I actually did sit down to patch Slashcode after you pointed it out, but Slashcode apparently requires blowing away FC2's Apache and mod_perl installation, which I'm just not willing to do.
Were the Wright brothers kooks because many of their original airplane designs had flaws, and it took them a while to correct all of them?
I wish *more* people would post stuff to the Internet to allow discussion. The copyright ownership rules associated with Science, Nature, and other major publications are not very researcher-friendly.:-(
Keep in mind, this is all just rendering in real-time. If you want the reactions to feel right, you've got to be modeling the physical interactions as well.
[clip]
And don't get me started on how corny the sounds are...
Aureal tried commercializing "wave-tracing" at the consumer level via A3D -- actually tracing out the paths of sound waves.
Unfortunately, they got hijacked by the incumbent (Creative, who didn't have a lot of incentive to get involved in a research war) who introduced a small reverb model as an alternative.
I think that is very insulting. Do you really believe that it is more of a feat to adjust some color scales than it is to send a spacecraft to another planet at distances of 300 million miles or more, have it operate without any repairs for years at a atime, survive the heat & cold of space, the forces of re-entry, launch etc etc.?
Of course not. I wasn't talking about the missions. I was talking about the *images*. I think that the images that NASA hands out for public consumption, are much more marketing-driven than science-driven, and I feel that those beautiful golden or rosy abstracts are more aesthetically appealing as a result of careful choosing of colors and tweaking until the result looks pretty than because of the source of the data. I suspect that given an equivalent amount of time to poke at an image, an electron microscope user could make SEM output look equally appealing.
The images are generally false-color composites, true. But they are not "retouched". The difference is between one of choosing how to remap wavelengths your eye can't see into colors it can see, and flat-out changing images. JPL does the former, and not the latter.
Granted, this picture is not a celestial one of neublae and stars and other goodies, where careful color selection does lots of good.
You have to rememeber that many of these missions are selected after competitions among various university and industry groups. This means that you have to sell a mission to the review boards; you can't do that if you under-promise. If you only claimed you could do 10% of what you think you could actually do, then some other group is going to propose a mission to do 20% of what is possible - and they will look much better on paper and so get chosen. And these proposals are not secret, so NASA can't turn around and tell the public that mission will do less than it proposed for.
You're right -- "10%" is hyperbole in my part. However, I would be quite surprised if any of CMU/Caltech/MIT had the ability to set mission parameters on, say, Opportunity. They might be able to make claims about what they can do that NASA then can set mission objectives based upon. Instead, we have a list of vague, easy-to-classify-as-successful mission objectives. There are no numbers, no "fully map a total of 10 square meters of surface, analyzing available rock surfaces within for iron". This is hardly par for the course for engineering -- and makes it much easier to declare success.
Do you consider NASA upper echelons, the people responsible for getting funding and ensuring that engineers continue to be paid, unbiased in mission choice? I will admit that I do not work at NASA -- it has been my experience that there is plenty of PR management in research (both in academia and corporate work), though.
The result is NASA tends to define success criteria close to what is reasonably expected based on some pretty detailed mission analysis work.
I still feel that the mission success criteria that I linked to above are pretty vague.
Another point to remember is that the mission probability of success is like a chain - no stronger than the weakest link. Which means that there are almost always a few events that have all the risk (launch, landing); once past those there isn't much that can kill a spacecraft, at least not until old age starts to set in.
So why aren't rover life expectancies longer?
And one thing about JPL - their stuff is built to last.
Hey, you won't hear anything from me taking issue with JPL engineering -- just pointing out the way PR is handled.
That's why the mission achievements are bimodal - either failure, or way longer life (and greater success) than expected.
Last think I want is HIV or some nasty cuts from broken glass or metal shit.
Phone handsets or doorknobs are generally *far* worse from a sanitary perspective than just about anything else. All the communicable respiratory diseases have been nicely cultured on the doorknobs by people sneezing on their hands and then operating the knob.
Heck, your ancestors survived tromping around in the mud, barefoot, getting stabbed, clawed, bitten, stung, and so forth. You have an immune system and regenerative abilities that are awfully tough to muck with. Now, *cars*...*cars* are scary. Not many people die each year from scorpion bites, but tens of thousands of people die each year from auto accidents in the United States. And you probably have a road out right in front of your house!
As Neal Stephenson put it -- you're a stupendeous badass. You come from a long line of stupendous badasses. Anything that wasn't a stupendous badass is now dead.
NASA does astronomy. To be very blunt and honest, astronomy provides very few concrete short-term benefits.
Most people think in the very short term when it comes to deciding who should get money -- and when politicians are strapped for cash for a project, NASA is always a likely source of money to divert.
As a result, it's always an uphill battle for NASA's research to get funded.
This is why NASA spends so much effort marketing what they have done -- for instance, providing free, beautiful pictures that consist entirely of false-color images that have been tweaked by hand to look attractive...they're more a credit to the artistic nature of the postprocessors than to the people doing the research itself.
One major problem is mission failures. The response to NASA getting mission failures appears to be a counterintuitive "cut their budget". My guess is that when positive public opinion and awareness of NASA goes up (as with successful missions), NASA's likelihood of getting funding increases markedly.
So all NASA has to do is make significant public underestimates of their mission potentials. That way, after completing, say, 10% of their expected work, they can announce that the mission "is a success". When the mission finally does end, the media can crow about how it "vastly exceeded anyone's wildest imaginations", and make public lots of hand-retouched images.
That doesn't mean I disapprove of what they're doing. I like seeing basic research being funded, and I don't think that there's a really good alternative method for NASA to get money.
It does mean, however, that it's *very* unlikely that this is an off-the-cuff decision by an engineer at NASA. It's a good bet that they have pre-made strategies for dealing with dust, extreme temperature change, power loss, signal loss, failure of particular systems, etc.
FWIW, having run Nessus against two FVS318 systems, I have yet to find an open port that I didn't specifically open.
You do realize that this *only* picks up TCP listening ports (probably not what they'd use), and *only* if the device manufacturer chooses to respond in such a way that lets you know that there's something listening there (also extremely unlikely)?
There is no way you can avoid router vulnerabilities, if the router manufacturer chooses to be an ass.
I use a Linux box to do my ADSL routing. I have an HTB tree that does matching on a list of authorized MACs on the network to balance bandwidth fairly between users on the network. Within that HTB (after breaking down bandwidth between all hosts asking for it), I have a three-level queue scheme (with TOS=Minimize Delay, everything else, and then TOS=Maximize Bandwidth). This lets me use SSH with no added latency while web browsing, and web browse with no added latency while still leaving BitTorrent/mldonkey running 24/7.
Anyone that uses an asymmetric connection like cable or DSL and doesn't have a setup like this doesn't know what they're missing out on. It's fantastic.
People don't need to be protected from content. People need the ability to choose what content they view. Censorship takes away my ability to choose.
Absolutely.
There were a *huge* number of Americans watching the Super Bowl halftime game that *didn't* want to see (or their children to see) Janet flashing the gamera. They were not informed that there would be nudity, and given the current state of affairs, reasonably expected to be informed of such if it was intended. Those people are exercising their right to choose what they would like to watch.
When the FCC tries to ban porn on satellite or cable or the Internet, then I'll agree that you have a reasonable case. If *Ashcroft* was running the FCC, we would have seen this -- but fortunately, it's Michael Powell.
If you want to see celebrities baring skin, there are plenty of vendors that will happily supply you with such content -- and you can do so without bothering those people who do find such content offensive.
FCC's anti-indecensy crusade is nutty, but "property rights" just transfer the problem to courts that lack the FCC's technical staff expertise (some of which does still exist).
AFAICT, the only thing that the Powell FCC has done that's irritated anyone is the very recent Janet Jackson tits thing, which apparently got Powell lots of complaints. Probably the only reason that the FCC got involved is because (a) the Bush administration, which has the ability to get rid of Powell, ran on a morality platform and is absolutely not interested in being associated with flashing being allowed during the most-watched family event in the United States and (b) people were engaging in a knee-jerk reaction to being very surprised by something that clearly was not supposed to be shown (regardless of whether it should or shouldn't be allowed or be an issue, a lot of people *didn't* want to see a shot of Janet flashing the camera). Also, keep in mind that the decency laws were made *way* before Powell's watch.
Powell has been strongly against the FCC regulating the Internet. It's probably only because of a few intelligent people that have pushed to avoid Internet regulation that we don't have a morass of laws quashing Internet growth today.
Sanitarium (a difficult to find game, but a fantastic gem). Old, so 8-bit graphics, but it doesn't use a Lucasarts look.
Syberia.
The Myst series (sans that recent MMORPG disaster -- I have no idea why they did that, as they had few concerns about pirating due to size anyway -- and without the antipiracy concerns, MMORPGs lose a lot of their publisher appeal).
A bit longer, if you want a full 75 fps (or 60, if we're all using LCDs in 7 years).
Plus, technically Moore's law relates to transistor count, not processing power.
I'm interested in when we can do this in a game in real-time. l(2hrs*3600secs/hr*60fps)/l(2) * 1.5yrs = 28 years before we see this in real-time (though that's using Pov-Ray, which could probably be sped up a lot if it's made into a game engine rather than a general purpose graphics architecture.
I have a comment a bit further down with some more explanation.
I remember seeing an SGI demo of real-time raytracing. They used a kinda neat technique -- the application was a modelling app, and so they "faded" the new image in by rendering random pixels. It let them get away with far fewer FPS.
Someone put a lot of computers together to make a powerful distributed system that is capable of rendering Quake using ray-tracing.
Here is an example of a (not real time) raytraced image (one that doesn't use radiosity -- just straight raytracing). In theory, given enough CPU power, they could pull this off.
Ray-tracing uses a method of 3d rendering that is currently beyond dedicated 3d hardware and must be done in software.
The main benefits of ray-tracing from a quality perspective are:
* True, accurate shadows from *everything* (most games, even stuff like Neverwinter Nights have hackish shadow engines that don't realistically display what lighting would look like in real life. These are calculated in real-time, not the precalculated shadows that you'll see in, say, Quake, where the light sources never move. You could throw a flickering lantern across a bar with bottles falling down and have all the bottles cast their own shadows.
* Advanced lighting. Currently, real-time 3d engines are very limited in the types of light they can produce -- generally, only spherical point sources of light.
* Refraction. You can have glass, ooze, or water truly refract light and distort images, not just use some sorta-lame effect to vaguely approximate it. Think of looking through a glass lens or a window in an old house.
* Volumetric fog (where you have "clumps" or "clouds" of fog, rather than just a global constant flag fog covering everything). Quake 3 had some rather (IMHO) impressive hacks to emulate volumetric fog -- ray tracing allows *true* volumetric fog -- people vanishing in swirling clouds of fog and mist and the like, not just a straight visibility dropoff.
* Reflections (there are a lot of hacks to approximate this off with existing 3d engines), but raytracers are *made* for this sort of thing.
* True curved and arbitrarily-shaped surfaces.
* Light projections (with shadowing and all that). They show a bit of this in the demo -- you could have, say, two people having a swordfight in a theater and the picture washing over them, or a scene in a church, with dusty light from the stained glass windows washing over the characters.
Basic ray-tracing does have some flaws. The shadows are sharp and hard -- sharper and harder than in real life. There are hacks to do soft shadows, but there isn't a particularly good an efficient way to pull them off.
It's hard to deal with things like laser beams or light beams coming out of a prism in ray-tracing. You need to do forward raytracing/photon mapping for this, which I suspect that they aren't doing.
Ray tracers tend to look a bit "eerie", for lack of a better word. They tend to leave shadowed areas very dark -- in real life, light will bounce around in corners and things a bit (even surfaces that don't look "reflective" to us will do so). So if I shine a flashlight, a raytracer will show a perfectly accurate cone of light (unlike existing 3d engines) that will spill properly over all surfaces. However, that cone of light will be a *cone* -- normally, when I shine a flashlight in a room, it lights up the entire side to some degree because of light bouncing off of objects.
There are some really nice things about ray tracers. They tend to parallelize really well, so you can theoretically put lots of computers together to do renders (as these folks did), or have lots of chips in parallel to theoretically make a custom piece of hardware.
All of these could be said to "excessively hurt Microsoft", and most importantly *do not reduce barriers to entry* (with the possible partial exception of the code).
What competitors *really* need is Microsoft forced to open their file formats and network protocols, so that they can fully interoperate.
Microsoft got where they were by bundling products together and keeping them from interoperating with competitors' products. Fining Microsoft and then letting them continue doing what they were doing may help out the EU, but doesn't do a whole lot to solve the problem.
There are *very* few arguments Microsoft can make against opening file formats and network protocols. There is minimal IP value in each -- it doesn't take a smegging horde of PhDs years of research to create the Word file format. It does nothing but help the consumer, and helps mean that Microsoft always needs to compete.
The primary education system in the US is broken, but the secondary (university) education system in the US is still pretty sharp.
You know, if I had the opportunity to make changes to the public schools, I think I'd:
* Break down subject matter. Instead of having "fourth grade", you'd have the math that was in fourth grade, the writing in fourth grade, etc.
* Do evaluations on subjects in one month intervals (rather than one year). Failing a test that sets you back an entire year is a huge setback, and so there's enormous pressure on teachers not to fail students and parents to make teachers keep their kids moving. This is what seems to me to cause a huge chunk of the problems in schools. If you fail the test, you go over that month of material again next month, until you pass it. Furthermore, for schools that have "summer school for students that didn't pass", it's much easier to reteach the one month of content that didn't get finished and pass the student than to ram them through the entire year again.
* Deemphasis of lectures. Right now, teachers spend an enormous amount of time talking -- doing nothing other than reading out teaching notes or curriculum, and so forth. I could never figure out why this is a good idea -- they're just reading notes aloud, which is an expensive use of time and doesn't benefit students at all. Every minute a teacher spends reading aloud content is one minute that they cannot spend answering questions, which is really the only thing they can do that tapes/computer software/books/worksheets can't do. It drove me equally nuts that college professors frequently do the same thing (*especially* when a college professor basically reads aloud his notes, and then expects TAs to answer out-of-class questions -- if the university wanted to hire a public speaker, they'd hire a public speaker, and wouldn't need him to have a PhD). Furthermore, this would make make-up work much easier. I've never figured out the value of lectures -- if you're going to say something, you might as well just write it down. This also makes it easier for students to do work remotely, if they're with parents on vacation for a week or something.
* Increase the number of papers/research papers to write. I think that the times that I learned the most in K-12 was when I had to do something on my own -- not when the teacher was feeding me something and then making me regurgitate it. High-school/middle-school history was a great example of this -- I remember memorizing vast numbers of dates and thinking ("God, I hate history" and "History is a waste of time"). On a whim, I took a history class in college, where all the grading was done based on writing papers, and loved it. The emphasis is much more on learning and understanding what was going on and being able to clearly describe it than regurgitating rarely-used numerical data that lives in only short-term memory. If I can say "event X happened before event Y", that's much better than "event X happened on June 3rd, 1905". Grading papers requires additional teacher time -- however, the reduction in lecture time reduces it, so I think it'd be a fair trade.
* Several nonrequired classes should (IMHO) be standard required fare in K-12. Probability and Statistics is a big one -- most people picking up a degree in the social sciences are going to need some statistics, and probability is useful for a ton of fields, everyday life (and *terribly* useful in computer science), and it's not a required course. I also think that an anti-propaganda class (I really don't have a better term for this), perhaps a mini-class should be included. I took a speech class that served much of this role, and I think that it was incredibly valuable. It basically summarized the types of propaganda/bogus claims that people make, and the techniques used. In today's world, where people are targeted ever more heavily by marketers, I think that innoculating people against basic marketing tactics early on, or at least making them awar
Seriously, what the heck *is* up with people that cheat?
I just can't figure it out.
You pay some obscene amount of money, say, $30K/year to go to a university. Once you're there, you cheat? The degree isn't going to do much other than help convince employers to look at your degree. The education is the whole damn point of being there.
I'm constantly boggled by the kinds of interview questions that people on Slashdot mention that the people they're hiring *can't answer*. They're *basic*, standard questions.
You know, now that I think about it, that's one of the things that I *really* like about the Open Source community (and I could reasonably see terrifying folks).
Prestige and reputation doesn't mean a whole lot.
It's very hard to make arguments from authority when everyone can see your entire corpus of past work inside and out and criticize it and judge it. If you do good work, you do good work. If you do bad work, you do bad work. There isn't much else to say. It's hard to live on reputation. When you make a claim, you can easily be criticized or shot down unless you actually demonstrate a working counterexample. There's very little hierarchy, and (at least with the GPL and BSD licenses) if you don't like working with someone, you can fork the project.
Unlike pure academia (where a research paper usually makes only a small splash, and among people in the field), an open source project is an actual *device*, a machine, not just tools for making devices. It can be distributed far and wide, and affect a huge number of people directly.
I, like many other people, think that Google will eventually lose its engineer/science orientation, probably sooner than later when the IPO is considered. It's happened to many, many small companies as they turn into bigger companies and acquire deadweight, meetings, deadlines, crony consultants, etc.
"PhD" obviously isn't a qualifier for "knows what they're talking about". It doesn't even mean "pretty good". However:
a) It means that someone is more likely to be willing to do something for the knowledge rather than the direct money. This is, IMHO, a good correlation to knowing what they're talking about.
b) It means that they probably have at least some reasonable ability to deal with things abstractly.
c) It means that they have a certain degree of stick-to-itiveness.
d) If you're lucky enough to get someone who did their thesis on the area that you're working on, they probably know the area very well.
Honestly, perhaps because I've been lucky enough to work mostly with PhDs in *academia*, I've found that a PhD doesn't seem to make people arrogant. I personally suspect that if anything, it's a bit humbling -- you realize how much there is to learn.
Asus is about as mainstream a manufacturer as you could ask for.
I agree with you that the Linux support for the 9600 could be better -- the only complete option is a binary-only driver -- but there just aren't a whole lot of modern 3d games to *run* on Linux, either.
Apple will never be a threat to Microsoft until they run on x86 hardware. End story, full stop. The era of "proprietary hardware/OS bundles" is over, and enough companies were burned for lots of money by computer vendors to not want to go back.
I was really hopeful, back in the day, that the PowerPC might end up eating the x86 line for lunch, but that didn't end up happening.
That doesn't mean that it would make business sense for Apple to port to the x86. It just means that Microsoft doesn't have to worry about Apple taking away their market.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually did sit down to patch Slashcode after you pointed it out, but Slashcode apparently requires blowing away FC2's Apache and mod_perl installation, which I'm just not willing to do.
Why is he a kook?
:-(
Were the Wright brothers kooks because many of their original airplane designs had flaws, and it took them a while to correct all of them?
I wish *more* people would post stuff to the Internet to allow discussion. The copyright ownership rules associated with Science, Nature, and other major publications are not very researcher-friendly.
Sorry -- the following text was a direct quote from the grandparent post, and should have been italicized.
That's why the mission achievements are bimodal - either failure, or way longer life (and greater success) than expected.
Keep in mind, this is all just rendering in real-time. If you want the reactions to feel right, you've got to be modeling the physical interactions as well.
[clip]
And don't get me started on how corny the sounds are...
Aureal tried commercializing "wave-tracing" at the consumer level via A3D -- actually tracing out the paths of sound waves.
Unfortunately, they got hijacked by the incumbent (Creative, who didn't have a lot of incentive to get involved in a research war) who introduced a small reverb model as an alternative.
I think that is very insulting. Do you really believe that it is more of a feat to adjust some color scales than it is to send a spacecraft to another planet at distances of 300 million miles or more, have it operate without any repairs for years at a atime, survive the heat & cold of space, the forces of re-entry, launch etc etc.?
Of course not. I wasn't talking about the missions. I was talking about the *images*. I think that the images that NASA hands out for public consumption, are much more marketing-driven than science-driven, and I feel that those beautiful golden or rosy abstracts are more aesthetically appealing as a result of careful choosing of colors and tweaking until the result looks pretty than because of the source of the data. I suspect that given an equivalent amount of time to poke at an image, an electron microscope user could make SEM output look equally appealing.
The images are generally false-color composites, true. But they are not "retouched". The difference is between one of choosing how to remap wavelengths your eye can't see into colors it can see, and flat-out changing images. JPL does the former, and not the latter.
No?
Granted, this picture is not a celestial one of neublae and stars and other goodies, where careful color selection does lots of good.
You have to rememeber that many of these missions are selected after competitions among various university and industry groups. This means that you have to sell a mission to the review boards; you can't do that if you under-promise. If you only claimed you could do 10% of what you think you could actually do, then some other group is going to propose a mission to do 20% of what is possible - and they will look much better on paper and so get chosen. And these proposals are not secret, so NASA can't turn around and tell the public that mission will do less than it proposed for.
You're right -- "10%" is hyperbole in my part. However, I would be quite surprised if any of CMU/Caltech/MIT had the ability to set mission parameters on, say, Opportunity. They might be able to make claims about what they can do that NASA then can set mission objectives based upon. Instead, we have a list of vague, easy-to-classify-as-successful mission objectives. There are no numbers, no "fully map a total of 10 square meters of surface, analyzing available rock surfaces within for iron". This is hardly par for the course for engineering -- and makes it much easier to declare success.
Do you consider NASA upper echelons, the people responsible for getting funding and ensuring that engineers continue to be paid, unbiased in mission choice? I will admit that I do not work at NASA -- it has been my experience that there is plenty of PR management in research (both in academia and corporate work), though.
The result is NASA tends to define success criteria close to what is reasonably expected based on some pretty detailed mission analysis work.
I still feel that the mission success criteria that I linked to above are pretty vague.
Another point to remember is that the mission probability of success is like a chain - no stronger than the weakest link. Which means that there are almost always a few events that have all the risk (launch, landing); once past those there isn't much that can kill a spacecraft, at least not until old age starts to set in.
So why aren't rover life expectancies longer?
And one thing about JPL - their stuff is built to last.
Hey, you won't hear anything from me taking issue with JPL engineering -- just pointing out the way PR is handled.
That's why the mission achievements are bimodal - either failure, or way longer life (and greater success) than expected.
I
Last think I want is HIV or some nasty cuts from broken glass or metal shit.
Phone handsets or doorknobs are generally *far* worse from a sanitary perspective than just about anything else. All the communicable respiratory diseases have been nicely cultured on the doorknobs by people sneezing on their hands and then operating the knob.
Heck, your ancestors survived tromping around in the mud, barefoot, getting stabbed, clawed, bitten, stung, and so forth. You have an immune system and regenerative abilities that are awfully tough to muck with. Now, *cars*...*cars* are scary. Not many people die each year from scorpion bites, but tens of thousands of people die each year from auto accidents in the United States. And you probably have a road out right in front of your house!
As Neal Stephenson put it -- you're a stupendeous badass. You come from a long line of stupendous badasses. Anything that wasn't a stupendous badass is now dead.
So, here's the problem.
NASA does astronomy. To be very blunt and honest, astronomy provides very few concrete short-term benefits.
Most people think in the very short term when it comes to deciding who should get money -- and when politicians are strapped for cash for a project, NASA is always a likely source of money to divert.
As a result, it's always an uphill battle for NASA's research to get funded.
This is why NASA spends so much effort marketing what they have done -- for instance, providing free, beautiful pictures that consist entirely of false-color images that have been tweaked by hand to look attractive...they're more a credit to the artistic nature of the postprocessors than to the people doing the research itself.
One major problem is mission failures. The response to NASA getting mission failures appears to be a counterintuitive "cut their budget". My guess is that when positive public opinion and awareness of NASA goes up (as with successful missions), NASA's likelihood of getting funding increases markedly.
So all NASA has to do is make significant public underestimates of their mission potentials. That way, after completing, say, 10% of their expected work, they can announce that the mission "is a success". When the mission finally does end, the media can crow about how it "vastly exceeded anyone's wildest imaginations", and make public lots of hand-retouched images.
That doesn't mean I disapprove of what they're doing. I like seeing basic research being funded, and I don't think that there's a really good alternative method for NASA to get money.
It does mean, however, that it's *very* unlikely that this is an off-the-cuff decision by an engineer at NASA. It's a good bet that they have pre-made strategies for dealing with dust, extreme temperature change, power loss, signal loss, failure of particular systems, etc.
Not necessarily.
If their code isn't linked to GPL code (and just running on the same box), they can use code of whatever license they like.
I agree that router manufacturers have a black history here *cough* Linksys *cough* of swiping code from Linux and then ignoring license terms.
FWIW, having run Nessus against two FVS318 systems, I have yet to find an open port that I didn't specifically open.
You do realize that this *only* picks up TCP listening ports (probably not what they'd use), and *only* if the device manufacturer chooses to respond in such a way that lets you know that there's something listening there (also extremely unlikely)?
There is no way you can avoid router vulnerabilities, if the router manufacturer chooses to be an ass.
I use a Linux box to do my ADSL routing. I have an HTB tree that does matching on a list of authorized MACs on the network to balance bandwidth fairly between users on the network. Within that HTB (after breaking down bandwidth between all hosts asking for it), I have a three-level queue scheme (with TOS=Minimize Delay, everything else, and then TOS=Maximize Bandwidth). This lets me use SSH with no added latency while web browsing, and web browse with no added latency while still leaving BitTorrent/mldonkey running 24/7.
Anyone that uses an asymmetric connection like cable or DSL and doesn't have a setup like this doesn't know what they're missing out on. It's fantastic.
People don't need to be protected from content. People need the ability to choose what content they view. Censorship takes away my ability to choose.
Absolutely.
There were a *huge* number of Americans watching the Super Bowl halftime game that *didn't* want to see (or their children to see) Janet flashing the gamera. They were not informed that there would be nudity, and given the current state of affairs, reasonably expected to be informed of such if it was intended. Those people are exercising their right to choose what they would like to watch.
When the FCC tries to ban porn on satellite or cable or the Internet, then I'll agree that you have a reasonable case. If *Ashcroft* was running the FCC, we would have seen this -- but fortunately, it's Michael Powell.
If you want to see celebrities baring skin, there are plenty of vendors that will happily supply you with such content -- and you can do so without bothering those people who do find such content offensive.
FCC's anti-indecensy crusade is nutty, but "property rights" just transfer the problem to courts that lack the FCC's technical staff expertise (some of which does still exist).
AFAICT, the only thing that the Powell FCC has done that's irritated anyone is the very recent Janet Jackson tits thing, which apparently got Powell lots of complaints. Probably the only reason that the FCC got involved is because (a) the Bush administration, which has the ability to get rid of Powell, ran on a morality platform and is absolutely not interested in being associated with flashing being allowed during the most-watched family event in the United States and (b) people were engaging in a knee-jerk reaction to being very surprised by something that clearly was not supposed to be shown (regardless of whether it should or shouldn't be allowed or be an issue, a lot of people *didn't* want to see a shot of Janet flashing the camera). Also, keep in mind that the decency laws were made *way* before Powell's watch.
Powell has been strongly against the FCC regulating the Internet. It's probably only because of a few intelligent people that have pushed to avoid Internet regulation that we don't have a morass of laws quashing Internet growth today.
Sanitarium (a difficult to find game, but a fantastic gem). Old, so 8-bit graphics, but it doesn't use a Lucasarts look.
Syberia.
The Myst series (sans that recent MMORPG disaster -- I have no idea why they did that, as they had few concerns about pirating due to size anyway -- and without the antipiracy concerns, MMORPGs lose a lot of their publisher appeal).
ed2k link (It sucks that Slashcode is broken WRT ed2k direct links.)
Like, by wanker pundits who desperately want to be the ones to coin a new phrase.
Nicely put, though it applies to half of the tech journalist types out there.
No.
20 computers running.
You have one computer.
log(20)/log(2) * 1.5 yrs = ~6.5 yrs
A bit longer, if you want a full 75 fps (or 60, if we're all using LCDs in 7 years).
Plus, technically Moore's law relates to transistor count, not processing power.
I'm interested in when we can do this in a game in real-time. l(2hrs*3600secs/hr*60fps)/l(2) * 1.5yrs = 28 years before we see this in real-time (though that's using Pov-Ray, which could probably be sped up a lot if it's made into a game engine rather than a general purpose graphics architecture.
I have a comment a bit further down with some more explanation.
I remember seeing an SGI demo of real-time raytracing. They used a kinda neat technique -- the application was a modelling app, and so they "faded" the new image in by rendering random pixels. It let them get away with far fewer FPS.
Someone put a lot of computers together to make a powerful distributed system that is capable of rendering Quake using ray-tracing.
Here is an example of a (not real time) raytraced image (one that doesn't use radiosity -- just straight raytracing). In theory, given enough CPU power, they could pull this off.
Ray-tracing uses a method of 3d rendering that is currently beyond dedicated 3d hardware and must be done in software.
The main benefits of ray-tracing from a quality perspective are:
* True, accurate shadows from *everything* (most games, even stuff like Neverwinter Nights have hackish shadow engines that don't realistically display what lighting would look like in real life. These are calculated in real-time, not the precalculated shadows that you'll see in, say, Quake, where the light sources never move. You could throw a flickering lantern across a bar with bottles falling down and have all the bottles cast their own shadows.
* Advanced lighting. Currently, real-time 3d engines are very limited in the types of light they can produce -- generally, only spherical point sources of light.
* Refraction. You can have glass, ooze, or water truly refract light and distort images, not just use some sorta-lame effect to vaguely approximate it. Think of looking through a glass lens or a window in an old house.
* Volumetric fog (where you have "clumps" or "clouds" of fog, rather than just a global constant flag fog covering everything). Quake 3 had some rather (IMHO) impressive hacks to emulate volumetric fog -- ray tracing allows *true* volumetric fog -- people vanishing in swirling clouds of fog and mist and the like, not just a straight visibility dropoff.
* Reflections (there are a lot of hacks to approximate this off with existing 3d engines), but raytracers are *made* for this sort of thing.
* True curved and arbitrarily-shaped surfaces.
* Light projections (with shadowing and all that). They show a bit of this in the demo -- you could have, say, two people having a swordfight in a theater and the picture washing over them, or a scene in a church, with dusty light from the stained glass windows washing over the characters.
Basic ray-tracing does have some flaws. The shadows are sharp and hard -- sharper and harder than in real life. There are hacks to do soft shadows, but there isn't a particularly good an efficient way to pull them off.
It's hard to deal with things like laser beams or light beams coming out of a prism in ray-tracing. You need to do forward raytracing/photon mapping for this, which I suspect that they aren't doing.
Ray tracers tend to look a bit "eerie", for lack of a better word. They tend to leave shadowed areas very dark -- in real life, light will bounce around in corners and things a bit (even surfaces that don't look "reflective" to us will do so). So if I shine a flashlight, a raytracer will show a perfectly accurate cone of light (unlike existing 3d engines) that will spill properly over all surfaces. However, that cone of light will be a *cone* -- normally, when I shine a flashlight in a room, it lights up the entire side to some degree because of light bouncing off of objects.
There are some really nice things about ray tracers. They tend to parallelize really well, so you can theoretically put lots of computers together to do renders (as these folks did), or have lots of chips in parallel to theoretically make a custom piece of hardware.
Screw the code.
Screw the money.
Screw "business remedies".
All of these could be said to "excessively hurt Microsoft", and most importantly *do not reduce barriers to entry* (with the possible partial exception of the code).
What competitors *really* need is Microsoft forced to open their file formats and network protocols, so that they can fully interoperate.
Microsoft got where they were by bundling products together and keeping them from interoperating with competitors' products. Fining Microsoft and then letting them continue doing what they were doing may help out the EU, but doesn't do a whole lot to solve the problem.
There are *very* few arguments Microsoft can make against opening file formats and network protocols. There is minimal IP value in each -- it doesn't take a smegging horde of PhDs years of research to create the Word file format. It does nothing but help the consumer, and helps mean that Microsoft always needs to compete.
The primary education system in the US is broken, but the secondary (university) education system in the US is still pretty sharp.
You know, if I had the opportunity to make changes to the public schools, I think I'd:
* Break down subject matter. Instead of having "fourth grade", you'd have the math that was in fourth grade, the writing in fourth grade, etc.
* Do evaluations on subjects in one month intervals (rather than one year). Failing a test that sets you back an entire year is a huge setback, and so there's enormous pressure on teachers not to fail students and parents to make teachers keep their kids moving. This is what seems to me to cause a huge chunk of the problems in schools. If you fail the test, you go over that month of material again next month, until you pass it. Furthermore, for schools that have "summer school for students that didn't pass", it's much easier to reteach the one month of content that didn't get finished and pass the student than to ram them through the entire year again.
* Deemphasis of lectures. Right now, teachers spend an enormous amount of time talking -- doing nothing other than reading out teaching notes or curriculum, and so forth. I could never figure out why this is a good idea -- they're just reading notes aloud, which is an expensive use of time and doesn't benefit students at all. Every minute a teacher spends reading aloud content is one minute that they cannot spend answering questions, which is really the only thing they can do that tapes/computer software/books/worksheets can't do. It drove me equally nuts that college professors frequently do the same thing (*especially* when a college professor basically reads aloud his notes, and then expects TAs to answer out-of-class questions -- if the university wanted to hire a public speaker, they'd hire a public speaker, and wouldn't need him to have a PhD). Furthermore, this would make make-up work much easier. I've never figured out the value of lectures -- if you're going to say something, you might as well just write it down. This also makes it easier for students to do work remotely, if they're with parents on vacation for a week or something.
* Increase the number of papers/research papers to write. I think that the times that I learned the most in K-12 was when I had to do something on my own -- not when the teacher was feeding me something and then making me regurgitate it. High-school/middle-school history was a great example of this -- I remember memorizing vast numbers of dates and thinking ("God, I hate history" and "History is a waste of time"). On a whim, I took a history class in college, where all the grading was done based on writing papers, and loved it. The emphasis is much more on learning and understanding what was going on and being able to clearly describe it than regurgitating rarely-used numerical data that lives in only short-term memory. If I can say "event X happened before event Y", that's much better than "event X happened on June 3rd, 1905". Grading papers requires additional teacher time -- however, the reduction in lecture time reduces it, so I think it'd be a fair trade.
* Several nonrequired classes should (IMHO) be standard required fare in K-12. Probability and Statistics is a big one -- most people picking up a degree in the social sciences are going to need some statistics, and probability is useful for a ton of fields, everyday life (and *terribly* useful in computer science), and it's not a required course. I also think that an anti-propaganda class (I really don't have a better term for this), perhaps a mini-class should be included. I took a speech class that served much of this role, and I think that it was incredibly valuable. It basically summarized the types of propaganda/bogus claims that people make, and the techniques used. In today's world, where people are targeted ever more heavily by marketers, I think that innoculating people against basic marketing tactics early on, or at least making them awar
Seriously, what the heck *is* up with people that cheat?
I just can't figure it out.
You pay some obscene amount of money, say, $30K/year to go to a university. Once you're there, you cheat? The degree isn't going to do much other than help convince employers to look at your degree. The education is the whole damn point of being there.
I'm constantly boggled by the kinds of interview questions that people on Slashdot mention that the people they're hiring *can't answer*. They're *basic*, standard questions.
You know, now that I think about it, that's one of the things that I *really* like about the Open Source community (and I could reasonably see terrifying folks).
Prestige and reputation doesn't mean a whole lot.
It's very hard to make arguments from authority when everyone can see your entire corpus of past work inside and out and criticize it and judge it. If you do good work, you do good work. If you do bad work, you do bad work. There isn't much else to say. It's hard to live on reputation. When you make a claim, you can easily be criticized or shot down unless you actually demonstrate a working counterexample. There's very little hierarchy, and (at least with the GPL and BSD licenses) if you don't like working with someone, you can fork the project.
Unlike pure academia (where a research paper usually makes only a small splash, and among people in the field), an open source project is an actual *device*, a machine, not just tools for making devices. It can be distributed far and wide, and affect a huge number of people directly.
I, like many other people, think that Google will eventually lose its engineer/science orientation, probably sooner than later when the IPO is considered. It's happened to many, many small companies as they turn into bigger companies and acquire deadweight, meetings, deadlines, crony consultants, etc.
"PhD" obviously isn't a qualifier for "knows what they're talking about". It doesn't even mean "pretty good". However:
a) It means that someone is more likely to be willing to do something for the knowledge rather than the direct money. This is, IMHO, a good correlation to knowing what they're talking about.
b) It means that they probably have at least some reasonable ability to deal with things abstractly.
c) It means that they have a certain degree of stick-to-itiveness.
d) If you're lucky enough to get someone who did their thesis on the area that you're working on, they probably know the area very well.
Honestly, perhaps because I've been lucky enough to work mostly with PhDs in *academia*, I've found that a PhD doesn't seem to make people arrogant. I personally suspect that if anything, it's a bit humbling -- you realize how much there is to learn.
Asus is about as mainstream a manufacturer as you could ask for.
I agree with you that the Linux support for the 9600 could be better -- the only complete option is a binary-only driver -- but there just aren't a whole lot of modern 3d games to *run* on Linux, either.
All this time we have been doing things like making the Windows more stable (my laptop running XP hasn't crashed ONCE since my last reinstall)
a) "since my last reinstall".
b) That's because the 9x line was horribly unstable and easy to improvve on, and the NT/2k stuff made you reboot very frequently.
and supporting all kinds of wierd software and hardware, and making it easy to use
Generally, Microsoft doesn't have to support hardware manufacturers. Manufacturers have to support Microsoft.
Apple will never be a threat to Microsoft until they run on x86 hardware. End story, full stop. The era of "proprietary hardware/OS bundles" is over, and enough companies were burned for lots of money by computer vendors to not want to go back.
I was really hopeful, back in the day, that the PowerPC might end up eating the x86 line for lunch, but that didn't end up happening.
That doesn't mean that it would make business sense for Apple to port to the x86. It just means that Microsoft doesn't have to worry about Apple taking away their market.