Try converting your models to Gnuplot format and converting to PS with that. It probably won't handle perspective, but it does orthographic and isometric projections just fine.
Let's assume without loss of generality that you pick the first digit. That rules out cases 4 to 7. Knowing there's at least a 1 rules out case 0. The cases left are 001, 010 and 011. Therefore the odds that there are two 1's is 1/3.
The clever bit is finding ways to keep track of the error without using division.
The algorithm can be easily obtained by writing the obvious iterative algorithm in floating point, then separating the fractional part from the integer part, and finally multiplying the fractional part by the length of the longer dimension (times 2 if you're using midpoint-Bresenham) to turn it into an integer.
I like ratings. They help you choose what you want to see, or what your kids want to see. My big problem with the US system is that the ratings are fairly useless for this purpose.
In Australia, we don't have a perfect system (far from it), but one thing that I like is the consumer advice label. Rather than just give an overall rating (G, PG, M, MA, R), they actually give you, on the movie poster, video cover, TV guide or broadcast the programme, the reasons why it got that rating.
Reasons can include violence, nudity, sex, coarse language, drug use, horror or a particularly useful category called "adult themes". Adult themes are topics which kids may need parental guidance or help in understanding, like mental illness, marital breakup, the supernatural and so on. I love this, because I can envisage an age which my daughter will reach where I won't have a problem with, say, nudity (it's just the human body in its natural state) or coarse language (there's plenty of that around in the wider world), but I'd like to sit with her if she sees a portrayal of hate groups, or people with mental illnesses. I think that would be more confusing for a 10 year old, and need "parental guidance" more, than depictions of sex.
So, IMO, these ratings on video games will do as much good as the other North American ratings on TV programmes or films: hardly any good at all. How about some real information instead?
I've met a number of attractive, intelligent, well-educated women through dating services.
I don't doubt it. Have you ever had a lasting relationship with any of them, though?
I've never known of any long-term committed relationships which started with a dating service. My experience may be limited in that regard, though.
The best long-term relationships start without this baggage. My wife and I fall in and out of love all the time, and our relationship goes in cycles of being "interested" and "not interested". But we're always best friends. That's what keeps us together.
If it were serious, the correct flight number would be on the form.
The form said that they arrived in Honolulu on "Apollo 13". In fact they arrived by ship on the USS Hornet, so that millitary shipping number is what should be on the form. Since it isn't, this form can't be a serious document.
Disclaimer: I'm not one to talk. I met my geek mate on the net.:-)
Having said that, whatever you do, don't go looking for a mate. That will put unnecessary baggage on any relationships you do have. Do what some of the others here have suggested, but do it to enjoy the company of people, especially of people of the preferred sex. Relationships will develop naturally if they're meant to happen.
Does this mean that sections of your constitution don't apply to private schools?
Yes. The constitution only applies to the government.
For example, suppose your constitution has a clause which says that the government can't establish a state religion. That means that a government or government-funded organisation (e.g. a public school) can't say that members of some religion are allowed to be on staff. However this doesn't apply to non-government organisations (e.g. a church may impose a rule that you must be a member of this church to be an office holder).
Now of course it may not prohibit the government from passing laws prohibiting this kind of "discrimination" in other organisations, but there might be other problems there. Imagine the fuss that the Roman Catholic Church would kick up if a court decided that they had to allow women to be priests due to anti-discrimination laws...
There is a good reason for this. Democratic government is meant to be by and for "the people". Government has a monopoly on some things, so they need the restraint. On the other hand, you have a choice as to which private school you send your kids to (if you choose a private school), so they don't need the restraint so much.
IMO, it's both good and bad. The bad part is that when private organisations overstep the mark there's often no legal recourse. (You can't legislate professionalism.) The good part is that negative publicity can be a much more powerful tool than the legal system, especially in a non-monopoly environment where people can and do vote with their money. Unfortunately, where the guilty party is a school, this can backfire, as lots of parents side with the school, thinking they're doing a good job with "discipline", when they're actually abusing their powers.
You know, teenagers are rebellious enough without giving them something actually legitimate to rebel against. You'd think the school would know that.
Redhat is following the rule that companies don't pay for software, they pay for solutions. They want someone to come in and set up everything for them so they don't need to think, or hire people to be experts. That's what Redhat does for a living, and they are about to make a profit from it.
I don't know how Eazel is planning to make money. When Andy H spoke at Monterey last year, I got the distinct impression that he didn't know either. I keep hearing about "subscription services", but no details.
Well, it's not exactly a dataflow machine, anyway.
The old E&S machines were dataflow architectures at the equivalent of the "machine code" level. Newer architectures are using similar ideas, but in a way that does not require details of the dataflow model leeching outside the chip.
Look at the Pentium 3, for example. It exploits dataflow ideas at the microcode level by prefetching several machine code instructions, splitting them into a larger set of "micro-instructions" and then schedules them together. That's not really a dataflow architecture, but it does use ideas from it: the idea of deciding on how to schedule the instructions at run-time.
The new clockless CPUs will exploit dataflow ideas by implementing a kind of dataflow machine between the functional units of the CPU itself. The CPU, remember, is like an interpreter for machine code. Since the "program" for that interpreter does not change, it can be implemented in a "plugboard" kind of way and people or programs producing machine code will never know the difference, apart from speed.
Why you need 16 bits (continued)
on
Linux in 3D
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· Score: 3
Bleah. Didn't get to finish that. Let me continue.
Anyway, Cineon uses a 10 bit logarithmic space, where the 10 bits let you capture that extended headroom. To give you some idea:
~1% black (the minimum exposure needed to register with the human eye) has a code of about 95.
18% grey has a code of 470.
90% white has a code of 685.
The maximum code is 1023, which by my calculations is about 1350% white or so.
Anyway, the reason why film people like 16 bits per channel in their paint programs is to capture this dynamic range. Logarithmic spaces are horrible to work with, so you really need a linear space. You pick a reference white and call that "white". Something like 4096 is a good compromise. This corresponds to "255" on an 8 bit display. Then everything above that is headroom.
You might think that picking 255 as reference white is a good idea, since 0..255 is adequate for computer displays. It isn't a good idea.:-) It captures more headroom than you can capture on film, and you pay for it by reduced precision in the range that matters (reference black to reference white).
As an aside, people often quote the statistic that the human eye can only distinguish so many colours. While that's true, people who say that are using the word "colour" in a different way than computer graphics people do. A certain shade of blue is one "colour" to psychologists and cognitive scientists, but it may map to many "colours" under different lighting conditions as far as a computer graphics person is concerned. Plus, in the real world, you can always add more photons. Clamping your range to [0..255] limits the number of photons that you can deliver to the eye, and so it just doesn't look as good. And that, dear reader, is one reason why I prefer going to the cinema than watching films on TV.:-)
Not as much of it is due to human perception as you think. It's entirely due to the dynamic range of film.
Film has a huge dynamic range. It starts off black and has to be overexposed "mercilessly" (to quote my boss) before it's totally saturated. Naturally, the full dynamic range is almost never covered in a normal indoor scene. Cameras are sometimes calibrated by holding benchmark grey or white cards in front of the lens. These cards are of a known intensity and expressed in terms of a percentage of "reference white", which roughly speaking plays the role of "255" on an 8-bit-per-channel display.
Now on film, the maximum exposure probably gives you 20 times that brightness. That additional range is called "headroom", and you notice it especially when you look at specular highlights on water or chrome on film.
Naturally up in the headroom, you won't notice subtle differences between brightnesses. One of the most popular digital negative formats, Kodak's Cineon format, captures this by using a 10-bit logarithmic space.
I hope the "OpenPGP consortium" doesn't make it their objective to write yet another version of PGP.
Errr... no. The last thing that an industry consortium would want to do is write a competitor to the products of its member. The most they would do in this regard is produce a reference implementation (like the one I wrote when I was reviewing RFC 2440 prior to IETF submission) which while correct isn't practical, or to serve as a test-bed for new features before they're implemented properly in a real product like GPG.
But the actual purpose of the consortium is to ensure that PGP, GPG and your hypothetical browser plugins all worked together, and to put a more formal face behind the IETF OpenPGP working group to push the standard forward even further, as well as related projects which PGP enthusiasts want to see happen like PGP/MIME, PGP/Ticket, integration of PGP with biometrics and so on. This is a good thing for the PGP standard.
You don't actually have a constitutional right to free speech. The best that can be argued is that you have an implied right under common law.
There was a supreme court decision about ten years ago which set the precedent that the use of the word "democracy" in the Australian constitution implied right to freedom of speech, as it pertains to government and politics. (That is, you have the right to comment about the the government, laws and politics in general.)
I therefore intend to comment about these new laws in the strongest "MA 15+ (strong coarse language)" rated terms.:-)
Is there some legal reason why a film must be rated, or why the MPAA must do it? Or is it just that the film distributors are MPAA members? I would think that there is scope here for someone else to break the monopoly on film ratings.
BTW, here in Australia, while our system is by no means perfect (in fact, there are serious problems with it) one feature that I like is that ratings are much more finely grained. In addition to the main categories (G, PG, M, MA, R, X, RC; see the guidelines if you want to know what they mean) there is always a list of what the OFLC calls "consumer advice", which is basically a list of reasons explaining why it attracted that rating. That way, if you don't mind sex but are squeamish at violence, you can easily tell if this is a film for you.
Consumer advice may include sex (e.g. "sexual references" or "sex scenes"), nudity (which is, naturally, treated differently from sex), drugs ("drug use"), "violence" (with some indication of how severe, such as "low-level violence"), "coarse language" (again with an indication of how severe), "horror", or what the OFLC calls "adult themes." "Adult themes", for those who are wondering, means that the film deals with things like mental illness, the supernatural or mild horror. All the things that children might not understand. This list of reasons is on all video boxes and movie posters, as well as read out by an announcer before most films or TV programmes which are rated above G. TV guides also put a summary in short form (for example, the repeat of South Park tonight is rated MA (A) where the (A) means it has adult themes). Some TV channels go even further, using their own consumer advice labels. For example, I remember one of Julian Clary's shows was rated M, with the consumer advice "strong innuendo".
The US could do with a more fine-grained system like this one, so we don't have to rely on spoiler reviews to decide whether or not we want to watch it.
The Bible was not open source by any means, if you mean the King James Version. Technically it carries Cum Privilego, which means that it belongs to the English crown, which authorised and paid for its production. For a hundred years, only the royal printer could print it. That's longer than a modern copyright, even post-copyright extension act.
One thing you have to keep in mind, though was that in the eras you're talking about, people were expected to be "gentlemen" and were more worried about their reputations than they are now. If you "plagairised", or otherwise misrepresented yourself, and got caught, your reputation would be shot and nobody would do business with you. That incentive is gone nowadays. Look at Jim Allchin. He lied in court and he's now still a senior VP at the same company!
Another thing is that in this era, credit was usually not given where credit is now due. For some of the greatest works of art we have no idea who did them, because a rich patron paid a tradesman to make them a statue, just like a plumber would be paid to lay pipes nowadays. We certainly don't want to return to an era where the provenance of artistic works is not known.
There is no doubt a happy medium in here somewhere.
This new form of sampling shows that hardware manufacturers have finally woken up to the fact that, to use Renderman terminology, the shading rate (the sampling rate at which textures, lighting etc are determined) and the pixel sampling rate should be decoupled. This simple anti-aliasing technique samples uses a pixel sampling rate at 4x the shading rate, using ordered sampling. Eventually we will see graphics cards where these two figures can be tuned separately, but it won't be for a while.
BTW, "anti-aliasing" is a bit of a misnumer. Ordered sampling does not remove aliasing. Neither does stochastic sampling. Ordered sampling merely moves the filtering problem up a few octaves. Stochastic sampling hides the aliasing behind noise, because our eyes find that less objectionable. The only way you can truly remove aliasing is analytically. Don't expect that in your graphics hardware for a long time.:-)
Bruce, you used to work for Pixar, and you know more about software patents, so you'd probably know more about this than us.
I've read the text of the patent and can't work out exactly what they claim. It reads like they claim any application of Monte Carlo integration to image generation. Also, how come they've been able to file what looks like the same patent three times?
I have the impression that Pixar are actually better than most about their patents, and I believe they've never tried to enforce their claimed API copyright. (Just as well for them. API copyrights are untested, and I don't think they want to be the first to test them. But then, it might just be because nobody tried to stand up to them.) Who did they enforce it against, and do you know what the circumstances were?
But believing implies faith, and as an atheist I don't believe in anything so by definition I have no faith. Your statement excludes atheists and should probably should have said "geeks don't mind what you believe or do not believe...".
Fair enough.
There is no such thing as "sheep-like" atheism.
I disagree, because I know some of them. There are people who call themselves atheist because their parents were, or their peers are. I'm talking "strong atheism" here, too, a positive belief in no god or gods, rather than "weak atheism", which is just an absence of belief.
First of all, there are no large masses of atheists (in numbers, we more like sheepdogs than sheep).
You don't need to be in a majority culture to be a sheep. You merely need to unthinkingly follow your peers or other authority figures.
Secondly, there are no atheist prophets advocating atheism to the masses of those who believe in "God" (the term sheep fits here).
You'd be surprised. I'm the moderator of a religious Usenet newsgroup, and we see such people all the time.
Thirdly, you don't have to join an organization of like-minded individuals (a herd of sheep) when you become an atheist.
You also don't need to join an organisation to be a jock, or a goth, or a yuppie fashion victim, or any number of subcultures where people follow blindly. Nor is there an organisation of commercial television watchers. You'll still find such (non-organised) groups full of sheep.
Becoming an atheist is an individual decision. Having atheist parents does not guarantee atheist children, just like having religionist parents will not guarantee the children will believe in "God".
I agree. Becoming a theist is also an individual decision. In a perfect world, people would understand this. In this imperfect world, many people call themselves theists or atheists without making the decision. These people are sheep.
I believe that Karl Marx's quote "religion is the opiate of the masses" is true.
Taken in context, I agree with the sentiment, but since Marx's day, religion has lost its unique status in this regard. Mass media is now the dominant opiate.
I suspect that we actually don't disagree on much but terminology here. My point is that sheep can be found anywhere, and true geeks know the differences between sheep and non-sheep no matter what their beliefs or absence thereof. That's why I like geek culture.
I tell you, if you show this software to the fx companies (the like of ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks et.al), publicly they are going to ask you : "so, whats new?". privately, they are going to laugh at it and list a 1000 required features that is missing in OpenFX.
What's more, those features are probably going to be things that the average person would never suspect. Like "the renderer must be able to handle more geometry than you have RAM for without thrashing", or "you must be able to specify the coordinate system that shading happens in separately from the coordinate system of the geometry", or even "you must be able to tune the shading sampling rate separately from the image sampling rate".
I might add that all of the above companies (ILM is an exception with respect to renderers because Pixar used to be part of Lucasfilm, so they have good licensing terms for Pixar's renderer) have written their own animation systems and renderers precisely because nothing on the marked did what they wanted.
Money is important in animation production.
That's true, but the cost of hardware and software is (generally) not as important as the cost of people. Look at Pixar's render farm, for example. It would have been cheaper to buy PCs and slap a free Unix on them all than buy the farm of 100 Sun E450s that they have. However, Sun E450s can fit 14 CPUs in each box. That's 1400 CPUs in 100 physical machines. Compare to number of physical machines you'd need if you bought PCs instead. Fewer machines require fewer sysadmins. And since sysadmins are more expensive than machines in the long run, it turns out cheaper. Similarly, the cost of a Maya licence is not nearly as much as the cost of a talented modeller or animator to use it.
There's Renderman Interface Bytestream. RIB is not like SVG, however. It's more like PostScript, in that it's intended to be an interchange format between modellers and renderers, rather than between modellers and other modellers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there's Railpage Australia. That the sort of thing you wanted?
OS/390 was the OS for the IBM/390, and OS/2 was meant to be the OS for the PS/2. So the z/OS name is at least consistent.
Try converting your models to Gnuplot format and converting to PS with that. It probably won't handle perspective, but it does orthographic and isometric projections just fine.
Let's assume without loss of generality that you pick the first digit. That rules out cases 4 to 7. Knowing there's at least a 1 rules out case 0. The cases left are 001, 010 and 011. Therefore the odds that there are two 1's is 1/3.
Get it now?
The algorithm can be easily obtained by writing the obvious iterative algorithm in floating point, then separating the fractional part from the integer part, and finally multiplying the fractional part by the length of the longer dimension (times 2 if you're using midpoint-Bresenham) to turn it into an integer.
I like ratings. They help you choose what you want to see, or what your kids want to see. My big problem with the US system is that the ratings are fairly useless for this purpose.
In Australia, we don't have a perfect system (far from it), but one thing that I like is the consumer advice label. Rather than just give an overall rating (G, PG, M, MA, R), they actually give you, on the movie poster, video cover, TV guide or broadcast the programme, the reasons why it got that rating.
Reasons can include violence, nudity, sex, coarse language, drug use, horror or a particularly useful category called "adult themes". Adult themes are topics which kids may need parental guidance or help in understanding, like mental illness, marital breakup, the supernatural and so on. I love this, because I can envisage an age which my daughter will reach where I won't have a problem with, say, nudity (it's just the human body in its natural state) or coarse language (there's plenty of that around in the wider world), but I'd like to sit with her if she sees a portrayal of hate groups, or people with mental illnesses. I think that would be more confusing for a 10 year old, and need "parental guidance" more, than depictions of sex.
So, IMO, these ratings on video games will do as much good as the other North American ratings on TV programmes or films: hardly any good at all. How about some real information instead?
Bleah. I shouldn't post before the first caffeine of the day. You knew what I meant, anyway. :-)
I don't doubt it. Have you ever had a lasting relationship with any of them, though?
I've never known of any long-term committed relationships which started with a dating service. My experience may be limited in that regard, though.
The best long-term relationships start without this baggage. My wife and I fall in and out of love all the time, and our relationship goes in cycles of being "interested" and "not interested". But we're always best friends. That's what keeps us together.
If it were serious, the correct flight number would be on the form.
The form said that they arrived in Honolulu on "Apollo 13". In fact they arrived by ship on the USS Hornet, so that millitary shipping number is what should be on the form. Since it isn't, this form can't be a serious document.
Disclaimer: I'm not one to talk. I met my geek mate on the net. :-)
Having said that, whatever you do, don't go looking for a mate. That will put unnecessary baggage on any relationships you do have. Do what some of the others here have suggested, but do it to enjoy the company of people, especially of people of the preferred sex. Relationships will develop naturally if they're meant to happen.
Yes. The constitution only applies to the government.
For example, suppose your constitution has a clause which says that the government can't establish a state religion. That means that a government or government-funded organisation (e.g. a public school) can't say that members of some religion are allowed to be on staff. However this doesn't apply to non-government organisations (e.g. a church may impose a rule that you must be a member of this church to be an office holder).
Now of course it may not prohibit the government from passing laws prohibiting this kind of "discrimination" in other organisations, but there might be other problems there. Imagine the fuss that the Roman Catholic Church would kick up if a court decided that they had to allow women to be priests due to anti-discrimination laws...
There is a good reason for this. Democratic government is meant to be by and for "the people". Government has a monopoly on some things, so they need the restraint. On the other hand, you have a choice as to which private school you send your kids to (if you choose a private school), so they don't need the restraint so much.
IMO, it's both good and bad. The bad part is that when private organisations overstep the mark there's often no legal recourse. (You can't legislate professionalism.) The good part is that negative publicity can be a much more powerful tool than the legal system, especially in a non-monopoly environment where people can and do vote with their money. Unfortunately, where the guilty party is a school, this can backfire, as lots of parents side with the school, thinking they're doing a good job with "discipline", when they're actually abusing their powers.
You know, teenagers are rebellious enough without giving them something actually legitimate to rebel against. You'd think the school would know that.
Redhat is following the rule that companies don't pay for software, they pay for solutions. They want someone to come in and set up everything for them so they don't need to think, or hire people to be experts. That's what Redhat does for a living, and they are about to make a profit from it.
I don't know how Eazel is planning to make money. When Andy H spoke at Monterey last year, I got the distinct impression that he didn't know either. I keep hearing about "subscription services", but no details.
Well, it's not exactly a dataflow machine, anyway.
The old E&S machines were dataflow architectures at the equivalent of the "machine code" level. Newer architectures are using similar ideas, but in a way that does not require details of the dataflow model leeching outside the chip.
Look at the Pentium 3, for example. It exploits dataflow ideas at the microcode level by prefetching several machine code instructions, splitting them into a larger set of "micro-instructions" and then schedules them together. That's not really a dataflow architecture, but it does use ideas from it: the idea of deciding on how to schedule the instructions at run-time.
The new clockless CPUs will exploit dataflow ideas by implementing a kind of dataflow machine between the functional units of the CPU itself. The CPU, remember, is like an interpreter for machine code. Since the "program" for that interpreter does not change, it can be implemented in a "plugboard" kind of way and people or programs producing machine code will never know the difference, apart from speed.
Bleah. Didn't get to finish that. Let me continue.
Anyway, Cineon uses a 10 bit logarithmic space, where the 10 bits let you capture that extended headroom. To give you some idea:
Anyway, the reason why film people like 16 bits per channel in their paint programs is to capture this dynamic range. Logarithmic spaces are horrible to work with, so you really need a linear space. You pick a reference white and call that "white". Something like 4096 is a good compromise. This corresponds to "255" on an 8 bit display. Then everything above that is headroom.
You might think that picking 255 as reference white is a good idea, since 0..255 is adequate for computer displays. It isn't a good idea. :-) It captures more headroom than you can capture on film, and you pay for it by reduced precision in the range that matters (reference black to reference white).
As an aside, people often quote the statistic that the human eye can only distinguish so many colours. While that's true, people who say that are using the word "colour" in a different way than computer graphics people do. A certain shade of blue is one "colour" to psychologists and cognitive scientists, but it may map to many "colours" under different lighting conditions as far as a computer graphics person is concerned. Plus, in the real world, you can always add more photons. Clamping your range to [0..255] limits the number of photons that you can deliver to the eye, and so it just doesn't look as good. And that, dear reader, is one reason why I prefer going to the cinema than watching films on TV. :-)
Not as much of it is due to human perception as you think. It's entirely due to the dynamic range of film.
Film has a huge dynamic range. It starts off black and has to be overexposed "mercilessly" (to quote my boss) before it's totally saturated. Naturally, the full dynamic range is almost never covered in a normal indoor scene. Cameras are sometimes calibrated by holding benchmark grey or white cards in front of the lens. These cards are of a known intensity and expressed in terms of a percentage of "reference white", which roughly speaking plays the role of "255" on an 8-bit-per-channel display.
Now on film, the maximum exposure probably gives you 20 times that brightness. That additional range is called "headroom", and you notice it especially when you look at specular highlights on water or chrome on film.
Naturally up in the headroom, you won't notice subtle differences between brightnesses. One of the most popular digital negative formats, Kodak's Cineon format, captures this by using a 10-bit logarithmic space.
I always thought the Daemon was designed by John Lasseter (now head creative honcho at Pixar). Did he assign copyright to McKusick?
Errr... no. The last thing that an industry consortium would want to do is write a competitor to the products of its member. The most they would do in this regard is produce a reference implementation (like the one I wrote when I was reviewing RFC 2440 prior to IETF submission) which while correct isn't practical, or to serve as a test-bed for new features before they're implemented properly in a real product like GPG.
But the actual purpose of the consortium is to ensure that PGP, GPG and your hypothetical browser plugins all worked together, and to put a more formal face behind the IETF OpenPGP working group to push the standard forward even further, as well as related projects which PGP enthusiasts want to see happen like PGP/MIME, PGP/Ticket, integration of PGP with biometrics and so on. This is a good thing for the PGP standard.
There was a supreme court decision about ten years ago which set the precedent that the use of the word "democracy" in the Australian constitution implied right to freedom of speech, as it pertains to government and politics. (That is, you have the right to comment about the the government, laws and politics in general.)
I therefore intend to comment about these new laws in the strongest "MA 15+ (strong coarse language)" rated terms. :-)
Help out a non-American not versed in US laws.
Is there some legal reason why a film must be rated, or why the MPAA must do it? Or is it just that the film distributors are MPAA members? I would think that there is scope here for someone else to break the monopoly on film ratings.
BTW, here in Australia, while our system is by no means perfect (in fact, there are serious problems with it) one feature that I like is that ratings are much more finely grained. In addition to the main categories (G, PG, M, MA, R, X, RC; see the guidelines if you want to know what they mean) there is always a list of what the OFLC calls "consumer advice", which is basically a list of reasons explaining why it attracted that rating. That way, if you don't mind sex but are squeamish at violence, you can easily tell if this is a film for you.
Consumer advice may include sex (e.g. "sexual references" or "sex scenes"), nudity (which is, naturally, treated differently from sex), drugs ("drug use"), "violence" (with some indication of how severe, such as "low-level violence"), "coarse language" (again with an indication of how severe), "horror", or what the OFLC calls "adult themes." "Adult themes", for those who are wondering, means that the film deals with things like mental illness, the supernatural or mild horror. All the things that children might not understand. This list of reasons is on all video boxes and movie posters, as well as read out by an announcer before most films or TV programmes which are rated above G. TV guides also put a summary in short form (for example, the repeat of South Park tonight is rated MA (A) where the (A) means it has adult themes). Some TV channels go even further, using their own consumer advice labels. For example, I remember one of Julian Clary's shows was rated M, with the consumer advice "strong innuendo".
The US could do with a more fine-grained system like this one, so we don't have to rely on spoiler reviews to decide whether or not we want to watch it.
The Bible was not open source by any means, if you mean the King James Version. Technically it carries Cum Privilego, which means that it belongs to the English crown, which authorised and paid for its production. For a hundred years, only the royal printer could print it. That's longer than a modern copyright, even post-copyright extension act.
One thing you have to keep in mind, though was that in the eras you're talking about, people were expected to be "gentlemen" and were more worried about their reputations than they are now. If you "plagairised", or otherwise misrepresented yourself, and got caught, your reputation would be shot and nobody would do business with you. That incentive is gone nowadays. Look at Jim Allchin. He lied in court and he's now still a senior VP at the same company!
Another thing is that in this era, credit was usually not given where credit is now due. For some of the greatest works of art we have no idea who did them, because a rich patron paid a tradesman to make them a statue, just like a plumber would be paid to lay pipes nowadays. We certainly don't want to return to an era where the provenance of artistic works is not known.
There is no doubt a happy medium in here somewhere.
This new form of sampling shows that hardware manufacturers have finally woken up to the fact that, to use Renderman terminology, the shading rate (the sampling rate at which textures, lighting etc are determined) and the pixel sampling rate should be decoupled. This simple anti-aliasing technique samples uses a pixel sampling rate at 4x the shading rate, using ordered sampling. Eventually we will see graphics cards where these two figures can be tuned separately, but it won't be for a while.
BTW, "anti-aliasing" is a bit of a misnumer. Ordered sampling does not remove aliasing. Neither does stochastic sampling. Ordered sampling merely moves the filtering problem up a few octaves. Stochastic sampling hides the aliasing behind noise, because our eyes find that less objectionable. The only way you can truly remove aliasing is analytically. Don't expect that in your graphics hardware for a long time. :-)
Bruce, you used to work for Pixar, and you know more about software patents, so you'd probably know more about this than us.
I've read the text of the patent and can't work out exactly what they claim. It reads like they claim any application of Monte Carlo integration to image generation. Also, how come they've been able to file what looks like the same patent three times?
I have the impression that Pixar are actually better than most about their patents, and I believe they've never tried to enforce their claimed API copyright. (Just as well for them. API copyrights are untested, and I don't think they want to be the first to test them. But then, it might just be because nobody tried to stand up to them.) Who did they enforce it against, and do you know what the circumstances were?
Fair enough.
I disagree, because I know some of them. There are people who call themselves atheist because their parents were, or their peers are. I'm talking "strong atheism" here, too, a positive belief in no god or gods, rather than "weak atheism", which is just an absence of belief.
You don't need to be in a majority culture to be a sheep. You merely need to unthinkingly follow your peers or other authority figures.
You'd be surprised. I'm the moderator of a religious Usenet newsgroup, and we see such people all the time.
You also don't need to join an organisation to be a jock, or a goth, or a yuppie fashion victim, or any number of subcultures where people follow blindly. Nor is there an organisation of commercial television watchers. You'll still find such (non-organised) groups full of sheep.
I agree. Becoming a theist is also an individual decision. In a perfect world, people would understand this. In this imperfect world, many people call themselves theists or atheists without making the decision. These people are sheep.
Taken in context, I agree with the sentiment, but since Marx's day, religion has lost its unique status in this regard. Mass media is now the dominant opiate.
I suspect that we actually don't disagree on much but terminology here. My point is that sheep can be found anywhere, and true geeks know the differences between sheep and non-sheep no matter what their beliefs or absence thereof. That's why I like geek culture.
What's more, those features are probably going to be things that the average person would never suspect. Like "the renderer must be able to handle more geometry than you have RAM for without thrashing", or "you must be able to specify the coordinate system that shading happens in separately from the coordinate system of the geometry", or even "you must be able to tune the shading sampling rate separately from the image sampling rate".
I might add that all of the above companies (ILM is an exception with respect to renderers because Pixar used to be part of Lucasfilm, so they have good licensing terms for Pixar's renderer) have written their own animation systems and renderers precisely because nothing on the marked did what they wanted.
That's true, but the cost of hardware and software is (generally) not as important as the cost of people. Look at Pixar's render farm, for example. It would have been cheaper to buy PCs and slap a free Unix on them all than buy the farm of 100 Sun E450s that they have. However, Sun E450s can fit 14 CPUs in each box. That's 1400 CPUs in 100 physical machines. Compare to number of physical machines you'd need if you bought PCs instead. Fewer machines require fewer sysadmins. And since sysadmins are more expensive than machines in the long run, it turns out cheaper. Similarly, the cost of a Maya licence is not nearly as much as the cost of a talented modeller or animator to use it.
There's Renderman Interface Bytestream. RIB is not like SVG, however. It's more like PostScript, in that it's intended to be an interchange format between modellers and renderers, rather than between modellers and other modellers.