Other than to say that I am probably unhealthily excited about this. The Baroque Cycle proved ( to me at least ) that Stephenson's a great writer. His earlier books had great ideas and great characters but didn't stitch together well at the end. A little too much of the old deaus-ex-machina. But the Baroque Cycle was nearly flawless.
So, he has my money. I'm buying it the day I can get my dirty mitts on it.
While you're clearly trolling, and have been modded as such, I do agree. It's not a race. A better thing to have said would have been "It's xenophobia, pure and simple".
Which is funny, to me, since this country is made of immigrants, and is home to basically every language, religion, and culture. But, hey, if we keep this shit up, pretty soon the only people willing to remain in the US will be ignorant caucasian xtian fucktards who don't believe in science or for that matter, learning in general.
Then, it will be easy for Mexico, Europe or China or anybody who wants to treat America as a 3rd world cheap-labor shithole for crops and manufacturing. It's not as if the remaining Americans will have the ability or education to better themselves.
The last time I flew ( note: I'm an American citizen born in the US, and it was a flight inside of the US ) when the plane was about to leave the boarding area for the runway, one of the flight attendants loudly called out "$REAL_NAME, identify yourself!".
(I have an eastern-european muslim first name, shared with a recently deceased chechnyan terorrist, and my last name is shared with one of the 911 guys. Go me. )
So, I politely said, "Here I am, is anything wrong?". She came over, and gave me the stink eye. Asked, "Where are you headed?". "Home, washington DC". She asked to see my ID. I showed her.
She asked if anybody was with me. My girlfriend ( a cute korean lass ) says "Me, we're going home together." The stewardess looks at her, gives us both the stinkeye, and says "Fine", and walks way.
I'm fucking tired of this shit. It's racism, pure and simple. It serves no benefit to anybody. If I were a terrorist, would I for fuck's sake use my real name and id? Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
Bullet has full dynamics. Maybe you're thinking of an older bullet implementation?
Either way, the point ( while more or less true ) is academic. Both bullet and ode have collision detection as well as dynamics. It may very well be true that ODE is better at dynamics and Bullet is better at collision. But either way, you can use just one engine for both purposes.
Also, OPCODE is solely used in ODE for trimesh collision detection. ODE has had collision detection for primitive shapes ( cylinders, spheres, capsules, boxes, planes ) for a very long time. OPCODE is a relatively recent addition ( last 3 years or so ) and is for trimesh collisions.
Anyway, the developers of both ODE and Bullet are friendly to one another and work together to make both engines stronger.
Because there is an absolutely unfathomable amount of brilliant mathematics running behind the scenes. The kind of stuff that competitor physics engine authors would love to pore over.
Even if they can't use that work, they can certainly learn some of the tricks that Havok uses.
Now, if what you want is open source physics, check out ODE ( http:://ode.org ) and bullet ( http://www.bulletphysics.com/ ) both are fully open source, both are well documented, and both are quite good, but aim at different usages.
ODE is great for robotics simulation, and is decent for games. ODE's strength is in joint types ( motors, sliders, etc ). ODE has a clean C api and is very easy to use.
Bullet is faster and more stable than ODE; however it is targeted more towards gaming. It's weak in joint types, but has much better performance when dealing with large groups of bodies. Bullet also has soft-body simulation as well, which is very very impressive. Bullet has a C++ api which, well, is well designed but perhaps over-designed. Finally, bullet supports Collada export, so you can wire up rigs in Blender and use them in your game.
I've been using ODE for five years. I love it. But recently I worked with the bullet folks to port their demo app to cocoa ( they have a windowsy demo, which uses GLUI, but was fugly on OS X ). I learned a lot about bullet doing that and I can see myself moving that direction in the future, when the joint types mature.
Anyway; I just wanted to make it clear that there are valid open source physics engines out there.
And that is why Alone in the Dark and Silent Hill are actually scary.
I never played Doom 3, but I blew a fair amount of junior high playing Doom 1 and 2, and loved them. Not because they were scary, but because of the frantic adrenaline rushes. It was fun.
Seriously, how? Unless MS manages to develop strong AI, which can tell that my torrented Battlestar episode is in fact Battlestar and thus property of Universal, there's no way to make this work.
So how do figure out that some random video is owned by some studio? Unless every video gets a watermark this is essentially impossible.
The only methods I see coming out of this are:
1) Zune only plays DRMd videos. Period.
2) Every time you attempt to copy a non-DRMd video to your zune, it is forwarded to a poor sap in Bangalore who looks it over and decides if it's kosher or not.
3) Watermarking. We all know how well that works.
4) Magic strong-AI which can do this on your computer ( or zune ).
Good luck, MS! NBC has you over a barrel.
It probably has to do with reaction time. If the robots maintain perfect velocity synchronicity with the car in front, you'd probably not see the wave propagation. On the other hand, if the robots were configured to have a response "delay" ( on the order of, say, half a second or so ) and minor errors in estimated velocity correction you'd probably see something just like you'd get with humans.
Basically, people are doing the right thing, most of the time. But minor delays in perception/action as well as overshooting and undershooting velocity based on minor flaws in perception are where the problem comes from.
Or, at least that's my guess. I've been doing my best to smooth out waves in highway driving for years, much to the consternation of my girlfriend who's of the speed-and-tailgate-and-make-panic-adjustments school of driving. Which amazes me, since she's a scientist. She doesn't listen to me, since I'm just a programmer... No PhD!
The only difference is that one can be taxed easily.
And that's what I don't get. If they legalised pot I imagine they'd regulate it just like they do alcohol and tobacco. The government would make plenty of revenue off of taxation and the like. Plus, the jails could be filled with -- you know -- actual criminals instead of random people who just wanted to watch Murder She Wrote while baked. Not that I do that or anything...
I'm not disagreeing with the author ( I did RTFA ), but I want to say there is some ray tracing ( in a sense ) already in some modern games. Specifically, some types of parallax mapping can be considered to be bastard red-headed stepchildren of raytracing.
What you have is ray tracing in texture space, but that texture is brought to the screen via conventional scanline rasterization methods. Sort of. My glsl parallax shader code sucks though ( looks all gelatinous close up ) so I'm no expert....
Late to respond here, but yeah, I DO read books, & I prefer to read books. You might want to look into it sometime. If you did read books, your reading comprehension might improve: you'd have grokked that I was *complementing* well written shows.
The fact that you got modded insightful for a know-nothing snarky response like that makes me fear for the world. As if reading books is a bad thing. For fuck's sake.
It has nothing to do with the computer. It's the OS.
Microsoft has put a lot of love into DirectX, and because of that, gaming companies focus on Windows. Apple's done an OK job with OpenGL -- not great, but not bad. But what Apple hasn't done is provide a rich toolkit for everything else. For example, apple's HID support, while excellent, is almost impossible to program for ( I say this with experience ).
I bought my mac to get work done, and my PS2 to play games. I can and do play games on my mac, but frankly, the experience on the PS2 is better, even if the graphics are worse than what my MBP could do.
Now, as regards the lack of directx on the mac, technically toolkits like Ogre3D would fit the bill for cross platform gaming. Ogre uses DirectX on windows, and OpenGL on mac & linux. Ogre3D supports USB HID on all platforms, and has networking/physics bindings ( to Newton, ODE, and probably others ) as well as a thorough maths toolkit and so on and so forth. I don't seriously expect big companies to use Ogre3D, but frankly, a small company could use Ogre and have cross platform games more or less for "free".
Are those shows actually better on a $1000 high-def flatscreen TV? Those shows are good because of good writing, good thinking, and charismatic presentation. As such, they're just as enjoyable on a 20 year old SD television...
The only stuff that really benefits from an HD tv are sports and summer "blockbusters" like Transformers.
I've read some of those studies -- it's quite interesting. The ones I've read ( admittedly in NewScientist ) referred to *overweight* people and not obese people. And that being said, I think I was a bit harsh in my original post. There's no real health problem with being merely overweight. It's obesity that shortens life, or at the very least the quality of life.
Now, people who think fat people are *bad* or *amoral*, those people are assholes. But the fact remains that being fat will kill you early, and will impact the quality of your life for a long time before you die.
I'm not judging you or other fat people. I'm just speaking the truth. It's bad for you. I used to be fat, and thanks to the laws of thermodynamics I'm not any more. I can ride my bike 50 miles and feel great the rest of the day. I can run, do pushups, etc. I couldn't do that way back when I was in high school spending my time in a basement playing Wolfenstein and watching horror movies, all the while stuffing my face and lamenting my lack of a girlfriend.
On many of these electrics, you do need to plug-in to get your initial charge. Isn't that causing just as much, if not more, pollution than burning oil locally?
Obviously, the electric car is consuming energy which has to be produced, somehow. In a magic future it will be generated by wind, solar, geothermal and some sort of better-thought-out nuclear like pebble-bed reactors. Right now that energy will be produced by oil/coal so yes there will be pollution.
That being said, automotive IC engines are completely and utterly piss-poor at converting oil to torque. They are shamefully poor at it, with efficiency down in the 20-30% range. Modern electricity generation plants ( using coal or oil ) convert quite a bit more of the chemical energy in the fuel to electricity. They're really quite good at it. They can run hot, they don't need gearboxes, etc etc. Even better, these facilities can have scrubbers and other carbon reduction measures which are too expensive for cars. Also, of the electricy consumed by an electric car, far more of it can be converted to torque simply because electric drivetrains are so simple and direct. No need for transmissions, and no need for differentials or CV joints ( provided the motor is in the wheel as some electrics do )
So, yes, electric cars are not non-polluting. But, the amount of fuel burnt to move an electric car 100km is quite a bit less than even the best hybrid IC car can pull off. And looked at in the long term, electric cars are so simple I see no reason for a well built electric not to last 30 years ( provided good maintenance ). During those 30 years your city/town may have upgraded to a new power generation mechanism which is cleaner. Thus less pollution. Can your IC engine car do that?
That being said, I'll continue to ride my bicycle to work, and only use my ( tiny, 2 door stickshift ) car when it's really necessary
It'll probably happen, but you'd better have one hell of a super-cooled superconducting pipe to supply the energy. That is to say, iff someday this is pulled of, it won't be magic. I'd wager you wouldn't want to be within a kilometer of a fab like this, you know, lest you become a source of complex organic molecules for the circuitry ( or seat cushions ).
If this new battery is 10x as efficient it is still 3x worse than gasoline.
No argument here, but consider how poorly we make use of energy from gasoline ( at least in cars, trucks, etc ). My understanding of electric motors is that not only do they convert energy to torque much more efficiently, but they don't need a transmission, differential or CV joints ( the latter two if you're using one motor per drive wheel ), which lose quite a bit of torque to heat/sound.
Just saying. Batteries might suck in comparison to gasoline, but if you can convert more of their stored energy to motion, well, it sound slike a win to me.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, once I closed the demo window in Camino, my clipboard was fine. Chalk one up for Camino!
Other than to say that I am probably unhealthily excited about this. The Baroque Cycle proved ( to me at least ) that Stephenson's a great writer. His earlier books had great ideas and great characters but didn't stitch together well at the end. A little too much of the old deaus-ex-machina. But the Baroque Cycle was nearly flawless.
So, he has my money. I'm buying it the day I can get my dirty mitts on it.
It's also about the corrosion, and the solids that gunk up the line over time.
While you're clearly trolling, and have been modded as such, I do agree. It's not a race. A better thing to have said would have been "It's xenophobia, pure and simple".
Which is funny, to me, since this country is made of immigrants, and is home to basically every language, religion, and culture. But, hey, if we keep this shit up, pretty soon the only people willing to remain in the US will be ignorant caucasian xtian fucktards who don't believe in science or for that matter, learning in general.
Then, it will be easy for Mexico, Europe or China or anybody who wants to treat America as a 3rd world cheap-labor shithole for crops and manufacturing. It's not as if the remaining Americans will have the ability or education to better themselves.
USA! USA!
The last time I flew ( note: I'm an American citizen born in the US, and it was a flight inside of the US ) when the plane was about to leave the boarding area for the runway, one of the flight attendants loudly called out "$REAL_NAME, identify yourself!".
(I have an eastern-european muslim first name, shared with a recently deceased chechnyan terorrist, and my last name is shared with one of the 911 guys. Go me. )
So, I politely said, "Here I am, is anything wrong?". She came over, and gave me the stink eye. Asked, "Where are you headed?". "Home, washington DC". She asked to see my ID. I showed her.
She asked if anybody was with me. My girlfriend ( a cute korean lass ) says "Me, we're going home together." The stewardess looks at her, gives us both the stinkeye, and says "Fine", and walks way.
I'm fucking tired of this shit. It's racism, pure and simple. It serves no benefit to anybody. If I were a terrorist, would I for fuck's sake use my real name and id? Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
End rant.
Sorry to just say the old AOLler "me too", but I think windmills are beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking.
As far as I'm concerned, the more, the merrier.
I implemented this in OpenGL + GLSL a year ago ( April 2007 to be specific ). I got the idea from a paper dating to 2005 or so.
Now, with that aside, it's awesome and easy to implement, so long as you have easy acces to a depth buffer, and the hardware to make use of it.
Bullet has full dynamics. Maybe you're thinking of an older bullet implementation?
Either way, the point ( while more or less true ) is academic. Both bullet and ode have collision detection as well as dynamics. It may very well be true that ODE is better at dynamics and Bullet is better at collision. But either way, you can use just one engine for both purposes.
Also, OPCODE is solely used in ODE for trimesh collision detection. ODE has had collision detection for primitive shapes ( cylinders, spheres, capsules, boxes, planes ) for a very long time. OPCODE is a relatively recent addition ( last 3 years or so ) and is for trimesh collisions.
Anyway, the developers of both ODE and Bullet are friendly to one another and work together to make both engines stronger.
Because there is an absolutely unfathomable amount of brilliant mathematics running behind the scenes. The kind of stuff that competitor physics engine authors would love to pore over.
Even if they can't use that work, they can certainly learn some of the tricks that Havok uses.
Now, if what you want is open source physics, check out ODE ( http:://ode.org ) and bullet ( http://www.bulletphysics.com/ ) both are fully open source, both are well documented, and both are quite good, but aim at different usages.
ODE is great for robotics simulation, and is decent for games. ODE's strength is in joint types ( motors, sliders, etc ). ODE has a clean C api and is very easy to use.
Bullet is faster and more stable than ODE; however it is targeted more towards gaming. It's weak in joint types, but has much better performance when dealing with large groups of bodies. Bullet also has soft-body simulation as well, which is very very impressive. Bullet has a C++ api which, well, is well designed but perhaps over-designed. Finally, bullet supports Collada export, so you can wire up rigs in Blender and use them in your game.
I've been using ODE for five years. I love it. But recently I worked with the bullet folks to port their demo app to cocoa ( they have a windowsy demo, which uses GLUI, but was fugly on OS X ). I learned a lot about bullet doing that and I can see myself moving that direction in the future, when the joint types mature.
Anyway; I just wanted to make it clear that there are valid open source physics engines out there.
And that is why Alone in the Dark and Silent Hill are actually scary. I never played Doom 3, but I blew a fair amount of junior high playing Doom 1 and 2, and loved them. Not because they were scary, but because of the frantic adrenaline rushes. It was fun.
Seriously, how? Unless MS manages to develop strong AI, which can tell that my torrented Battlestar episode is in fact Battlestar and thus property of Universal, there's no way to make this work.
So how do figure out that some random video is owned by some studio? Unless every video gets a watermark this is essentially impossible.
The only methods I see coming out of this are:
1) Zune only plays DRMd videos. Period.
2) Every time you attempt to copy a non-DRMd video to your zune, it is forwarded to a poor sap in Bangalore who looks it over and decides if it's kosher or not.
3) Watermarking. We all know how well that works.
4) Magic strong-AI which can do this on your computer ( or zune ). Good luck, MS! NBC has you over a barrel.
Command click the layer's image icon in the layer palette. I assume it's ctrl-click on PC.
( I'm staying out of this argument. I say use what you want )
It probably has to do with reaction time. If the robots maintain perfect velocity synchronicity with the car in front, you'd probably not see the wave propagation. On the other hand, if the robots were configured to have a response "delay" ( on the order of, say, half a second or so ) and minor errors in estimated velocity correction you'd probably see something just like you'd get with humans.
Basically, people are doing the right thing, most of the time. But minor delays in perception/action as well as overshooting and undershooting velocity based on minor flaws in perception are where the problem comes from.
Or, at least that's my guess. I've been doing my best to smooth out waves in highway driving for years, much to the consternation of my girlfriend who's of the speed-and-tailgate-and-make-panic-adjustments school of driving. Which amazes me, since she's a scientist. She doesn't listen to me, since I'm just a programmer... No PhD!
And that's what I don't get. If they legalised pot I imagine they'd regulate it just like they do alcohol and tobacco. The government would make plenty of revenue off of taxation and the like. Plus, the jails could be filled with -- you know -- actual criminals instead of random people who just wanted to watch Murder She Wrote while baked. Not that I do that or anything...
I'm not disagreeing with the author ( I did RTFA ), but I want to say there is some ray tracing ( in a sense ) already in some modern games. Specifically, some types of parallax mapping can be considered to be bastard red-headed stepchildren of raytracing.
What you have is ray tracing in texture space, but that texture is brought to the screen via conventional scanline rasterization methods. Sort of. My glsl parallax shader code sucks though ( looks all gelatinous close up ) so I'm no expert....
Late to respond here, but yeah, I DO read books, & I prefer to read books. You might want to look into it sometime. If you did read books, your reading comprehension might improve: you'd have grokked that I was *complementing* well written shows.
The fact that you got modded insightful for a know-nothing snarky response like that makes me fear for the world. As if reading books is a bad thing. For fuck's sake.
It has nothing to do with the computer. It's the OS.
Microsoft has put a lot of love into DirectX, and because of that, gaming companies focus on Windows. Apple's done an OK job with OpenGL -- not great, but not bad. But what Apple hasn't done is provide a rich toolkit for everything else. For example, apple's HID support, while excellent, is almost impossible to program for ( I say this with experience ).
I bought my mac to get work done, and my PS2 to play games. I can and do play games on my mac, but frankly, the experience on the PS2 is better, even if the graphics are worse than what my MBP could do.
Now, as regards the lack of directx on the mac, technically toolkits like Ogre3D would fit the bill for cross platform gaming. Ogre uses DirectX on windows, and OpenGL on mac & linux. Ogre3D supports USB HID on all platforms, and has networking/physics bindings ( to Newton, ODE, and probably others ) as well as a thorough maths toolkit and so on and so forth. I don't seriously expect big companies to use Ogre3D, but frankly, a small company could use Ogre and have cross platform games more or less for "free".
Are those shows actually better on a $1000 high-def flatscreen TV? Those shows are good because of good writing, good thinking, and charismatic presentation. As such, they're just as enjoyable on a 20 year old SD television...
The only stuff that really benefits from an HD tv are sports and summer "blockbusters" like Transformers.
P.S. The A-Team ruled.I've read some of those studies -- it's quite interesting. The ones I've read ( admittedly in NewScientist ) referred to *overweight* people and not obese people. And that being said, I think I was a bit harsh in my original post. There's no real health problem with being merely overweight. It's obesity that shortens life, or at the very least the quality of life.
I'll read the summary you linked.
That was intentional. IIRC it's from a cheeky ad.
It's a health problem. Seriously.
Now, people who think fat people are *bad* or *amoral*, those people are assholes. But the fact remains that being fat will kill you early, and will impact the quality of your life for a long time before you die.
I'm not judging you or other fat people. I'm just speaking the truth. It's bad for you. I used to be fat, and thanks to the laws of thermodynamics I'm not any more. I can ride my bike 50 miles and feel great the rest of the day. I can run, do pushups, etc. I couldn't do that way back when I was in high school spending my time in a basement playing Wolfenstein and watching horror movies, all the while stuffing my face and lamenting my lack of a girlfriend.
Obviously, the electric car is consuming energy which has to be produced, somehow. In a magic future it will be generated by wind, solar, geothermal and some sort of better-thought-out nuclear like pebble-bed reactors. Right now that energy will be produced by oil/coal so yes there will be pollution.
That being said, automotive IC engines are completely and utterly piss-poor at converting oil to torque. They are shamefully poor at it, with efficiency down in the 20-30% range. Modern electricity generation plants ( using coal or oil ) convert quite a bit more of the chemical energy in the fuel to electricity. They're really quite good at it. They can run hot, they don't need gearboxes, etc etc. Even better, these facilities can have scrubbers and other carbon reduction measures which are too expensive for cars. Also, of the electricy consumed by an electric car, far more of it can be converted to torque simply because electric drivetrains are so simple and direct. No need for transmissions, and no need for differentials or CV joints ( provided the motor is in the wheel as some electrics do )
So, yes, electric cars are not non-polluting. But, the amount of fuel burnt to move an electric car 100km is quite a bit less than even the best hybrid IC car can pull off. And looked at in the long term, electric cars are so simple I see no reason for a well built electric not to last 30 years ( provided good maintenance ). During those 30 years your city/town may have upgraded to a new power generation mechanism which is cleaner. Thus less pollution. Can your IC engine car do that?
That being said, I'll continue to ride my bicycle to work, and only use my ( tiny, 2 door stickshift ) car when it's really necessary
It'll probably happen, but you'd better have one hell of a super-cooled superconducting pipe to supply the energy. That is to say, iff someday this is pulled of, it won't be magic. I'd wager you wouldn't want to be within a kilometer of a fab like this, you know, lest you become a source of complex organic molecules for the circuitry ( or seat cushions ).
Yeah, but with the TimeCube you can play it today. Yesterday, even.
No argument here, but consider how poorly we make use of energy from gasoline ( at least in cars, trucks, etc ). My understanding of electric motors is that not only do they convert energy to torque much more efficiently, but they don't need a transmission, differential or CV joints ( the latter two if you're using one motor per drive wheel ), which lose quite a bit of torque to heat/sound.
Just saying. Batteries might suck in comparison to gasoline, but if you can convert more of their stored energy to motion, well, it sound slike a win to me.