Yeah, you're right. I'm aware of that. I think it is something along the lines of 'how much energy it takes to heat up a unit of water.'. With all the stories about how obese Americans are, I kinda thought it was appropriate heh.
I did read somewhere that humans are far more energy efficient than cars. Something equivalent to 300 mpg. I wish I could tell you if that accounted for speed or weight, or if they meant that a gallon of gas would have enough calories for a human to walk 300 miles.
It does take roughly 10 miles of walking to burn off a pound. (or something like that.) In all seriousness, a 'twinkie powered car' would be interesting indeed. Heh.:)
Hopefully one day the misconceptions (or lack of information) about dual processor machines will be cleared up. I haveta admit, I was pretty ignorant about them myself until one landed on my desk. I always asked the question "how much faster is it?" instead of asking "what's it do differently?"
I'm curious, though, do you think the 'hyperthreading' feature of Pentium 4's will lessen the need for dual processor machines? I can imagine it'll speed up explorer responsiveness quite a bit. If the computer 'appears' faster, will people even consider dual machines?
"Dual CPU's on the desktop are a waste of money, by the time you need the extra horsepower..."
That's not necessarily true. I've been running dual for a couple of years now, and the benefits I see to it are far deeper than adding 'extra horsepower'.
I'm a 3D artist. I use Lightwave primarily, but also use Photoshop and After Effects quite extensively. I spent a LOT of time waiting for stuff to get done. My boss got me a dual Athlon 1600 with a gig of RAM early this year. She didn't get it for me because she wanted me to halve my rendering times, but rather she wanted me to make better use of my time while the computer was busy.
Lightwave is multithreaded, but not very elegantly. As a matter of fact, I rarely enable the multithreaded option. Instead, while it's rendering, I set up processes on the other processor to continue on with what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm building the next model, sometimes I'm generating a texture in Photoshop, or I'm setting up a composition in After Effects.
So while my computer is busy rendering, I'm still busy being productive. Some of you are saying "Yeah, but you'll never get 2x the processing out of it." And you know what? That's basically true, at least in a benchmark point of view. I get close to double clock speed when I have a rendering running on each processor, but I doubt I hit 2x. I don't need 2x anymore, though. About a year ago I started layering my animations. That means that my computer would render elements of a scene, which render much faster than the entire scene. As each frame is generated, it gets added to the composition in After Effects. So while my computer is rendering, I'm busy in After Effects getting it all put together. This sure beats waiting for the rendering to get completed. Heck, thanks to this technique (and the dual proc), I rarely have 'over-the-weekend-renderings' that have the potential to go horribly wrong.
Would I be better off with a second machine? No. For the amount if money that was spent on my machine (roughly $1,500 sans monitor and hard drives), I probably could have gotten more 'pixels rendered' per minute. But, it'd be a huge blow to my workflow switching between two computers. It wouldn't take very long for the 100mbit connection between them to become a huge bottleneck. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure it would have been all that cheaper. We'd still have to get me high end video cards and monitors for each machine.
Are dual proc desktops for everybody? Not really. The best benefit you'd see is that Windows 2000 behaves a LOT better. Explorer and IE are both very multithreaded, and are much more responsive. As a matter of fact, my Athlon 1.2 gig machine at home felt sluggish compared to my old Dual P3 550. It kicked the 550's butt at rendering, but when it came to browsing the web, doing email, etc, the dual 550 was much more responsive.
In short, dual processor machines have their place. If you primarily play games, you probably won't care much. But if you do CPU intensive work, it'll make your life a lot easier. Unless, of course, you like having nothing to do while your machine is busy.
I'm a little surprise parent post got modded down as 'Flamebait'. His comment was appropriate. There's lots of comments floating around about bad driver support for ATI products. I can personally testify to that. The Radeon 8500 I used to have in my box wouldn't draw the titlebar properly in Windows. Instead, it'd draw it transparently. (Only the text was still there.) That made Windows a BITCH to use.
Nvidia, so far, is the king of drivers. They have a unified driver set. (only one download) They are stable. (I've used 3 different Geforce cards and they work wonderfully.) And they're constantly revised. ATI and every other video card company could learn a lot from Nvidia.
Please mod up parent post. He may not have the most interesting point, but it certainly was not worthy of a 'flamebait -1' moderation.
I'm really happy about what this guy wants to do, but I ache for a little more. I really like what DigitalConsumer.org suggests. Basically, they outline our 'rights' as 'digital consumers'. If this were passed into law, then our rights are clearly defined.
The benefit of this is that a 'pirate' is much easier to identify. If the law says 'we can media shift', then burning MP3's to CD is legal. You're not a 'pirate' then, like the RIAA is trying to say you are.
I'm happy he's requesting modifications to the DMCA, but it's not as far reaching as I hoped. What about the MPAA? What about downloading DivX versions of movies I have on DVD? Personally, I don't see how the RIAA can really do anything to stop unauthorized use of content until the Gov't defines specifically what we can do.
Not to mention that game interfaces respond a hell of a lot better than anything else out there. One of the first things that video games helped me with is mouse click accuracy. Before long, my mouse was arriving at it's destination before the window popped up.
Now, whenever I'm waiting for something to load, I need something else to 'distract' me. That's how I manage to stay so active on Slashdot, heh. I'm serious. When you're a Lightwave user, you've got time to burn.
I really hope that the acoustic stuff can be used with the visuals on as well. I love to play Quake and if I had more audio response from it, I'd just enjoy it that much more.
I certainly think the blind would find this useful as well. It'd help if a seeing person was able to stand over their shoulder and assist them with getting oriented.
Who knows, this could start a new area of development for games. It's well known that sound plays a crucial role in games, but what if sounds were exaggerated in order to give you spatial clues? Hollywood's been doing this for ages, this is why space ships generate sound when they fly by.
Just a thought. I'm not visually impaired by any stretch of the imagination, but I have very keen hearing and would love to put it to better use. I hope one day in the future my desktop computer provides more audio feedback.
Re:Sweet - what's the server IP address?
on
Quake For the Blind
·
· Score: 1
"Oh man, I gotta find me one of these servers. No more getting spanked by 11 year-olds in CounterStrike."
Heh I didn't laugh until I envisioned Bender saying that.
I think you're right. Often in Quake, I aim and take shots in the direction I heard the sound.
One problem with Quake is that it's rather limited visually. I don't mean in graphic detail, but in field of view. Your eyes can see roughly 180 degrees, but the game has it zoomed in at 90. I'm seriously interested in using a 3-monitor setup so I could get peripheral vision, but I'd happily try the sound enhanced version first.
Think there'll be a mod so you can get the sound and the visuals?
No, that's not even close to what I was saying. What I was saying was that you're a dumb fuck if you go into a movie only to look for problems in it.
As a matter of fact, the sentence right before the quote you brought up says very clearly that I was talking about watching the movie, not writing a review:
"You guys are kinda missing the point to watching a movie." -- that's what I said.
One of the complaints I heard was "...it sucks because wasn't like the first movie!" to which my response is "Duh!". The fun part of the first movie was discovering all the aliens and technology and so on. How could they drag that out into a second movie while making it interesting?
That's exactly the type of thing I was babbling about. I wasn't badmouthing people being 'honest', I was commenting that they didn't get the point of the movie in the first place. The people that didn't like MiiB also seem to think that it should be a retread of the first one like Back to the Future 2 was to the original.
" Preferably without small minded attempts at censorship from preachy cocksuckers like you. We clear?"
Censorship? Cocksucker?? Don't you think you're being a little extreme here? Grow up. As I already said, I wasn't picking on the reviews, nor was I saying they should all be 'happy happy-joy joy'. God, if you couldn't understand what I was saying, I have no idea why you're reading reviews of movies.
"I can't think of a practical situation, but if somebody could explain why you would need to send a gigabyte of data in one second vs. 8 second I'd be more impressed."
Movies like Final Fantasy would have greatly benefitted from 10 gigabit networking. They had over 1,000 machines rendering at a time. The resolution was enormous. (I apologize, I don't remember the exact resolution.) The animation was heavily layered, each frame having a miniumum of 10 layers and some hit as high as 100.
I can imagine that whenever they did the compositing, they didn't do it over the network. Rather, they copied alllll of the frames of each layer of the section they were working on to the compositing machine. I betcha anything they found it was quicker to carry around hot-swappable firewire drives in order to ferry data around faster than the network could move it.
If they had 10-gigabit capability, it would likely have drastically altered their workflow. They would probably have a central, heavily raided server holding all the source images. Then the compositing artists control the compositing from their machine, but the data stays on the server via network.
This would definitely have saved them ooodles of time. Even if their workflow was exactly the same, the huge increase in bandwidth would have greatly reduced their networking overhead.
A studio like that'd happily pay big $$$ for a network like that. The investment would have paid off right away.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd post it online if I wasn't afraid of someone totally ripping it off."
Funny thing is, the DMCA does nothing to help this guy.
You could always ROT-13 encrypt it, and then sue anybody who publishes it. =)
Yeah, you're right. I'm aware of that. I think it is something along the lines of 'how much energy it takes to heat up a unit of water.'. With all the stories about how obese Americans are, I kinda thought it was appropriate heh.
:)
I did read somewhere that humans are far more energy efficient than cars. Something equivalent to 300 mpg. I wish I could tell you if that accounted for speed or weight, or if they meant that a gallon of gas would have enough calories for a human to walk 300 miles.
It does take roughly 10 miles of walking to burn off a pound. (or something like that.) In all seriousness, a 'twinkie powered car' would be interesting indeed. Heh.
Ever ask yourself how an AC managed to get a sig? When you figure that out, you'll realize I'm not really anonvmous.
... that color LCD screens don't work outside. I think this is a clever ruse by a parents group to get their kids outside.
"You obviously have not used a dual cpu system."
Hopefully one day the misconceptions (or lack of information) about dual processor machines will be cleared up. I haveta admit, I was pretty ignorant about them myself until one landed on my desk. I always asked the question "how much faster is it?" instead of asking "what's it do differently?"
I'm curious, though, do you think the 'hyperthreading' feature of Pentium 4's will lessen the need for dual processor machines? I can imagine it'll speed up explorer responsiveness quite a bit. If the computer 'appears' faster, will people even consider dual machines?
...but what about the Flintstones car? Methane emissions were low and it ran on calories. =)
"Dual CPU's on the desktop are a waste of money, by the time you need the extra horsepower..."
That's not necessarily true. I've been running dual for a couple of years now, and the benefits I see to it are far deeper than adding 'extra horsepower'.
I'm a 3D artist. I use Lightwave primarily, but also use Photoshop and After Effects quite extensively. I spent a LOT of time waiting for stuff to get done. My boss got me a dual Athlon 1600 with a gig of RAM early this year. She didn't get it for me because she wanted me to halve my rendering times, but rather she wanted me to make better use of my time while the computer was busy.
Lightwave is multithreaded, but not very elegantly. As a matter of fact, I rarely enable the multithreaded option. Instead, while it's rendering, I set up processes on the other processor to continue on with what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm building the next model, sometimes I'm generating a texture in Photoshop, or I'm setting up a composition in After Effects.
So while my computer is busy rendering, I'm still busy being productive. Some of you are saying "Yeah, but you'll never get 2x the processing out of it." And you know what? That's basically true, at least in a benchmark point of view. I get close to double clock speed when I have a rendering running on each processor, but I doubt I hit 2x. I don't need 2x anymore, though. About a year ago I started layering my animations. That means that my computer would render elements of a scene, which render much faster than the entire scene. As each frame is generated, it gets added to the composition in After Effects. So while my computer is rendering, I'm busy in After Effects getting it all put together. This sure beats waiting for the rendering to get completed. Heck, thanks to this technique (and the dual proc), I rarely have 'over-the-weekend-renderings' that have the potential to go horribly wrong.
Would I be better off with a second machine? No. For the amount if money that was spent on my machine (roughly $1,500 sans monitor and hard drives), I probably could have gotten more 'pixels rendered' per minute. But, it'd be a huge blow to my workflow switching between two computers. It wouldn't take very long for the 100mbit connection between them to become a huge bottleneck. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure it would have been all that cheaper. We'd still have to get me high end video cards and monitors for each machine.
Are dual proc desktops for everybody? Not really. The best benefit you'd see is that Windows 2000 behaves a LOT better. Explorer and IE are both very multithreaded, and are much more responsive. As a matter of fact, my Athlon 1.2 gig machine at home felt sluggish compared to my old Dual P3 550. It kicked the 550's butt at rendering, but when it came to browsing the web, doing email, etc, the dual 550 was much more responsive.
In short, dual processor machines have their place. If you primarily play games, you probably won't care much. But if you do CPU intensive work, it'll make your life a lot easier. Unless, of course, you like having nothing to do while your machine is busy.
The specs on the box require an Intel p2 400 or better, and a Mac 400 or better...
:)
Seeing as how Mac's got a significantly higher instruction per cycle ratio, I do think your comment about lack of Mac optimizations is justified.
Anybody wanna bet it was just a recompile? heh.
I'm a little surprise parent post got modded down as 'Flamebait'. His comment was appropriate. There's lots of comments floating around about bad driver support for ATI products. I can personally testify to that. The Radeon 8500 I used to have in my box wouldn't draw the titlebar properly in Windows. Instead, it'd draw it transparently. (Only the text was still there.) That made Windows a BITCH to use.
Nvidia, so far, is the king of drivers. They have a unified driver set. (only one download) They are stable. (I've used 3 different Geforce cards and they work wonderfully.) And they're constantly revised. ATI and every other video card company could learn a lot from Nvidia.
Please mod up parent post. He may not have the most interesting point, but it certainly was not worthy of a 'flamebait -1' moderation.
"Errr, install Linux, maybe?
The way to solve a Windows98 problem is to remove Windows98. Problem solved."
Yeah, Linux is pretty damn stable when it has no games to run on it.
Hey!! I'm not fat! I'm big boned!!
... what the printing of this story implies about a large percentage of Slashdot users, or that I could really use some advice on a good diet.
:P
Blah.
I'm really happy about what this guy wants to do, but I ache for a little more. I really like what DigitalConsumer.org suggests. Basically, they outline our 'rights' as 'digital consumers'. If this were passed into law, then our rights are clearly defined.
The benefit of this is that a 'pirate' is much easier to identify. If the law says 'we can media shift', then burning MP3's to CD is legal. You're not a 'pirate' then, like the RIAA is trying to say you are.
I'm happy he's requesting modifications to the DMCA, but it's not as far reaching as I hoped. What about the MPAA? What about downloading DivX versions of movies I have on DVD? Personally, I don't see how the RIAA can really do anything to stop unauthorized use of content until the Gov't defines specifically what we can do.
Not to mention that game interfaces respond a hell of a lot better than anything else out there. One of the first things that video games helped me with is mouse click accuracy. Before long, my mouse was arriving at it's destination before the window popped up.
Now, whenever I'm waiting for something to load, I need something else to 'distract' me. That's how I manage to stay so active on Slashdot, heh. I'm serious. When you're a Lightwave user, you've got time to burn.
I really hope that the acoustic stuff can be used with the visuals on as well. I love to play Quake and if I had more audio response from it, I'd just enjoy it that much more.
I certainly think the blind would find this useful as well. It'd help if a seeing person was able to stand over their shoulder and assist them with getting oriented.
Who knows, this could start a new area of development for games. It's well known that sound plays a crucial role in games, but what if sounds were exaggerated in order to give you spatial clues? Hollywood's been doing this for ages, this is why space ships generate sound when they fly by.
Just a thought. I'm not visually impaired by any stretch of the imagination, but I have very keen hearing and would love to put it to better use. I hope one day in the future my desktop computer provides more audio feedback.
"Oh man, I gotta find me one of these servers. No more getting spanked by 11 year-olds in CounterStrike."
Heh I didn't laugh until I envisioned Bender saying that.
I think you're right. Often in Quake, I aim and take shots in the direction I heard the sound.
One problem with Quake is that it's rather limited visually. I don't mean in graphic detail, but in field of view. Your eyes can see roughly 180 degrees, but the game has it zoomed in at 90. I'm seriously interested in using a 3-monitor setup so I could get peripheral vision, but I'd happily try the sound enhanced version first.
Think there'll be a mod so you can get the sound and the visuals?
God dammit, I just spit water all over my monitor.
:)
ooOOoo rainbow!
heh
That was funny
The parent post here recieved a 'Flamebait' moderation.
Let's be serious, the only flames my comment would bring would be from the grill. (Maybe it was a sarcastic moderation?)
This is definitely one of the silliest mods I've ever recieved.
No, that's not even close to what I was saying. What I was saying was that you're a dumb fuck if you go into a movie only to look for problems in it.
As a matter of fact, the sentence right before the quote you brought up says very clearly that I was talking about watching the movie, not writing a review:
"You guys are kinda missing the point to watching a movie." -- that's what I said.
One of the complaints I heard was "...it sucks because wasn't like the first movie!" to which my response is "Duh!". The fun part of the first movie was discovering all the aliens and technology and so on. How could they drag that out into a second movie while making it interesting?
That's exactly the type of thing I was babbling about. I wasn't badmouthing people being 'honest', I was commenting that they didn't get the point of the movie in the first place. The people that didn't like MiiB also seem to think that it should be a retread of the first one like Back to the Future 2 was to the original.
" Preferably without small minded attempts at censorship from preachy cocksuckers like you. We clear?"
Censorship? Cocksucker?? Don't you think you're being a little extreme here? Grow up. As I already said, I wasn't picking on the reviews, nor was I saying they should all be 'happy happy-joy joy'. God, if you couldn't understand what I was saying, I have no idea why you're reading reviews of movies.
They said that the new 'Camilla' processor will be out in q4 of 2002.
Why? It's not like the 'chickens' that McDonalds uses have any feathers.
"I hate to disappoint you, but...Turkeys can fly. In the wild turkeys actually roost in trees."
Obviously you're not aware of the WKRP's 'Turkey bombing'.
"As god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"
You forgot to mention that Tax-payers didn't spend a dime on this ship. It was funded through sales of 'Perri-Air'. Heh
Funny stuff =)
"I can't think of a practical situation, but if somebody could explain why you would need to send a gigabyte of data in one second vs. 8 second I'd be more impressed."
Movies like Final Fantasy would have greatly benefitted from 10 gigabit networking. They had over 1,000 machines rendering at a time. The resolution was enormous. (I apologize, I don't remember the exact resolution.) The animation was heavily layered, each frame having a miniumum of 10 layers and some hit as high as 100.
I can imagine that whenever they did the compositing, they didn't do it over the network. Rather, they copied alllll of the frames of each layer of the section they were working on to the compositing machine. I betcha anything they found it was quicker to carry around hot-swappable firewire drives in order to ferry data around faster than the network could move it.
If they had 10-gigabit capability, it would likely have drastically altered their workflow. They would probably have a central, heavily raided server holding all the source images. Then the compositing artists control the compositing from their machine, but the data stays on the server via network.
This would definitely have saved them ooodles of time. Even if their workflow was exactly the same, the huge increase in bandwidth would have greatly reduced their networking overhead.
A studio like that'd happily pay big $$$ for a network like that. The investment would have paid off right away.