I think what this does prove is that there will be natural climate fluctuations.
Now I am in no way saying that we are not affecting our climate, but how much are we really affecting it?
How much of what we observe is natural, and how much is man made?
The problem with the greenhouse situation these days is it is no longer treated like science. It's far to political, and people are using it for their own political agenda instead of allowing science to study it objectivly.
I certainly don't know what to believe, so at the moment I'm more inclined to sit on the fence and view it the same way I view possibility of life on another planet. It may, or may not exist.
I want to know why someone hasn't made a generic device the size of an ipod which is made up of nothing except a large touch screen. That screen can then draw any user interface it wants on it.
Then you can have your organiser, mobile phone, mp3 player, any damn portable device you want in one single generic portable device!
How about the 2004 tsunami? The most devastating tsunami in recorded history and within days there were relief workers in the area helping out, burying bodies.
I certainly didn't hear about people stranded for 5 days without any sort of help.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco warned rioters and looters late on Thursday that National Guard troops were under her orders to "shoot and kill" if needed to restore order.
"These troops are battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."
This whole situation is making America look pathetic. You can send an army to 'liberate' another country, but you can't even help your own citizens when they need it.
From the picture it seems to just give devices the ability to expand the screen out so you can have a very portable device with a large screen.
So think of a mobile phone sized device that can expand out to screen size of a PSP (or something like that). Then give that screen touch pad or stylus abilities, and a powerful CPU and you have an ultimate generic portable PC with game, mp3 and organiser abilities.
It's a prototype. What do you want? It's not ready for prime time!
Do you really think they would say "paper-like display in two years" and then throw something out in two months, and put it on the market? It will still be two years before something like this hits the shops.
Which is done at any speed! 300fps is only the absolute maximum required.
This has gone on for far too long. If you believe you require 10000fps then that's fine. If you believe it's correct to have motion blur in a game then that's fine too.
No, you don't. Because it is not possible for the eye to percieve anything that fast.
The eye is most sensitive to brightness. Any picture that is flashed up faster than 1/300th of a second is not percieved by the human eye at all!
The only reason that you can percieve these pictures is because of the afterimage, which is what you get when you look at a bright light and then close your eyes.
So anything faster than that is a waste of processing.
I've been away the past few days so this post is late:)
This means that you will not be detecting collisions from graphics, but from 3d virtual model, that has no frame rate (it is just there, always).
That sounds great in theory, except computers can't do that. There is no way to have an arbitrary free flowing model like that, virtual or not. A computer always has to work on some sort of tick rate, even if it's as fast as the CPU's clock speed.
But lets assume what you said is possible. We can even use real life for this example. Imagine a very fast moving object. What you can see is only what you see through a camera. The camera takes a picture (a single frame). What you see in that single frame is the motion blured image. The camera begins taking the picture for the next frame. While that frame is being gererated you are still being displayed the previous frame.
Now. Looking at that image, point at where the object is in reality. Because the object is still moving it is no longer inside where the object appears. The hitbox will be leading the actual appearance of the object.
Now you may think that in a game this will never be a problem. You will never have an object moving fast enough for the object to lead the image that much. But that isn't true either. Motion blur has to be applied to everything from the camera's point of view, and the camera isn't stationary. The camera is the gamer, and twitch gamers will move the camera very fast causing a large motion blur.
Now, if you believe that won't be a problem and gamers won't care, then you really really don't know gamers. You should see the CS:Source players complain about the hit registration in that game.
A few years ago the National Library in Canberra had an extremely popular exihbition called "National Treasures" or something like that. It was a collection of many historical and influential works like ancient maps, the original lyrics to "Yesterday" by Paul McCartney, and other incredible things I've forgotten about. Included amongst them was Einstein's original paper on relativity open at the famous equation E=mc^2.
A German friend of mine went and saw it, and when he read that page he laughed because Einstein had written (in German) a long explanation concluded by 'this can be aproximated by the equation E=mc^2'.
We both hoped that all the physicists around the world knew that the equation wasn't acurate:)
You can't process the bullets and hit boxes faster. You will end up with either the hitbox not following the predicted path causing graphical glitches, or the hitbox being calculated outside the drawn object. Both of which are wrong.
You get motion blur because the frame spans a period of time. Think of it like a camera shutter. When the shutter opens the object is at the start of the blur. By the time the shutter closes the object has moved leaving the blur pattern. You can't place the hitbox at the start of the blur or at the end of the blur because both are wrong. For that single frame the object is the Entire blur pattern.
So where do you place the hitbox? Your hand example works in real life because time is free flowing and despite the fact we visualise it as a blur the hand's 'hitbox' is always in a distinct and absolute position. A game engine doesn't have free flowing time and works on ticks like a camera shutter where the position of everything is calculated every tick, and the scene is drawn for that tick. So if you wave your hand so it becomes a blur you will Always be able to 'hit' your hand because the hand no longer has an absolute position, it only has the blured position which is stretched out.
To do what you suggested you would have to have two seperate tick rates. You would have one tick rate for drawing the scene, and another tick rate for calculating the hitbox. But that causes another problem. Each motion blur would have to predict where an object will end up at the end of it's tick time to ensure the hitbox is in the correct place. But what happens if the model doesn't follow it's predicted path and changes direction half way through the draw tick? That drawn scene and blur will have been incorrect and will have to be corrected in the next draw. I believe that is something your eye will pick up, and the game will look jittery occasionally.
Motion blur can't be used in all games. But not because it can't be rendered or anything.
From reading the other comments in reply to yours I'm not sure people fully understand what motion blur is. It's explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_blur
Motion blur can be used in animation to make characters appear they were moving really fast. It's done by drawing the character in a warped shape. If a game uses motion blur then they would all be able to run at 20-30fps without stuttering in any way. All movement would look natural.
Some games already use motion blur. These are mainly car racing games, and flight simulators. An FPS can't use it though. In an FPS if someone shoots at you where do you register the hit? If the character is stretched out in a motion blur, should the hit box also be stretched out? The obvious answer is no because that isn't fair, and makes you can easy target. If you don't stretch out the hit box what part of the visible character do you aim at?
This is why FPS games have to run at 60fps or more.
Because solar panels are not that cheap, and you waste a lot of energy when you convert energy from one form to another.
You would get very close to 100% efficiency by redirecting sunlight straight into a room than by converting it into electricty and then back to light again.
I must of read a different article because I didn't see anyone suggesting that we can use this as a replacement for reducing pollution in the first place.
It seems to me that this is a solution that can be used in conjunction with such efforts.
In fact there was even some questions as to how effective this would be
"Trying to clean up air pollution seems to me to be a stretch," said Reynaldo Barreto, a chemistry professor at Purdue University in Indiana. "It doesn't mean it can't be done. But there's an awful lot of air and not a whole lot of surface."
No matter what you say any progress like this is a Good Thing! There is not going to be any one, single solution to these problems. So putting a negative spin on this sort of progress because it isn't a wonderous magic bullet doesn't achieve anything.
True, solar panels do not create polutants when being used. But the manufacture of them does create huge amount of polution due to the mining and refining processes of the materials used.
They are not a magical answer to all our polution, and energy needs.
From an article I read ages ago, she has never seen the terminator movies. She took the case to the FBI and asked them to investigate the Matrix for her. They came back to her and said "Yes you have a case, it looks like the Matrix was stolen from you, and so was Terminator".
I have used it. We use it for all of our servers. I tried it on a desktop ages ago for a week or so before I got rid of it.
None of this really matters. This whole discussion is about whether linux is ready for the desktop, and in comparison to other OS, especially OSX it's not.
First distro I used was Red Hat, then Mandrake. Whenever a new version came out I just did a complete reinstall because it was better and more stable than going to upgrade process.
Now I use Gentoo. Which works fine most of the time. But if I didn't do an emerge world regularly then the next one I did resulted in compile errors everywhere and it was easier to just reinstall. I haven't had that problem in quite a while though as I try and update the system at least once a week.
GobeLinux looks interesting though. So I was thinking of giving that a go sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what this does prove is that there will be natural climate fluctuations.
Now I am in no way saying that we are not affecting our climate, but how much are we really affecting it?
How much of what we observe is natural, and how much is man made?
The problem with the greenhouse situation these days is it is no longer treated like science. It's far to political, and people are using it for their own political agenda instead of allowing science to study it objectivly.
I certainly don't know what to believe, so at the moment I'm more inclined to sit on the fence and view it the same way I view possibility of life on another planet. It may, or may not exist.
And neither is a mouse pad on a laptop.
I want to know why someone hasn't made a generic device the size of an ipod which is made up of nothing except a large touch screen. That screen can then draw any user interface it wants on it.
Then you can have your organiser, mobile phone, mp3 player, any damn portable device you want in one single generic portable device!
How about the 2004 tsunami? The most devastating tsunami in recorded history and within days there were relief workers in the area helping out, burying bodies.
I certainly didn't hear about people stranded for 5 days without any sort of help.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco warned rioters and looters late on Thursday that National Guard troops were under her orders to "shoot and kill" if needed to restore order.
"These troops are battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."
This whole situation is making America look pathetic. You can send an army to 'liberate' another country, but you can't even help your own citizens when they need it.
So it's finally been solved. After centuries of study we finally know that the ingredient Alchemists were missing was electricty.
All they needed was 1.21 gigawatts to convert lead into gold!
So what about heavy elements? Where were they produced if they weren't produced in massive supernovas?
From the picture it seems to just give devices the ability to expand the screen out so you can have a very portable device with a large screen.
So think of a mobile phone sized device that can expand out to screen size of a PSP (or something like that). Then give that screen touch pad or stylus abilities, and a powerful CPU and you have an ultimate generic portable PC with game, mp3 and organiser abilities.
It's a prototype. What do you want? It's not ready for prime time!
Do you really think they would say "paper-like display in two years" and then throw something out in two months, and put it on the market? It will still be two years before something like this hits the shops.
Which is done at any speed! 300fps is only the absolute maximum required.
This has gone on for far too long. If you believe you require 10000fps then that's fine. If you believe it's correct to have motion blur in a game then that's fine too.
No, you don't. Because it is not possible for the eye to percieve anything that fast. The eye is most sensitive to brightness. Any picture that is flashed up faster than 1/300th of a second is not percieved by the human eye at all! The only reason that you can percieve these pictures is because of the afterimage, which is what you get when you look at a bright light and then close your eyes. So anything faster than that is a waste of processing.
But you don't need 10000fps. You only need 60-100fps, which we already have :)
This means that you will not be detecting collisions from graphics, but from 3d virtual model, that has no frame rate (it is just there, always).
That sounds great in theory, except computers can't do that. There is no way to have an arbitrary free flowing model like that, virtual or not. A computer always has to work on some sort of tick rate, even if it's as fast as the CPU's clock speed.
But lets assume what you said is possible. We can even use real life for this example. Imagine a very fast moving object. What you can see is only what you see through a camera. The camera takes a picture (a single frame). What you see in that single frame is the motion blured image. The camera begins taking the picture for the next frame. While that frame is being gererated you are still being displayed the previous frame.
Now. Looking at that image, point at where the object is in reality. Because the object is still moving it is no longer inside where the object appears. The hitbox will be leading the actual appearance of the object.
Now you may think that in a game this will never be a problem. You will never have an object moving fast enough for the object to lead the image that much. But that isn't true either. Motion blur has to be applied to everything from the camera's point of view, and the camera isn't stationary. The camera is the gamer, and twitch gamers will move the camera very fast causing a large motion blur.
Now, if you believe that won't be a problem and gamers won't care, then you really really don't know gamers. You should see the CS:Source players complain about the hit registration in that game.
Yep. I'm curious. I think it would be an interesting problem to solve.
A few years ago the National Library in Canberra had an extremely popular exihbition called "National Treasures" or something like that. It was a collection of many historical and influential works like ancient maps, the original lyrics to "Yesterday" by Paul McCartney, and other incredible things I've forgotten about. Included amongst them was Einstein's original paper on relativity open at the famous equation E=mc^2.
A German friend of mine went and saw it, and when he read that page he laughed because Einstein had written (in German) a long explanation concluded by 'this can be aproximated by the equation E=mc^2'.
We both hoped that all the physicists around the world knew that the equation wasn't acurate :)
You didn't understand what I said did you?
You can't process the bullets and hit boxes faster. You will end up with either the hitbox not following the predicted path causing graphical glitches, or the hitbox being calculated outside the drawn object. Both of which are wrong.
But where is the hand?
You get motion blur because the frame spans a period of time. Think of it like a camera shutter. When the shutter opens the object is at the start of the blur. By the time the shutter closes the object has moved leaving the blur pattern. You can't place the hitbox at the start of the blur or at the end of the blur because both are wrong. For that single frame the object is the Entire blur pattern.
So where do you place the hitbox? Your hand example works in real life because time is free flowing and despite the fact we visualise it as a blur the hand's 'hitbox' is always in a distinct and absolute position. A game engine doesn't have free flowing time and works on ticks like a camera shutter where the position of everything is calculated every tick, and the scene is drawn for that tick. So if you wave your hand so it becomes a blur you will Always be able to 'hit' your hand because the hand no longer has an absolute position, it only has the blured position which is stretched out.
To do what you suggested you would have to have two seperate tick rates. You would have one tick rate for drawing the scene, and another tick rate for calculating the hitbox. But that causes another problem. Each motion blur would have to predict where an object will end up at the end of it's tick time to ensure the hitbox is in the correct place. But what happens if the model doesn't follow it's predicted path and changes direction half way through the draw tick? That drawn scene and blur will have been incorrect and will have to be corrected in the next draw. I believe that is something your eye will pick up, and the game will look jittery occasionally.
Motion blur can't be used in all games. But not because it can't be rendered or anything.
From reading the other comments in reply to yours I'm not sure people fully understand what motion blur is. It's explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_blur
Motion blur can be used in animation to make characters appear they were moving really fast. It's done by drawing the character in a warped shape. If a game uses motion blur then they would all be able to run at 20-30fps without stuttering in any way. All movement would look natural.
Some games already use motion blur. These are mainly car racing games, and flight simulators. An FPS can't use it though. In an FPS if someone shoots at you where do you register the hit? If the character is stretched out in a motion blur, should the hit box also be stretched out? The obvious answer is no because that isn't fair, and makes you can easy target. If you don't stretch out the hit box what part of the visible character do you aim at?
This is why FPS games have to run at 60fps or more.
Because solar panels are not that cheap, and you waste a lot of energy when you convert energy from one form to another.
You would get very close to 100% efficiency by redirecting sunlight straight into a room than by converting it into electricty and then back to light again.
Did you see who was directing it? John Woo.
There will be one guaranteed scene with a slow motion dove flying across the screen.
If we are lucky the scene will end with Battle Cat pouncing on top of it and eating the bird.
It seems to me that this is a solution that can be used in conjunction with such efforts.
In fact there was even some questions as to how effective this would be
"Trying to clean up air pollution seems to me to be a stretch," said Reynaldo Barreto, a chemistry professor at Purdue University in Indiana. "It doesn't mean it can't be done. But there's an awful lot of air and not a whole lot of surface."
No matter what you say any progress like this is a Good Thing! There is not going to be any one, single solution to these problems. So putting a negative spin on this sort of progress because it isn't a wonderous magic bullet doesn't achieve anything.
They are not a magical answer to all our polution, and energy needs.
From an article I read ages ago, she has never seen the terminator movies. She took the case to the FBI and asked them to investigate the Matrix for her. They came back to her and said "Yes you have a case, it looks like the Matrix was stolen from you, and so was Terminator".
I have used it. We use it for all of our servers. I tried it on a desktop ages ago for a week or so before I got rid of it.
None of this really matters. This whole discussion is about whether linux is ready for the desktop, and in comparison to other OS, especially OSX it's not.
First distro I used was Red Hat, then Mandrake. Whenever a new version came out I just did a complete reinstall because it was better and more stable than going to upgrade process.
Now I use Gentoo. Which works fine most of the time. But if I didn't do an emerge world regularly then the next one I did resulted in compile errors everywhere and it was easier to just reinstall. I haven't had that problem in quite a while though as I try and update the system at least once a week.
GobeLinux looks interesting though. So I was thinking of giving that a go sometime.