about everything a computer can do is impossible. The fact that these binary digits can represent large numbers, and that these numbers can represent characters, and that those characters can represent thought... anyway, I understand that it's easier to do yes/no but I won't call the alternative impossible.
I do think that the author neglected some important points in the article and I have issues with overdone orthodoxies. I'm all for feminism, women's rights and any argument for equality in general, but there have been times when friends of mine (both male and female) have taken it too far and lost touch with reality.
Anyway, it's pretty cool that this potential flame thread damped instead of exploded... good talkin'
njord
P.S. I had originally thought that you were talking about me when you said *this guy* and thus the troll label. I'm sorry about that, I misunderstood.
Well, I wasn't trolling for trolls (any I'd say your reply is a little trollish), but I'll bite. And I'll stop the fishing metaphors.
My arguement is that women tend to be physically distorted more often (and more seriously) than guys. I'm not about to survey video games and find actual numbers, but I'd say that 90% of women and about 50% of men are phyiscally exaggurated in games. Looking at characters like Max Payne, Gordon Freeman, Kyle Katarn, I see average-looking (albeit Causcasian) guys. 99.9%? I don't think so.
Character doesn't matter in video games? Why do they bother with voice acting? Why even put story in? I don't know about you, but I think that Tommy Vercetti's character had a lot to do with the game play in Vice City - I'm glad he wasn't a pacifist. Character doesn't matter to some, and that's okay. Look at just about any of id's games - they're great and they could care less about character. But I wouldn't say that character never did and never will matter.
I'd have to disagree with that. Sure, contact with things plays a part in lots of games, since they're aiming to mimic parts of the real world. Colocation is a big no-no in the real world, so collision detection is usually a part of the game.
Is that what the game is about? Almost never. Is race car driving about running into things? No. Is chocobo breeding in FFVII about tagging Regan greens? No. In fact, I don't think any of your examples are about 'tagging' things. I'm not sure any game is about that. Counterstrike is about teamwork and tactics, right? Isn't the gunplay incidental? Why is Counterstrike so popular when games like Beachhead let you shoot things too? Those F-14s shooting missles are flight sims too - there wouldn't be much of a game without it.
What would be the real feminist (as opposed to faux)'s view of this then? Is the gist of your statement that there is no metric that we can use to gauge how realistic a person in a video game? That Lara Croft is no different from Cate Archer?
Last time I checked, some RPGs WERE computer games. Basically books with minigames and multiple endings huh? So the ending for every other game (i.e. win or lose) is somehow better? There's a few problems that I have with your statement. First of all, what about RPG/FPS games like Deus Ex? How do you categorize those? Are their characters realistic? Second, are you saying that the "realistic characters" in RPGs aren't subject to the debate that there may be some sexism in games?
Why? Film and games both have writers, actors, directors, producers. They tend to swap stories and work off each other quite a bit. I'd watch what I say, if I were you: "basically just books with minigames and multiple endings" sounds like a comparison.
Take that, AI. So computers were designed to play tag? I don't know if I buy that. Computer were designed to manipulate data - if that's not what the human mind does, let me know. I'm not even sure how your statement here is part of your argurment.
The portrayal of women in media is not accurate, in general. While mediums such as books and music have reached a point where women are dealt with as honestly as men (which is often not very honest, mind you), games and films (to a lesser extent) have a long way to go towards balancing their portrayal of the sexes.
The issue here is not necessarily that women should portrayed in complete honesty, but that they should be subject to no more or no less exaggeration than men. Men in films are typically clever/intelligent, physically gifted, or a sort of underdog type loser. Films are certainly slanted toward the first two categories, but the last one shows up more frequently and I feel that it grounds the portrayal of men in films overall.
I feel that the film industry isn't as honest with women. In most films, it seems like they are still paraded as sexual beings that are passed around as love interests. Case in point Pirates of the Carribean, a thoroughly entertaining film with some slanted gender roles. While the men are not particularly heroic (clumsy, but witty and endearing), the female lead doesn't seem to make any significant decisions other than who to fall in love with.
Video games, because of a mostly male audience, can get away with more imbalanced depictions. Women in games, even if they are intelligent, brave, and strong-willed, are still almost always shown with ridiculously large breasts and buttocks and seem to wear outfits that emphasize these qualtities. While this is okay in small doses, the fact that nearly all women in games are shown this way disappoints me
The shining exception in my mind (as a guy who's played a lot of games) is Alice. The hero was a female whose dialogue and appearance were completely believable and admirable. Alice wasn't a "bimbo", but she wasn't a man in a dress either. Rather, she was an average-looking eighteen year-old with well-written dialogue that showed the character of this occasionally headstrong and feral young women tempered with strong feeling of guilt and depression, as is to be expected as a resident of an insane asylum in late Victorian England.
Okay, this post is long enough. That's the state of the art, as I see it. I think that women will be more fairly portrayed in games as the audience and developer base widens, just as with the film industry. It's a long way to go still, but it will happen someday.
njord
I missed the original posting about this website, but I just have to say that it is definitely worth checking out if you're into science at all.
The stuff on DSP alone is really educational. (Watch out!)
njordDon't follow that link in the parent, people. It might as well be goatse.
I know I'm being offtopic, but to hell with karma, I want to spare the rest of you from what my poor eyes have just witnessed.
Poor, poor old Njord
This is the fevered dream of a romantic, but I'd pay money to see a Lisp-based PDA. An actualy Lisp Processer isn't necessarily what I mean; a powerful commercial or a free and powerful Lisp interpreted for x86 (or any von Neumann) processor would be okay. What I want is for it do have a Genera-like OS that can be re-written in real-time. Man, that would rule.
Ain't gunna happen, though. Unless someone wants to pay me to write it for the PDA of their choice.
Also, it should have a Canesta projection keyboard. I saw them at siggraph, they rock!
njord, Lisp sympathizer