I prefer thinking in watts than in monetary terms as watts are absolute, money is not. The general rule of thumb I use is that if something creates a lot of heat (cooker, immersion heater, element heater, incandescent light bulb) or moves something heavy (tumble drier, lawn mower, hoover) then it'll use a proportionally large amount of juice.
However, this is mitigated by the fact that people don't typically keep such devices on all the time, for fear of burning down their house. Leaving everything on standby or using electronic devices constantly does end up consuming a lot of energy, particularly if you consider how many people are doing the same. My router and cable modem combined use around 24 watts, so to use as much energy as a kettle left on for 5 minutes I'd have to leave it on for around 3 1/2 hours. A nation of people doing that 24/7 along with all their other energy uses adds up to a lot of watts, a lot of money and a lot of melting ice caps.
Now, if you're the sort of person that uses a chandelier full of incandescent bulbs (surely not though, what kind of person doesn't use CFL bulbs these days. Oh, wait... most of them), you'll probably laugh at my worrying about 24 watts (or around 200KWh every year, multiply that by several million for national use) but many of us now take our energy use seriously and have begun to plan accordingly. Sure, using an oven for an hour dwarfs the energy used by your desktop, laptop, gadgets and lighting but the cumulative effects, both on a household and national/global scale are significant.
The fact is, it costs nothing to switch things off when you don't need them, just a tiny bit of care and time on your part. Saying that the energy use of these things is insignificant just because you waste vast amounts of energy on other things doesn't mean that you shouldn't curb both.
Just drink suntory ulon tea instead, stop carbonating your liver:) I stopped drinking coke like beverages because they tend to leave a horrid black coating of scum on my tounge. On the broader subject of schooling, discipline, uniformity (and uniforms), come over and visit Japan. Here we enjoy a very safe society free from guns and generally, violence and crime. The flipside of this is a similarly prevelent lack of independent thought and personal freedom and because people have had conformity drilled into their brains since preschool, nobody minds. Very Orwleian, make suire people know no better and they will be happy with less. Welcome to your future.
"That's why more and more professionals are finding that at NCR, nothing stands in the way of innovative thinking."
The trouble is with big companies is that their spin doctors are so far removed from the nasty reality their lawyers try to create. Trying to copyright such fundimental concepts seems like a great idea to those who have nothing to do with development; If they did then perhaps they would know how it feels to wonder if whatever you come up with has been patented by some pinstripped shark with dollar signs in his eye. If only the guys in charge weren't so clueless, we would not have these problems.
The trouble with that is, Ginger toms like to eat mice just as much. You are right though, a two party democracy is a joke and unfortunately the third options have all but disappeared in my country of origin, Britain, as well (actually, the second option seems to be on holiday too). I'm not totally clued up on the American system and forgive me if I'm wrong but most of the campaign energy seems to be towards the president, rather than the party and it's policies. However, he seems to have about as much clout as the Queen of England or the Japanese Emperor which is to say, not a lot (symbolic figureheads with no political power). So who is in power? the house of representatives or the president's party? Cliton asked for gun controls, the NRA's lobbyists start spouting crap and win the day, Cliton asks for an increase in NASA's budget and it gets slashed to hell. As an aside, after the columbine killings, waves were to be expected but looking at it, the groups with the strongest political faction win out and those that don't bother with all that political stuff (i.e. the games industry and Hollywood) take all the flak. Sorry but the question of what doom and nasty films did to those kids minds is one for psychologists and it is difficult to prove either way whether or not that would have prevented the killings. Not having vicious weponary in their cupboard would have prevented it. It doesn't seem to matter in the slightest who you vote for, there are always going to be power groups who are there and there to stay who will veto any good ideas that come along; But anyway, what the hell do I know, I've never even been to the U.S.:) Tim.
Not wanting to seem pendantic, that's not the case. They were called 2 1/2 d because the maps were essentially flat 2d maps with different heights around the sections in doom and a hack in the build engine of duke to allow overhangs and certain non horizontal edges (but this was limited to a few angles if I remember correctly). There was no roll and no centre of projection looking down the y axis; if you looked up to the sky, the buildings would not seem to converge towards a central point. This was due to the raycasting method that was used to make textured 3d gaming worlds a bit before their time. Quake and descent were true 3d worlds, even if decsent's engine looked a bit shoody (didn't subXel accuracy or maybe it was just the dodgey textures) which proves that 3d did exist before microsoft came along.. not to mention elite, sentinel and others on 8bit machines.
I agree that this feature is high on my list too; I'm sure he's aware of all the implicit techniques out there but bare in mind that smooth cubic urfaces are one thing but random relief detail (i.e. drawn by an artist as textures tend to be) cannot be so easily represented by any higher order surfaces that spring to mind; Also, using environmental bump mapping (or a more accurate technique that perturbs the normal) you can save on polygon bandwidth and add the illusion of greater quality at greater speed, which is what I want from a 3d card. Maybe in the future we'll have cards that do what softimage does and take a bump map and convert it into some sort of polygon representation, only on the card itself and then we would have silhouette edge detail as well (you could do that by finding the edge polygons and only splitting those). For now, environment bump mapping and hardware t&l seem to be the best route. The next card I buy will have both and probably more.
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I prefer thinking in watts than in monetary terms as watts are absolute, money is not. The general rule of thumb I use is that if something creates a lot of heat (cooker, immersion heater, element heater, incandescent light bulb) or moves something heavy (tumble drier, lawn mower, hoover) then it'll use a proportionally large amount of juice.
However, this is mitigated by the fact that people don't typically keep such devices on all the time, for fear of burning down their house. Leaving everything on standby or using electronic devices constantly does end up consuming a lot of energy, particularly if you consider how many people are doing the same. My router and cable modem combined use around 24 watts, so to use as much energy as a kettle left on for 5 minutes I'd have to leave it on for around 3 1/2 hours. A nation of people doing that 24/7 along with all their other energy uses adds up to a lot of watts, a lot of money and a lot of melting ice caps.
Now, if you're the sort of person that uses a chandelier full of incandescent bulbs (surely not though, what kind of person doesn't use CFL bulbs these days. Oh, wait... most of them), you'll probably laugh at my worrying about 24 watts (or around 200KWh every year, multiply that by several million for national use) but many of us now take our energy use seriously and have begun to plan accordingly. Sure, using an oven for an hour dwarfs the energy used by your desktop, laptop, gadgets and lighting but the cumulative effects, both on a household and national/global scale are significant.
The fact is, it costs nothing to switch things off when you don't need them, just a tiny bit of care and time on your part. Saying that the energy use of these things is insignificant just because you waste vast amounts of energy on other things doesn't mean that you shouldn't curb both.
Tim.
Just drink suntory ulon tea instead, stop carbonating your liver :) I stopped drinking coke like beverages because they tend to leave a horrid black coating of scum on my tounge.
On the broader subject of schooling, discipline, uniformity (and uniforms), come over and visit Japan. Here we enjoy a very safe society free from guns and generally, violence and crime. The flipside of this is a similarly prevelent lack of independent thought and personal freedom and because people have had conformity drilled into their brains since preschool, nobody minds. Very Orwleian, make suire people know no better and they will be happy with less.
Welcome to your future.
Tim.
"That's why more and more professionals are finding that at NCR, nothing stands in the way of innovative thinking."
The trouble is with big companies is that their spin doctors are so far removed from the nasty reality their lawyers try to create. Trying to copyright such fundimental concepts seems like a great idea to those who have nothing to do with development; If they did then perhaps they would know how it feels to wonder if whatever you come up with has been patented by some pinstripped shark with dollar signs in his eye. If only the guys in charge weren't so clueless, we would not have these problems.
Tim.
The trouble with that is, Ginger toms like to eat mice just as much. You are right though, a two party democracy is a joke and unfortunately the third options have all but disappeared in my country of origin, Britain, as well (actually, the second option seems to be on holiday too). I'm not totally clued up on the American system and forgive me if I'm wrong but most of the campaign energy seems to be towards the president, rather than the party and it's policies. However, he seems to have about as much clout as the Queen of England or the Japanese Emperor which is to say, not a lot (symbolic figureheads with no political power). So who is in power? the house of representatives or the president's party? Cliton asked for gun controls, the NRA's lobbyists start spouting crap and win the day, Cliton asks for an increase in NASA's budget and it gets slashed to hell. As an aside, after the columbine killings, waves were to be expected but looking at it, the groups with the strongest political faction win out and those that don't bother with all that political stuff (i.e. the games industry and Hollywood) take all the flak. Sorry but the question of what doom and nasty films did to those kids minds is one for psychologists and it is difficult to prove either way whether or not that would have prevented the killings. Not having vicious weponary in their cupboard would have prevented it. It doesn't seem to matter in the slightest who you vote for, there are always going to be power groups who are there and there to stay who will veto any good ideas that come along; But anyway, what the hell do I know, I've never even been to the U.S. :) Tim.
Not wanting to seem pendantic, that's not the case. They were called 2 1/2 d because the maps were essentially flat 2d maps with different heights around the sections in doom and a hack in the build engine of duke to allow overhangs and certain non horizontal edges (but this was limited to a few angles if I remember correctly). There was no roll and no centre of projection looking down the y axis; if you looked up to the sky, the buildings would not seem to converge towards a central point. This was due to the raycasting method that was used to make textured 3d gaming worlds a bit before their time.
Quake and descent were true 3d worlds, even if decsent's engine looked a bit shoody (didn't subXel accuracy or maybe it was just the dodgey textures) which proves that 3d did exist before microsoft came along.. not to mention elite, sentinel and others on 8bit machines.
Tim
I agree that this feature is high on my list too; I'm sure he's aware of all the implicit techniques out there but bare in mind that smooth cubic urfaces are one thing but random relief detail (i.e. drawn by an artist as textures tend to be) cannot be so easily represented by any higher order surfaces that spring to mind; Also, using environmental bump mapping (or a more accurate technique that perturbs the normal) you can save on polygon bandwidth and add the illusion of greater quality at greater speed, which is what I want from a 3d card.
Maybe in the future we'll have cards that do what softimage does and take a bump map and convert it into some sort of polygon representation, only on the card itself and then we would have silhouette edge detail as well (you could do that by finding the edge polygons and only splitting those).
For now, environment bump mapping and hardware t&l seem to be the best route.
The next card I buy will have both and probably more.
Tim
A flat, larger screen and it's a G4 alright. Maybe wiley toons also design macs in their spare time :)
4 99.html
http://www.wileytoons.com/homer/again/homer_031
Tim