It's a ray tracer and that'll cost you. You may find you can render a cube or sphere without trouble but it's hard to efficiently ray trace something like a human figure with clothing etc. that has a few million polygons - all of which may be required at any point in the render. Mental Ray doesn't make use of some really quite cool advances in ray tracing that have been made in the last few years. For example it doesn't use Matt Pharr et al's caching techniques. It also has trouble displacement mapping - again because that requires massive tesselation which is difficult in a ray tracer. It's a trade off between realism (which is easy in a ray tracer) and efficiency (which a 'streaming' renderer like Renderman is good at).
Someone wrote a bullshit paper. Editors at some journals were asleep. These editors need to be hauled over hot coals. The journals will lose some respect. But the whole problem was detected by physicists who are perfectly competent to judge what is and isn't bullshit in the field of physics. There's nothing bigger going on. There's no sign of any kind of crisis going on. People just put whatever spin they want on what is really fairly straightforward.
"he worked for ten years, so he deserved a doctorate."
Don't make a judgement from such a comment. We don't know exactly how or why that was said but I don't know any physicist who would agree with it (I know quite a few physicists). Certainly you are wrong to generalize to "the people who reviewed them are now spouting inanities like..." from a single inane comment.
Re:Get rid of the TM and you're A-OK
on
Micro Tetris
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· Score: 1
Interesting. Thanks.
Did they license Tetris?
on
Micro Tetris
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Or is that blatant theft of intellectual property?
No Libertarian I've ever heard of has defended slavery of any kind, especially to a taxaholic government.
To corporations. Of course I'm not talking about governments. But a thousand headed hydra of unfettered corporations would be infinitely worse then a government controlled by a constitution. And that's the 'freedom' so called libertarians call for.
if you vote for a Libertarian, you're voting FOR more liberty and AGAINST
Of course if you're a libertarian you're not using the word 'liberty' like anyone else because to you being sold into slavery is liberty. Fortunately nobody other than libertarians sees it that way so you really ought to stop misusing laguage the way you do.
Wickramasinghe is a crackpot
on
Bacteria @ 41km
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· Score: 1
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are (/were) pretty well known as on a planet of their own. Their claims vary from believing illnesses like flu arrive on Earth from comets to believing there is a megaintelligent being at the end of the universe communicating with us via quantum uncertainty. If you don't believe me just pick up the books that they have written - it's all published.
98.3% of people, when asked, would you like something for nothing, said "yes". When asked if they would also like to be able to give that something to their friends, for free as well, 82% replied "yes".
I read this book years ago but because I liked the pictures so much I still have it. However the text is completely devoid of content.
Imagine a philosopher with no practical experience of anything vaguely robotic wrote a book on robotics. This is what they would write. Braitenberg talks about vague concepts like memory, foresight, logic and trains of thought. But these discussions are completely sophomoric jumping from systems with one or two neurons to imaginary systems with the above properties. I don't need a book to point out that an intelligent machine needs foresight, and I don't need a book to point out that a simple neuronal system with persistence might have something to do with memory. Unless you're going to say something about the details between neurons and full blown brains then you're just armchair philosophizing and any sophomore can do that without the help of a book. Maybe if he had written the book in the forties it'd be interesting. But by the eighties every science fiction writer and his dog had written about these subjects with far more detail.
But I do love the pictures by Ladina Ribi and Claudia-Martin-Schubert. They are quite special.
The catch is the complexity of the problem grows exponentially. I don't believe that predicting the folding of a tiny protein shows that we are any closer to predicting the folding of the kinds of proteins that would be useful to be able to predict. I think the time is better spent on SETI@home myself.
I have a feeling they don't know. Look how fast MacOS X does 2D rendering and you'll see that they are a little lacking in the optimization department. Even with Quartz Extreme the performance can be painfully slow as it draws things like Postscript documents.
Kurzweil must be very out of touch with current research if he thinks there is any chance of that happening by 2039. Forget Moore's law. Look at how smart machines have been getting over the decades. It's nowhere near that impressive. Clearly intelligence doesn't increase in proportion with Moore's law.
I started trying to read it. It reads like some boring work of fiction laden with irrelevant details such as the fact the sun was setting! What are the key relevant facts in that article?
our understanding of physics breaks down at the edge
No it doesn't. At least not according to classical General Relativity which describes nice continuous and well behaved properties as you cross over the event horizon. If you approach the mathematics naively it looks like things go to infinity at the horizon but that's due to the cooridnate system being used. Just like the way longitude goes a little awry at the North and South Poles. But this doesn't signify any real problems. Just change coordinates (to Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates for instance) and you have well defined finite fields again.
Now the singularity is a different matter. No coordinate change can fix things up there.
You made the assumption I read the whole article. I decided that the statement I pointed out was illogical enough to make me read no further but I shall try to dig out the original article some time if it's available.
I think a training course in logic should be mandatory for everyone.
the team found chemical oddities there that could be explained by the presence of living microbes.
That's extremely uninteresting. The fact that my coffee cup is half empty could be explained by an ET having drunk it. Here is a statement that would be interesting:
the team found chemical oddities there that could not be explained by anything other than the presence of living microbes.
See the difference a couple of negations make? You go from something completely insignificant to something exciting.
There needs to be a different mod category, cynicsm or something
The only new category needed is 'clueless'. If you get enough of these then your/. account automatically directs you to a website where obscure concepts such as 'irony', 'sarcasm' and maybe even 'humor' are explained.
I don't think inline isn't part of the (old) C standard. It is part of the C++ standard and I believe it may have been when cfront was around. The original C++ compiler, cfront, worked by preprocessing C++ and spitting out C to a C compiler. If what I say is correct above it must have done what you ask. Therefore port the code to C++ (if you're using ANSI C this is most likely trivial) and cfront it. I believe a version of cfront may still be available.
I've heard that is a very good book. However that conclusion sounds pretty unlikely. There are many synesthetes who don't have amazing memories and if it were that simple people who learn from multimedia CDROMs would remember more than those who read:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a ray tracer and that'll cost you. You may find you can render a cube or sphere without trouble but it's hard to efficiently ray trace something like a human figure with clothing etc. that has a few million polygons - all of which may be required at any point in the render. Mental Ray doesn't make use of some really quite cool advances in ray tracing that have been made in the last few years. For example it doesn't use Matt Pharr et al's caching techniques. It also has trouble displacement mapping - again because that requires massive tesselation which is difficult in a ray tracer. It's a trade off between realism (which is easy in a ray tracer) and efficiency (which a 'streaming' renderer like Renderman is good at).
Someone wrote a bullshit paper. Editors at some journals were asleep. These editors need to be hauled over hot coals. The journals will lose some respect. But the whole problem was detected by physicists who are perfectly competent to judge what is and isn't bullshit in the field of physics. There's nothing bigger going on. There's no sign of any kind of crisis going on. People just put whatever spin they want on what is really fairly straightforward.
Interesting. Thanks.
Or is that blatant theft of intellectual property?
If we get to see more of Arwen!
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are (/were) pretty well known as on a planet of their own. Their claims vary from believing illnesses like flu arrive on Earth from comets to believing there is a megaintelligent being at the end of the universe communicating with us via quantum uncertainty. If you don't believe me just pick up the books that they have written - it's all published.
98.3% of people, when asked, would you like something for nothing, said "yes". When asked if they would also like to be able to give that something to their friends, for free as well, 82% replied "yes".
Imagine a philosopher with no practical experience of anything vaguely robotic wrote a book on robotics. This is what they would write. Braitenberg talks about vague concepts like memory, foresight, logic and trains of thought. But these discussions are completely sophomoric jumping from systems with one or two neurons to imaginary systems with the above properties. I don't need a book to point out that an intelligent machine needs foresight, and I don't need a book to point out that a simple neuronal system with persistence might have something to do with memory. Unless you're going to say something about the details between neurons and full blown brains then you're just armchair philosophizing and any sophomore can do that without the help of a book. Maybe if he had written the book in the forties it'd be interesting. But by the eighties every science fiction writer and his dog had written about these subjects with far more detail.
But I do love the pictures by Ladina Ribi and Claudia-Martin-Schubert. They are quite special.
The catch is the complexity of the problem grows exponentially. I don't believe that predicting the folding of a tiny protein shows that we are any closer to predicting the folding of the kinds of proteins that would be useful to be able to predict. I think the time is better spent on SETI@home myself.
I have a feeling they don't know. Look how fast MacOS X does 2D rendering and you'll see that they are a little lacking in the optimization department. Even with Quartz Extreme the performance can be painfully slow as it draws things like Postscript documents.
Kurzweil must be very out of touch with current research if he thinks there is any chance of that happening by 2039. Forget Moore's law. Look at how smart machines have been getting over the decades. It's nowhere near that impressive. Clearly intelligence doesn't increase in proportion with Moore's law.
nt
I think you mean "au contraire".
I started trying to read it. It reads like some boring work of fiction laden with irrelevant details such as the fact the sun was setting! What are the key relevant facts in that article?
Now the singularity is a different matter. No coordinate change can fix things up there.
And how many ETIs have they found? It's obviously not a very good investment.
You made the assumption I read the whole article. I decided that the statement I pointed out was illogical enough to make me read no further but I shall try to dig out the original article some time if it's available.
I don't think inline isn't part of the (old) C standard. It is part of the C++ standard and I believe it may have been when cfront was around. The original C++ compiler, cfront, worked by preprocessing C++ and spitting out C to a C compiler. If what I say is correct above it must have done what you ask. Therefore port the code to C++ (if you're using ANSI C this is most likely trivial) and cfront it. I believe a version of cfront may still be available.
I've heard that is a very good book. However that conclusion sounds pretty unlikely. There are many synesthetes who don't have amazing memories and if it were that simple people who learn from multimedia CDROMs would remember more than those who read :-)