> True, Dark Matter, like Dark Energy, is just a placeholder name for something that we _think_ is there.
FTFY.
Probably will get modded down, but if you "knew" it, then you would be able to prove it exists. Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it, therefore it is a mathematical kludge, aka, the aether of the 1900s. (Yes, I'm aware of http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html )
Ergo, while said more politely, "it falls out of the math", which will allthough appear quite reasonable at first, given the current limitations of understanding gravity / light / mass & energy, it is still one a big hack-job based on one assumption after another, namely:
a) that there is only one type of gravity and
b) gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
c) redshift is accurate (ARP has interesting evidence that calls into question this assumption)
Earlier in the day, Comcast was exposed for trying to bar cheaper cable modems from its network — a clear violation of Net Neutrality. http://act2.freepress.net/go/1082?akid=2071.9186247.v6FnQS&t=10 This is what a media monopoly looks like in the Internet age — one company, consolidating its media power to squash competitors, stifle innovation and price-gouge consumers.
Sign our message to the FCC: "Don't Let Comcast Kill the Internet."
We need FCC Chairman Genachowski to speak out again the Comcast-NBC merger and enact strong Net Neutrality rules to protect consumers from Comcast’s abuse. If the FCC stays on the sidelines, Comcast will turn the Internet into cable TV, where it gets to pick the channels, overcharge you for them, and decide what downloads quickly and whose voices are heard.
Comcast is the same company that wants to take over NBC Universal in one of the biggest media mergers in a generation. It's not just the Internet at stake here. It's the future of all media: television, radio, social networks... and our democracy itself.
> It'll never be the same, though. You don't get the tactile feedback that you get from a real keyboard.
Mod parent up.
This is the reason a "driving wheel + computer sim" is never close to the real thing. You don't FEEL the G's around a corner, feel when your tires are "about" to lose traction, etc. That said, I love racing sims.;-)
It would _last_ these ~ 27.5 regardless if the author is dead or alive.
If a compromise can't be reached, methinks the general public will eventually just say f- it, as they mostly do nowadays with.mp3s, p2p, torrents, etc.
And while Real-Time Ray Tracing is the "Holy Grail" and is achievable, there is no way VRAM is going away to be replaced with traditional CPU memory. There are so many memory optimizations in the rendering pipeline that it would be stupid to suggest that it all should be tossed out and use slow DRAM instead.
> they had to bolt on a GTX to the Cell because the cell didn't have the horsepower to compete with the Xbox 360.
Huh? The PPU was never designed to do rendering. Looking at the data flow, say for skinning, you have this:
PS2: CPU (EE) -> vector processors: VU (T&L) -> GPU (VS) PS3: CPU (PPU) -> vector processors: SPU (T&L) -> GPU (RSX)
Ergo, if you pardon the French, you don't know WTF you are talking about.
One of the reason the PS3 was initially so much was because of the hardware. Specifically, the Blu-Ray drive for one, the PS2 hardware compatibility for two, and all the superfluous flash-type memory card slots for three.
There were teething problems, because the *whole* industry was changing from single-core to multi-core design. Taking a PC game and porting to the PS3 will of course have extremely poor performance (because you are letting the hardware go unused / to waste); when you design for multi-core from the beginning, and say port a PS3 game to the Xbox 360 or PC, you won't have toilet performance on the Xbox 360.
> The Wii is actually a reasonably powerful system in terms of CPU/GPU/ etc, in spite of the fact that it outputs at 480p.
When I was shipping PS2 and Wii games, yes, I found this to be generally true as well. i.e. We could run at a higher resolution on the Wii compared to the PS2 and still have the same relative frame rate.
e.g. PS2: 512 x 384 Wii: 640 x 480
The PS2 VRAM is wicked fast. I mean, VRAM to VRAM copies are around 10x faster then the Wii's, and you can do dumb "fake" heat effects "for free" on the PS2. On the Wii, you are forced to modulate a 2d vertex grid.
As someone who wrote and implemented OpenGL on the Wii and shipped 2 Wii games that used it, actually, you and the GP are both right, and wrong.
The Wii was Gamecube x2. Meaning in the Real-World it was twice as fast. Check the Nintendeo forums where Jack Matthews benchmarks the performance (especially memory.)
Nintendo DIDN'T fix _any_ of the hardware GPU rendering bugs in the Wii, which is why the derogatory Gamecube is applicable.
Sorry, but you are anonymous idiot who doesn't understand Consciousness. Specifically, coming this century...
- White Holes (Science will discover them when they can finally see them with a plasma lens) - First Contact - Free Energy - Bio-Computing (will finally allow True A.I., not the joke that is called Artificial Ignorance today.)
Predicting the future isn't _that_ hard -- getting an accurate _date_ is.
e.g. We have the technology to build cars that can drive themselves. The cost of doing this is extremely prohibitive and unrealistic today, but at some point it will be possible to build vehicles that are self-aware.
-- CPUs & GPUs are still too damn slow.. A graphics programmer who worked on Uncharted 2 (one of the best looking PS3 games available) shares his comments on the future of GPUs / Rendering... http://filmicgames.com/archives/467
> vast majority of people playing games at 720p max
Your comment skirts around the issue, but is not entirely accurate. It is not the players, but the game devs themselves that are "not demanding" a new console. The PS3's RSX is ~= 7800 GTX. Most _games_ DON'T render at the native 1080p but at 720p simply because most (PS3) games are GPU bound. (XBox 360 games are CPU bound if you are curious.) That said, currently the SPUs are _still_ under underutilized. Naughty Dog said this a few years back, but it is slowly getting better:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/832/832114p2.html "I'm more impressed with the hardware the longer we get to work with it. Imagining trying to develop Uncharted without the Blu-ray drive, without the hard drive, or without the Cell processor makes me wonder what kind of game we would have ended up with. It certainly would have required a lot more compromises than I would have been comfortable making. And much like the PS2, I think the longer developers work with the machine, the better the games are going to get. For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
Other presentations (GDC 2009) worth reading are * The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World - A KILLZONE 2 Case Study * Practical SPU Usage in GOD OF WAR 3
It will be REAL interesting to see what Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo 5), and Team Ico (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) since these two studios are known to typically push the PlayStation (2 & 3) to its limits.
- Resolution is not the complete picture; we simply "need" more GPU processing power. A graphics programmer who worked on Uncharted 2 (one of the best looking PS3 games available) shares his comments on the future of GPUs / Rendering... (Anybody who has been to SigGraph will say the same thing.) http://filmicgames.com/archives/467
- Resolutions such as 2k rendering are _currently_ less of an issue (i.e. 1680x1050 is perfectly fine for gaming with max details -- increasing the res up by 17% to 1980x1080 doesn't make the image look 17% better:), but resolution _will_ become more important when you want to drive a ~ large, say 60", display. Ideally you would want ~ 300 dpi, so you will "want" 16 K x 8192 K resolution -- for a number of reasons:
1) you can split the video signal to multiple monitors,
2) you can upscale it to ~ 100" and it doesn't look pixelated / blurry to hell due to bi / tri linear up-scaling. Monitors will one day be "embedded" into the wall (think LCD paint...), with those kind of resolutions, we're going to need to start thinking differently about how we composite our real-time images....
Computers are still too dam slow. I would say the bigger problem is the 4 GHz barrier of Silicon that doesn't have a cheap (near-term) solution.
> In 2010, it's just stupid. We don't need extensions to C of any form, we need C and its satanic spawn to die.
Sounds like you have never actually shipped any games on modern consoles. C (and C++) isn't going anywhere, because there is nothing better* to replace them with.
Which means, in the mean time, we need extensions to solve Real World (TM) problems. Not to sound like an ass, but let me know when you understand restrict semantics.
* Better, in this context means a) fast to compile, b) fast to execute. D _might_ be a possibility, but at the moment, I don't know of any D compilers for PS3, XBox 360, or Wii.
You CAN do reflection in C++ as the code base for one game I saw... the catch is you need a super-base object, templates, and macros to pull it all off...
but yeah, there is no _native_ language support for it.
To quote a famous insight... "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The concept of Imaginary Property is absurd to begin with... I have a sequence of numbers, yet somehow magically it is "owned" by someone else because it just so happens these numbers represent the frequencies of Happy Birthday. EMI can go fuck themselves.
Copyright is eventually going away in a few hundred years, whether they like it or not, and maybe we can get onto more important things instead of arguing over who "owns" what particular sequence of numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
> Since they can make predictions with it, and have tons a data supporting there is an effect going on, you're wrong.
Um, no.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13280
> True, Dark Matter, like Dark Energy, is just a placeholder name for something that we _think_ is there.
FTFY.
Probably will get modded down, but if you "knew" it, then you would be able to prove it exists. Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it, therefore it is a mathematical kludge, aka, the aether of the 1900s. (Yes, I'm aware of http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html )
Ergo, while said more politely, "it falls out of the math", which will allthough appear quite reasonable at first, given the current limitations of understanding gravity / light / mass & energy, it is still one a big hack-job based on one assumption after another, namely:
a) that there is only one type of gravity and
b) gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
c) redshift is accurate (ARP has interesting evidence that calls into question this assumption)
This prof. provides a half-decent summary though:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1999/ph123/lec08.html
Grr... opening sentance got cut
---
The New York Times reported on Monday that Comcast threatened to cut off Netflix streaming video unless the company that carries the traffic paid huge tolls.
http://act2.freepress.net/go/1081?akid=2071.9186247.v6FnQS&t=8
Speaking of Comcrap ...
From an email I receiver earlier today ...
--- 8http://act2.freepress.net/go/1081?akid=2071.9186247.v6FnQS&t=8
Earlier in the day, Comcast was exposed for trying to bar cheaper cable modems from its network — a clear violation of Net Neutrality.
http://act2.freepress.net/go/1082?akid=2071.9186247.v6FnQS&t=10
This is what a media monopoly looks like in the Internet age — one company, consolidating its media power to squash competitors, stifle innovation and price-gouge consumers.
Sign our message to the FCC: "Don't Let Comcast Kill the Internet."
We need FCC Chairman Genachowski to speak out again the Comcast-NBC merger and enact strong Net Neutrality rules to protect consumers from Comcast’s abuse. If the FCC stays on the sidelines, Comcast will turn the Internet into cable TV, where it gets to pick the channels, overcharge you for them, and decide what downloads quickly and whose voices are heard.
Comcast is the same company that wants to take over NBC Universal in one of the biggest media mergers in a generation. It's not just the Internet at stake here. It's the future of all media: television, radio, social networks... and our democracy itself.
Visit http://act2.freepress.net/sign/comcast_violations/?source=conf and urge the FCC to act now and save the Internet.
Thanks!
Not to diss you, because that is exactly what I thought of to when I saw the headline, but Starfire _is_ mentioned if you Read The Fine Article :-)
> It'll never be the same, though. You don't get the tactile feedback that you get from a real keyboard.
Mod parent up.
This is the reason a "driving wheel + computer sim" is never close to the real thing. You don't FEEL the G's around a corner, feel when your tires are "about" to lose traction, etc. That said, I love racing sims. ;-)
Mod parent up. This is _precisely_ the issue...
creator = in their best interests to have _infinite_ copyright
public = in their best interests to have _zero_ copyright
A reasonable approach would to have copyright last = 1/3 * the average life span (maybe in the country where the author lives?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy. e.g. 82.6 / 3 = 27.5 years
It would _last_ these ~ 27.5 regardless if the author is dead or alive.
If a compromise can't be reached, methinks the general public will eventually just say f- it, as they mostly do nowadays with .mp3s, p2p, torrents, etc.
LOL. Awesome quote from Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). Nice to see another fan.
He is usually known for:
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
- Life of Brian (1979)
- The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
All cult classics.
They must of been drinking the same, with all due respect to an otherwise extremely bright programmer, software rendering kool-aid as Tim Sweeney.
"The End of the GPU Roadmap"
http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/archive/SweeneyHPG2009/TimHPG2009.pdf
And while Real-Time Ray Tracing is the "Holy Grail" and is achievable, there is no way VRAM is going away to be replaced with traditional CPU memory. There are so many memory optimizations in the rendering pipeline that it would be stupid to suggest that it all should be tossed out and use slow DRAM instead.
> they had to bolt on a GTX to the Cell because the cell didn't have the horsepower to compete with the Xbox 360.
Huh? The PPU was never designed to do rendering. Looking at the data flow, say for skinning, you have this:
PS2: CPU (EE) -> vector processors: VU (T&L) -> GPU (VS)
PS3: CPU (PPU) -> vector processors: SPU (T&L) -> GPU (RSX)
Ergo, if you pardon the French, you don't know WTF you are talking about.
One of the reason the PS3 was initially so much was because of the hardware. Specifically, the Blu-Ray drive for one, the PS2 hardware compatibility for two, and all the superfluous flash-type memory card slots for three.
There were teething problems, because the *whole* industry was changing from single-core to multi-core design. Taking a PC game and porting to the PS3 will of course have extremely poor performance (because you are letting the hardware go unused / to waste); when you design for multi-core from the beginning, and say port a PS3 game to the Xbox 360 or PC, you won't have toilet performance on the Xbox 360.
Cheers
> The Wii is actually a reasonably powerful system in terms of CPU/GPU/ etc, in spite of the fact that it outputs at 480p.
When I was shipping PS2 and Wii games, yes, I found this to be generally true as well. i.e. We could run at a higher resolution on the Wii compared to the PS2 and still have the same relative frame rate.
e.g.
PS2: 512 x 384
Wii: 640 x 480
The PS2 VRAM is wicked fast. I mean, VRAM to VRAM copies are around 10x faster then the Wii's, and you can do dumb "fake" heat effects "for free" on the PS2. On the Wii, you are forced to modulate a 2d vertex grid.
Halo 3 also down-samples / up-scales VFX / HDR
Gamefest Unplugged (Europe) 2007: HDR The Bungie Way
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=995b221d-6bbd-4731-ac82-d9524237d486&displaylang=en
As someone who wrote and implemented OpenGL on the Wii and shipped 2 Wii games that used it, actually, you and the GP are both right, and wrong.
The Wii was Gamecube x2. Meaning in the Real-World it was twice as fast. Check the Nintendeo forums where Jack Matthews benchmarks the performance (especially memory.)
Nintendo DIDN'T fix _any_ of the hardware GPU rendering bugs in the Wii, which is why the derogatory Gamecube is applicable.
Cheers
Sorry, but you are anonymous idiot who doesn't understand Consciousness. Specifically, coming this century ...
- White Holes (Science will discover them when they can finally see them with a plasma lens)
- First Contact
- Free Energy
- Bio-Computing (will finally allow True A.I., not the joke that is called Artificial Ignorance today.)
Predicting the future isn't _that_ hard -- getting an accurate _date_ is.
e.g.
We have the technology to build cars that can drive themselves. The cost of doing this is extremely prohibitive and unrealistic today, but at some point it will be possible to build vehicles that are self-aware.
Sorry for the bad netiquette / karma whoring, didn't realize these were available ...
* The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World - A KILLZONE 2 Case Study
http://sijm.ca/2009/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/michiel-van-der-leeuw.pdf
* Practical SPU Usage in GOD OF WAR 3
http://www.tilander.org/aurora/comp/gdc2009_Tilander_Filippov_SPU.pdf
Cheers
-- ...
CPUs & GPUs are still too damn slow.. A graphics programmer who worked on Uncharted 2 (one of the best looking PS3 games available) shares his comments on the future of GPUs / Rendering
http://filmicgames.com/archives/467
> vast majority of people playing games at 720p max
Your comment skirts around the issue, but is not entirely accurate. It is not the players, but the game devs themselves that are "not demanding" a new console. The PS3's RSX is ~= 7800 GTX. Most _games_ DON'T render at the native 1080p but at 720p simply because most (PS3) games are GPU bound. (XBox 360 games are CPU bound if you are curious.) That said, currently the SPUs are _still_ under underutilized. Naughty Dog said this a few years back, but it is slowly getting better:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/832/832114p2.html
"I'm more impressed with the hardware the longer we get to work with it. Imagining trying to develop Uncharted without the Blu-ray drive, without the hard drive, or without the Cell processor makes me wonder what kind of game we would have ended up with. It certainly would have required a lot more compromises than I would have been comfortable making. And much like the PS2, I think the longer developers work with the machine, the better the games are going to get. For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
The presentation "Getting Unreal Engine 3 to 60Hz" isn't (yet) available on Devnet, but thankfully can be found here...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15118967/Hitting-60Hz-in-Unreal-Engine
Other presentations (GDC 2009) worth reading are
* The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World - A KILLZONE 2 Case Study
* Practical SPU Usage in GOD OF WAR 3
It will be REAL interesting to see what Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo 5), and Team Ico (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) since these two studios are known to typically push the PlayStation (2 & 3) to its limits.
Cheers
Mod parent up.
Couple of points to add about resolution:
- Resolution is not the complete picture; we simply "need" more GPU processing power. A graphics programmer who worked on Uncharted 2 (one of the best looking PS3 games available) shares his comments on the future of GPUs / Rendering ... (Anybody who has been to SigGraph will say the same thing.)
http://filmicgames.com/archives/467
- Resolutions such as 2k rendering are _currently_ less of an issue (i.e. 1680x1050 is perfectly fine for gaming with max details -- increasing the res up by 17% to 1980x1080 doesn't make the image look 17% better :), but resolution _will_ become more important when you want to drive a ~ large, say 60", display. Ideally you would want ~ 300 dpi, so you will "want" 16 K x 8192 K resolution -- for a number of reasons:
1) you can split the video signal to multiple monitors, ....
2) you can upscale it to ~ 100" and it doesn't look pixelated / blurry to hell due to bi / tri linear up-scaling. Monitors will one day be "embedded" into the wall (think LCD paint...), with those kind of resolutions, we're going to need to start thinking differently about how we composite our real-time images
Computers are still too dam slow. I would say the bigger problem is the 4 GHz barrier of Silicon that doesn't have a cheap (near-term) solution.
Cheers
> But that doesn't mean it couldn't have been even better with PS3 technology,
Well, we'll find out next year, since Ico and Shadows of the Colossus are coming in 2011. :-)
> In 2010, it's just stupid. We don't need extensions to C of any form, we need C and its satanic spawn to die.
Sounds like you have never actually shipped any games on modern consoles. C (and C++) isn't going anywhere, because there is nothing better* to replace them with.
Which means, in the mean time, we need extensions to solve Real World (TM) problems. Not to sound like an ass, but let me know when you understand restrict semantics.
* Better, in this context means a) fast to compile, b) fast to execute. D _might_ be a possibility, but at the moment, I don't know of any D compilers for PS3, XBox 360, or Wii.
You CAN do reflection in C++ as the code base for one game I saw ... the catch is you need a super-base object, templates, and macros to pull it all off ...
but yeah, there is no _native_ language support for it.
> Milliseconds, not minutes, but yeah. At about t+4ms, the strong forces came into existence.
Probably get down-modded for asking a genuine question but anyways ...
From where? By what cause? And more importantly WHY?
> They keep people from stealing ideas.
How do you "steal" an intangible??
To quote a famous insight...
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The concept of Imaginary Property is absurd to begin with ... I have a sequence of numbers, yet somehow magically it is "owned" by someone else because it just so happens these numbers represent the frequencies of Happy Birthday. EMI can go fuck themselves.
Copyright is eventually going away in a few hundred years, whether they like it or not, and maybe we can get onto more important things instead of arguing over who "owns" what particular sequence of numbers.
The Fashion Industry has no copyright at all yet it still "magically" makes money ...
http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/25/lessons_from_fa/
--
"Resistance of the Future is Childish"
2009 Military was 68%
http://stepsandleaps.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/wallstatsdatlarge.jpg
63% Military / National Security vs 37%
http://www.mint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/DAT2010mint.jpg
--
"You actually have to PAY to live on the planet you were born on?!?!"
Which is ridiculous that some people [still] get their panties in a knot over a _virtual_ image.
Why are textbooks allowed to factually have historical accurate flags, yet a different medium is somehow "offensive" ??
Political Censorship ^H^H^H Correctnes is for pansies.