What a GREAT idea. Fight Spam by committing a federal offence. You can laugh at the foolish spammers from prison.
Or, order the product using your credit card.
The next day, in good faith, try to cancel the order. If a package comes, send it back with the infinitely cheap "Return to Sender" moniker. After a week, contest the charge on with your credit card company, saying you cancelled that order. Of course, it will be impossible to communicate with this "company".
Vendors with many cancelled transactions have their credit card account terminated.
What about those/tmp directories -- who needs those? We can store data there.
Even disks that are full let you create empty files -- uuencode and store data in empty files as long filenames.
Who uses all that memory these days? Store data in memory, keep a few redundant copies for silly "rebooting" incidents.
Virtual memory is another place ripe for picking.
What about screen memory -- no one uses the whole desktop
Couldn't you send data to the speakers, and grab the data back from the microphone?
Here's a spam-fighting idea - I haven't read of ideas similar to this one. Not all spam wants you to spend money using a credit card (CC). But for those that do, allow a CC transaction to be labeled as "Spam".
This CC transaction is essentially contested by the customer contacting the CC company, providing a copy of the e-mail and details about the transaction. The CC tells the vendor that the customer really didn't want the item, instead the customer wanted to "tell" on the vendor -- that the vendor is sending spam.
Vendors with too many transactions labeled as "spam" have their accounts terminated.
Yes, there are holes in this: people angry at a company could tag transactions with that company as "Spam". Spammers could advertise for vendors that have no idea that customers are being led there via spam. It can be a pain to go through the entire buying process. Most sites these days require the CC's matching billing address be provided. The item could have been delivered by the time the vendor is notified.
For the 90% of computer users out there, a 3Ghz P4 is already a huge overkill to browse the net and check email.
First, 90% of those 90% really do more than just surf & email. The ones I run into do. Second, just about anything that doesn't respond in 1/30th of a second could be faster. And people will want it faster. Why does a web browser take seconds to start? It should be instant. We'll leave printing alone, but why is the "Back" button so slow? Because we would actually benefit from a 10GHz box.
You may remember some of Glassner's excellent books on computer
graphics here
and here.
I sat at a table at the computer graphics conference Siggraph 2003 while Andy
caught up with some of his friends (cough, not me, cough).
So I was interested to hear what graphics oriented tasks he had been
doing.
He talked about writing a script for a short for, oh - about a
year. And then talked about the challenges of making short films
(not feature-length) on a working-class-salary-sized budget. He
considered it a sabbatical.
No progress in writing new CG books <<sigh>>, but
interesting to see what he's been up to.
Wow -- that must be one great song.
I hope Apple lets them sell it.
If I were buying it for $10k, I think there would be problems getting the song to play:
If we cannot get the song to play on your system, I will refund your purchase price.
Please Note
The Bulk Club does not promote any portion of this site via bulk email period. It is against our hosting providers terms of service to do so and we will not tolerate anyone who abuses these rules on our web site.
Perhaps someone with some mail-blasting software could send a few million e-mail messages, telling people how great it would be to join this website.
The most popular computer game is, of course, Solitaire. It grates me to no end that so many games have come & gone, but people keep going back to Solitaire. It's a simple game.
I have given up on many games -- maybe because something didn't get me involved, but a good part of the reason was the game was too complicated. I didn't want to think that much, and left it for later. (still waiting, btw)
10 years ago, I called Gateway to buy a 33MHz 486, only they talked me into a '66 for only $60 more. I sent back my graphics card and $300 more for a video card that could (are you sitting down) 800x600 at 24bit color. Wow.
Now, my monitor does 2048x1536 at 32bits/pixel (only I prefer 1940x1280 at 70Hz). And higher-res pictures than that come in digitally. That's amazing. I thought I would be scanning pictures in at 2000dpi by now, but didn't think of the powerful imaging capabilities my home PC would have.
10 years from now? MS Windows running on top of a stable Unix system, 10MPix displays with HDTV movies that are kinda fuzzy compared to the full-res of the monitor. Let's go for 100MBit bandwidth, while we're at it.
many of those parents would never think to let the government have their or their child's DNA on file
But what a pain that would be.
Who's going to find that miniscule amount of DNA, and how often would be wrong? Not really evidence you could count on in a courtroom, but somewhat scary never the less.
OK/. How far away is a system like this from real-time photorealistic
rendering?
I agree with other posters, who say that film resolution is a few times higher
resolution than typical gamer's setup.
There are other barriers. Much of visual effects rendering involves
sophisticated per-pixel programs called shaders. These often are processed
in Rendermn [pixar.com]. These
shaders perform generalized floating point operations, if-then-else structures,
etc.
Newer generations of graphics cards are implementing floating point pixels
and enough processing generality, that this kind of shading can be done on
the graphics card
Before we get too excited about a scene running in/near realtime, remember
that there can be a need for 100s of MB of data for 1 second of footage.
Plus, lots of processing is done before rendering -- simulation of
forces, cloth, hair/fur, smoke/fire, etc. Also, the composite process
is performed after rendering to combine many layers (100+ for "hero" shots,
like far-away harbor scenes in Pearl Harbor).
In the past few Siggraph [siggraph.org] conferences
have shown prototypes of Nvidia hardware rendering movie scenes. Two
years ago was a multi-character shot from Final Fantasy. Last year
was a battle scene from LOTR. In each, lots of precomputing determined
the geometry. While rendering, many many passes were made and the result
was about a 5hz update rate.
(IMHO neither looked just like the movie -- perhaps the rendered images were
adjusted in the composite phase, or they ran out of time for the demo).
The floating point operations occur so much faster on a GPU (Graphics) than
a CPU, that speed-ups compared to software rendering of ~100x were not uncommon.
So, there are lots of precomputed items to rendering a scene in "realtime".
And these scenes are optimized for just what you see -- nothing extra
to slow down the process. There's less detail for smaller things than
close things.
Do you want to fly around and explore a scene from a movie? Well, that
might work -- but you won't see much detail.
Those that work on movies do not want to work in realtime -- they push their
systems to the limit to maximize what they can do. Jurassic Park had
scenes that took hours for one processor to render each frame. So do
today's movies. Maybe with 1000s of processors, you can push it to
10+ hours per frame.
Slashdot Mirror
What a GREAT idea. Fight Spam by committing a federal offence. You can laugh at the foolish spammers from prison.
Or, order the product using your credit card. The next day, in good faith, try to cancel the order. If a package comes, send it back with the infinitely cheap "Return to Sender" moniker. After a week, contest the charge on with your credit card company, saying you cancelled that order. Of course, it will be impossible to communicate with this "company".
Vendors with many cancelled transactions have their credit card account terminated.
What about those /tmp directories -- who needs those? We can store data there.
Even disks that are full let you create empty files -- uuencode and store data in empty files as long filenames.
Who uses all that memory these days? Store data in memory, keep a few redundant copies for silly "rebooting" incidents.
Virtual memory is another place ripe for picking. What about screen memory -- no one uses the whole desktop
Couldn't you send data to the speakers, and grab the data back from the microphone?
Here's a spam-fighting idea - I haven't read of ideas similar to this one.
Not all spam wants you to spend money using a credit card (CC). But for those that do, allow a CC transaction to be labeled as "Spam".
This CC transaction is essentially contested by the customer contacting the CC company, providing a copy of the e-mail and details about the transaction. The CC tells the vendor that the customer really didn't want the item, instead the customer wanted to "tell" on the vendor -- that the vendor is sending spam.
Vendors with too many transactions labeled as "spam" have their accounts terminated.
Yes, there are holes in this: people angry at a company could tag transactions with that company as "Spam". Spammers could advertise for vendors that have no idea that customers are being led there via spam. It can be a pain to go through the entire buying process. Most sites these days require the CC's matching billing address be provided. The item could have been delivered by the time the vendor is notified.
(hmm... maybe it needs some work)
For the 90% of computer users out there, a 3Ghz P4 is already a huge overkill to browse the net and check email.
First, 90% of those 90% really do more than just surf & email. The ones I run into do. Second, just about anything that doesn't respond in 1/30th of a second could be faster. And people will want it faster. Why does a web browser take seconds to start? It should be instant. We'll leave printing alone, but why is the "Back" button so slow? Because we would actually benefit from a 10GHz box.
You may remember some of Glassner's excellent books on computer graphics here and here.
I sat at a table at the computer graphics conference Siggraph 2003 while Andy caught up with some of his friends (cough, not me, cough).
So I was interested to hear what graphics oriented tasks he had been doing.
He talked about writing a script for a short for, oh - about a year. And then talked about the challenges of making short films (not feature-length) on a working-class-salary-sized budget. He considered it a sabbatical.
No progress in writing new CG books <<sigh>>, but interesting to see what he's been up to.
Wow -- that must be one great song. I hope Apple lets them sell it.
If I were buying it for $10k, I think there would be problems getting the song to play:
If we cannot get the song to play on your system, I will refund your purchase price.
Please Note The Bulk Club does not promote any portion of this site via bulk email period. It is against our hosting providers terms of service to do so and we will not tolerate anyone who abuses these rules on our web site.
Perhaps someone with some mail-blasting software could send a few million e-mail messages, telling people how great it would be to join this website.
The most popular computer game is, of course, Solitaire. It grates me to no end that so many games have come & gone, but people keep going back to Solitaire. It's a simple game.
I have given up on many games -- maybe because something didn't get me involved, but a good part of the reason was the game was too complicated. I didn't want to think that much, and left it for later. (still waiting, btw)
10 years ago, I called Gateway to buy a 33MHz 486, only they talked me into a '66 for only $60 more. I sent back my graphics card and $300 more for a video card that could (are you sitting down) 800x600 at 24bit color. Wow. Now, my monitor does 2048x1536 at 32bits/pixel (only I prefer 1940x1280 at 70Hz). And higher-res pictures than that come in digitally. That's amazing. I thought I would be scanning pictures in at 2000dpi by now, but didn't think of the powerful imaging capabilities my home PC would have.
10 years from now? MS Windows running on top of a stable Unix system, 10MPix displays with HDTV movies that are kinda fuzzy compared to the full-res of the monitor. Let's go for 100MBit bandwidth, while we're at it.
many of those parents would never think to let the government have their or their child's DNA on file
But what a pain that would be. Who's going to find that miniscule amount of DNA, and how often would be wrong? Not really evidence you could count on in a courtroom, but somewhat scary never the less.
OK /. How far away is a system like this from real-time photorealistic
rendering?
I agree with other posters, who say that film resolution is a few times higher resolution than typical gamer's setup.
There are other barriers. Much of visual effects rendering involves sophisticated per-pixel programs called shaders. These often are processed in Rendermn [pixar.com]. These shaders perform generalized floating point operations, if-then-else structures, etc.
Newer generations of graphics cards are implementing floating point pixels and enough processing generality, that this kind of shading can be done on the graphics card
Before we get too excited about a scene running in/near realtime, remember that there can be a need for 100s of MB of data for 1 second of footage. Plus, lots of processing is done before rendering -- simulation of forces, cloth, hair/fur, smoke/fire, etc. Also, the composite process is performed after rendering to combine many layers (100+ for "hero" shots, like far-away harbor scenes in Pearl Harbor).
In the past few Siggraph [siggraph.org] conferences have shown prototypes of Nvidia hardware rendering movie scenes. Two years ago was a multi-character shot from Final Fantasy. Last year was a battle scene from LOTR. In each, lots of precomputing determined the geometry. While rendering, many many passes were made and the result was about a 5hz update rate.
(IMHO neither looked just like the movie -- perhaps the rendered images were adjusted in the composite phase, or they ran out of time for the demo).
The floating point operations occur so much faster on a GPU (Graphics) than a CPU, that speed-ups compared to software rendering of ~100x were not uncommon.
So, there are lots of precomputed items to rendering a scene in "realtime". And these scenes are optimized for just what you see -- nothing extra to slow down the process. There's less detail for smaller things than close things.
Do you want to fly around and explore a scene from a movie? Well, that might work -- but you won't see much detail.
Those that work on movies do not want to work in realtime -- they push their systems to the limit to maximize what they can do. Jurassic Park had scenes that took hours for one processor to render each frame. So do today's movies. Maybe with 1000s of processors, you can push it to 10+ hours per frame.