"So I'd argue it's probably a draw if you're proficient at PC building."
Yeah, prices generally go down with increasing volume. If you build dozens of systems, you spread the initial time investment in figuring out how over all of them. You pick up tricks.
It remains true that if you only buy computers for yourself once every two years, it isn't worth learning the new RAM naming schemes and such. You won't save more money than you'd otherwise earn with that time.
"Not to be a flamebait, but isn't that what DVDs are for?
What makes the tivo any more legal than downloading divx files from kazaa, if that is the way it is going to be used?"
I don't suppose that is more legal. I don't care to comment on legality.
As for DVDs, they tend to come out way after the original series. Futurama Volume IV only came out just now.
Want to watch that Seinfeld episode with the toothbrush? You can pull it up only if you have all 100 or so hours of Seinfeld stored.
You probably don't want to watch it yourself. You probably want to show it to someone else. "There was this great episode of such and such the other day, man, you should have seen it."
Call it an extension of memory. It's well worth reading what C.S. Lewis said about this in "Perelandra", and of course if the text were online I could link you to the right bit.
These sorts of people used to download a lot more music before the iTunes music store for the same reason. They want to be able to have any song, any time. Now you don't have to download the song until you want to hear it because you know the download will work.
The music packratting is starting to fall off... you don't stockpile every kind of snack just in case you have a craving because you trust 7-11. The video packratting is just getting started.
1984 was made in the wake of WWII and during the rise of communism. It really seemed then that this kind of thing could hold onto a people into the future.
Brazil is about how these movements fall apart and all we're left with the the crumbling infrastructure of a grand social scheme and petty regulations designed to protect that system that trap the ordinary fellow.
1984 is about what the Western World feared communism would be. Brazil is about what communism, small-time fascism, and British capitalism all turned into.
So yeah, it's just like 1984, but rewritten from the side of things where the worst didn't happen. That's not an insignificant contribution. If more tinfoil hat types would watch Brazil, we could all relax just a bit. It's not a nice world, but it's not that much worse than any world we've ever had.
I think Dave Sims said, in one of his famous misogynists rant, that the key point in communism is that you do a lot of things to prepare society and then *boom*, human nature changes overnight, and you're free. Slashdot type know this as the ??? step. Brazil is about what happens if there is no ???.
I can't wait to see what the similar view of today's "war on terror" is forty years from now. We fear a worldwide network of people who would attack us yearly in horrible ways.... what will we get?
I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.
A major problem with in-game advertising where suspension of disbelief is concerned is that I'm used to seeing ads for all kinds of products.
Nothing's stranger than a universe where terrorists are after the president and oh, incidentally, the terrorist leader has somehow erased every brand of soda except Mountain Dew.
Brands have emotional connotations. I know people who get angry if they have to have the wrong brand of cola. If a person has truly entered into your world playing something like Shenmue and then the only kinds of soda available are Pepsi products, that's going to piss off about half your players, give or take %20.
I'm not at all happy that the bill refers to "atrocious" content. The word "obscene" was bad enough for abuse in interpretation. This is just insane.
Having created a category for atrocious content, future lawmakers can define penalties for creating or distributing atrocious content. The current system only requires labelling but that can change.
Wacom tablets don't use touch overlay technology. It's RFID tweaked to locate the stylus precisely in space. That's why it's pressure/tilt sensitive instead of just on/off.
You could build a non-pressure sensitive tablet PC, heck, maybe someone has. You couldn't sell it as an Apple. Graphic designers will buy Apple tablets with Wacom parts like chocolate bars. Digital sketchbook done right, yay.
I'd love a tablet. I don't care about the high price right now, I don't care about the lower cpu power. All I care about is that the current tablets run Windows and are made by insane PC firms. You just can't rely on the sleep functionality in Windows laptops.... not until someone you know has been using the specific model you're going to buy for three years and has had no problems.
It's not the fact that there are cameras in the cells that's the issue. It's publishing them on the web in real time.
Shows like cops give the suspect a chance to have his face blurred. These were real-time of recognizable individuals. As set up, there simple wasn't a chance for anyone to ensure anonymity... too much footage.
I appreciate the info, and of course I was well aware of posh. My earnest hope is that "fink u spk" isn't as common as lift.:D
By this I mean that the reason lift, posh, ming, and many other British words ordinarily pose no problem is that they can be picked up from context.
This sentence makes sufficient sense even though it has one wrong cabbage.
When the supporting structure is undermined, these regionalisms become more problematic. As I said, the Australians seem to do surprisingly well, despite having as many variant words as the British. "Free clothes" is one phrase I had to pick up that way. To me, it reeked of hobo chic.
If you learn to type via trial and error speedhacks, you have a tendency to AOL type, just as the parent said.
That's a problem. It brings accents into the typing realm. British people AOLspeak very differently from Americans. Australians tend to just type relatively well, which is odd, but they do have their own short forms.
The various slangs are based on whatever shorter way there is to spell the way the typist pronounces a word. Unlike the original online abbreviations such as LOL and ROFL, these new ones are not based on the typographic version of the word.
Accents online is something we don't need. The beauty of someone typing properly is that anyone can read that text and understand it, short of something like "lift" vs. "elevator". I couldn't walk into Manchester's poorer districts and converse reliably. I now find the same is true of typing with Manchester residents.
With Brit AOLSpeak, the first phrase you have to learn is "soz wot" which I think means "sorry, I don't follow." The second phrase is "i fink u spk 2 mingin posh u bastard" meaning "I am angry that you don't type the way I do." I'm not making that up, though I profess no great mastery of the form.
Even within the single local group, the AOL speak tends to vary based on what kind of half-assed typing is being used. People who use three fingers on each hand choose different short forms than those who use only the indexes.
Just as we need other web standards, we need a standard way of writing. It's not unprecedented... consider italic and cursive.
Slashdot is such a public extension of the private geek fight. There are three principal outcomes to a geek fight:
a) The first geek actually does know the truth about the point the second is bringing up, but differences in mode of expression and the lack of handy paper obscure this for a while as the two belabor the obvious. Eventually the first geek realizes what ridiculous mistake the second believes the first to have made, and laughs mightily.
b) The first geek does not know the truth about the point the second is bringing up, but would require a course in linear algebra and another in data structures to catch it, so he can't be convinced anyway.
c) The two work together or are in school together, and so one has grasped a point earlier than the other and is teaching it.
Strange that, though option c is least common among geeks, it's the one we tend to assume applies. In this case, we're at a.
So yeah, there's nothing wrong with your original post that a good dose of clearer terminology wouldn't cure. As it stood, it looked like sphoistry that happened to come out with the right conclusion. Turns out it's the right conclusion based on the right logic, casually expressed.
On the topic of clear terminology, I like your use of vectors (algebra), vectors (streams), vectors (graphics), etc... very useful in the more imprecise field of Graphic Design where I'm now applying my mathematical training. *sigh*
Hush Puppies are perfectly suited for hushing a puppy.... you kick the puppy.
Wouldn't you say there's something linguistically missing if you say their Puppy nature is why they're so suited? They're also suited for hushing babies.
Vector processors (big-V) are suited for dealing with vectors (little-v) because a Vector can contain the elements of a vector. Right. However, the elements of a Vector may not be a vector in any important sense, or worse, in a sense that twists the original meaning of the vector.
The Vector you deal with may be composed of a dozen scalars you want to multiply by another scalar really fast. You store them in a Vector, you perform what is technically a vector operation on them, but they are not in any important sense a little-v vector.
Say you're calculating the tax on a dozen shirts.... the vector containing the prices of all those shirts is not importantly a vector. If you let sV be a vector of shirt prices in the space of untaxed items, then you transform that into the vector space of taxed items... you're losing something important on the semantic front. The fact that you can view it this way is why it's called a vector processor, but it's naive. There isn't a thing in the world that isn't a vector when you're start talking that way, and the word loses its meaning.
More telling is the case in which, for reasons of limited cache and to avoid stall, you have a set of spatial vectors Vn, and you define a Vector xComponentsVector to contain all the x components of spatial vectors in your scene. The operation you perform on xComponent completely obliviates the concept of a direct mapping between Vectors and your vectors.
So all I'm pointing out is that there's a meaningful difference between a Vector and a vector, and that the reason Quartz and AltiVec are yummy to program for is that you can hand off vectors to the processor, yes... in the API. The Vectors that the processor calculates are very different indeed once the compiler has had its way, as with any data type.
If you're genuinely hand-coding assembly language AltiVec algorithms and the Vector you throw at the processor is always significantly a mathematical vector on a symbolic level, I'll eat my hat while we discuss the many optimization opportunities you're passing up.
"I truely fail to see how a desktop with 3D bloat will help over one with simple and fast 2D drawing."
The point is that 3-D card compositing is actually much faster than 2-D compositing on today's cards. The hardware is no longer super-optimized for 2-D... nobody cares about 2-D hardware anymore. The way Windows moves windows is insanely slow.
If I drag the window this browser is in on my 2.4 GHz machine with a Radeon 9800, I get tearing and it jumps around a bit. I have "display windows contents while dragging" on.
2-D on Windows is a fifteen year old setup, more or less. It's time for a new model, with less programmer complication.
If I run Quake III with vSync on, I get no tearing and I'm running at well past my monitors refresh rate... objects have apparent physical reality instead of this flitty flit windows nonsense.
Today if you turn off 32-bit colour for 8-bit color, you don't make your machine faster. It's slower because Windows stores internally as RGB. Turn to 256 color graphics and you have to set the palette all the time through BIOS calls. Yuck.
The same is true here... Windows is moving to a newer, faster graphics model. It's faster to have each application draw to its own framebuffer and let the 3-D card composite it. It's faster to not deal with actual blitting loops within applications that tie up the whole processor.
No more clipping calculations for the various windows, no more trouble with more than one video application trying to use the god-damned overlay mixer, no more trouble with overlays not working on the second monitor of a dual-monitor setup....
Don't think of it as 3-D bloat... that's inaccurate. Think of it as enabling the 3-D coprocessor that almost every computer will have at that time. You already know your P2-266 won't run Longhorn. 3-D doesn't make that more true.
"However, Quartz 2D is also a complete vector rasterizing engine, implemented (I assume, it'd be stupid if not) in AltiVec. Why use a GPU when you have multiple vector processors on a G5? (With oodles of L2 and L3 cache to eat on). FYI, writing vector graphics code with AltiVec is very yummy."
"Vector processors" do not accelerate the same kind of vectors that are involved in "vector graphics."
A vector processor works the kind of vector that is a data structure including many data elements. A scalar processor handles one piece of data at a time.
It's true that vector processing makes it faster to process vector graphics, but only because you can use it to process large lists of 3-D data very fast. Vectors (arrays) of vectors (quantities with both magnitude and direction).
The kind of "vector processing" you're thinking of is called a "transform and lighting engine." GPUs have that, the G5 does not per se.
Writing in Quartz 2D is yummy because Apple did the data type design pretty well, has some really useful calls, and you're surrounded by eyecandy.
I'm afraid you didn't manage to read it. Admittedly, the font is pretty unpleasant on that site.
"The VentrAssist, which is made by Australian company Ventracor, is of a type known as left ventricular assist devices. LVADs are not designed to replace the heart but are implanted alongside it under the rib cage."
Emphasis mine.
You're getting the full thrust of my frustration with the two sibling posts before you that also made this error... sorry.
It is a permanent device, but the heart must survive for this device to work. Grandparent brings up a valuable point about whether the heart will be weakened by non-pulsatile flow.
As for today's games, that's about money, not the limitations of a particular dimensional medium. Terrible games were rampant just before the big crash in the 80s... too much demand for the artists to meet well.
The whole point of using facial expressions is that they focus the entire attention on what's happening.
Facial expressions run deep into our primordial consciousness... just try to ignore that someone is frowning at you from across the room. You can tell the expressions of everyone around you instantly.
It's called a group mentality. The reason horses seem so intelligent is not that they think much... on an analytical level they are dumb as bricks. They do have a herding awareness that approaches telepathy, and so when they are around people, they seem to read our minds.
This kind of group mentality is enormously useful for huge lumbering things running around at high speed. Horses are perched on ungainly legs, run at twenty miles and hour, and wheel about in amazing configurations. Antelopes, zebra... these animals don't have lines on the ground, they don't have rules, but they very, very rarely crash.
No, the problem won't be being distracted by the facial expressions. The problem will be how to set the expressions. If they're keyed to those of the driver, then the car of a mother with troublesome kids in the back seat may look like it's about to crash. If they're set manually, it will probably be rude to do anything but smile.
The big difference is that HD-DVD will be given away for free. Hollywood wants it out there, free DVD players are used to drive the sales of big TVs, the generation of consoles after this one will be blu-ray to fit more game content...
None of this applies to DVD-A. Nobody is really buying the kinds of things you might give away DVD-A capability in. When people drop a huge wad of money on music, it's on playing MP3s. Music has moved beyond the disc.
That's on the market side. On the sensory side, "good enough" will be when the TV picture is indistinguishable from real life.
There's a layman's sense that a CD is "the same" as the song of which it is a recording, even though sure, the acoustics are better at a concert. With someone like Britney Spears, it IS the same as real life... what they're playing on the speakers is a digital recording with some real-time elements.
This sense doesn't exist with TV... you can still "feel" how HD-TV falls short. With standard DVDs, it's painfully clear. We've got a whole 'nother generation of higher-res televisions to sell before it feels "good enough".
"What bothers me is that offline rendering achieves much better graphics,"
On the contrary, demos produce far better graphics in many, many cases. Download something like The Popular Demo and run it 1280x1024 on a nice new card... the result is vastly beyond anything you're going to get on a DVD.
60 frames a second, high-resolution graphics have an appeal that beats the Pixar alternative... either 480p blur on a DVD or 24 FPS shuddering in the movie theatre.
There's a sense of physical reality there that is more than just "how closely does this shading model reflect reality." Would you criticize a cut diamond because of its low poly count? In some ways, that simplicity and mathematical clarity is the appeal.
Of course, you have to do it properly, which is why I refer to The Popular Demo... the dancing figures made of mirrored glass completely obviate any talk of realism in favor of simply gorgeous animation. No stiff Final Fantasy movie soap-person has ever seemed so alive.
I guess the best parallel in the real world would be stained glass. Is a painting inherently better than stained glass just because it can come closer to photo-realism? Hardly.
The issue is not whether I think it is art. The issue is whether the computer thinks it is art. The computer does not think it is art because the computer does not think anything, not yet.
See Daniel Dennett and the intentional stance... Art is always intentional. Even if you just drop your ketchup by accident then think it is pretty and photograph it for the wall, you're still accomplishing intention after having made the pattern. You're intending it to be something.
This is why not every shit you take or every footprint you make is a work of art. You don't intend them to be. You can easily intend one to be if you like. At that point we can start having heated discussions about whether the shit can be art, but not before.
In this case, then, you could easily say that the program is a piece of art, but any invidual animation is NOT. It is the totality of the images which is art, and that totality was not created by the computer. The program is a sort of multi-dimensional sculpture visible only from a certain perspective. The artist is the programmer.
To say the computer is the artist here is the equivalent of taking the missing arms of the Venus de Milo, then saying that the arms are a work of art and that the Venus made that work. The Venus didn't make anything, it just existed and broke.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, prices generally go down with increasing volume. If you build dozens of systems, you spread the initial time investment in figuring out how over all of them. You pick up tricks.
It remains true that if you only buy computers for yourself once every two years, it isn't worth learning the new RAM naming schemes and such. You won't save more money than you'd otherwise earn with that time.
I don't suppose that is more legal. I don't care to comment on legality.
As for DVDs, they tend to come out way after the original series. Futurama Volume IV only came out just now.
Want to watch that Seinfeld episode with the toothbrush? You can pull it up only if you have all 100 or so hours of Seinfeld stored.
You probably don't want to watch it yourself. You probably want to show it to someone else. "There was this great episode of such and such the other day, man, you should have seen it."
Call it an extension of memory. It's well worth reading what C.S. Lewis said about this in "Perelandra", and of course if the text were online I could link you to the right bit.
These sorts of people used to download a lot more music before the iTunes music store for the same reason. They want to be able to have any song, any time. Now you don't have to download the song until you want to hear it because you know the download will work.
The music packratting is starting to fall off... you don't stockpile every kind of snack just in case you have a craving because you trust 7-11. The video packratting is just getting started.
Brazil is about how these movements fall apart and all we're left with the the crumbling infrastructure of a grand social scheme and petty regulations designed to protect that system that trap the ordinary fellow.
1984 is about what the Western World feared communism would be. Brazil is about what communism, small-time fascism, and British capitalism all turned into.
So yeah, it's just like 1984, but rewritten from the side of things where the worst didn't happen. That's not an insignificant contribution. If more tinfoil hat types would watch Brazil, we could all relax just a bit. It's not a nice world, but it's not that much worse than any world we've ever had.
I think Dave Sims said, in one of his famous misogynists rant, that the key point in communism is that you do a lot of things to prepare society and then *boom*, human nature changes overnight, and you're free. Slashdot type know this as the ??? step. Brazil is about what happens if there is no ???.
I can't wait to see what the similar view of today's "war on terror" is forty years from now. We fear a worldwide network of people who would attack us yearly in horrible ways.... what will we get?
A major problem with in-game advertising where suspension of disbelief is concerned is that I'm used to seeing ads for all kinds of products.
Nothing's stranger than a universe where terrorists are after the president and oh, incidentally, the terrorist leader has somehow erased every brand of soda except Mountain Dew.
Brands have emotional connotations. I know people who get angry if they have to have the wrong brand of cola. If a person has truly entered into your world playing something like Shenmue and then the only kinds of soda available are Pepsi products, that's going to piss off about half your players, give or take %20.
Exclusivity isn't going to cut it.
Grandparent is saying "This isn't about copyright, but it's an interesting thing that this furore reminds me of..."
Can someone mod my parent post down so this embarassment won't get a thousand corrections?
The "atrocious" bill failed to pass. Call me happy about that.
Having created a category for atrocious content, future lawmakers can define penalties for creating or distributing atrocious content. The current system only requires labelling but that can change.
The Wacoms are RFID, not accelerometer, but they detect pen pressure and tilt at any moment.
Working a similar system out now would be a matter of $199 worth of hardware and the proper software. Piece of cake.
You could build a non-pressure sensitive tablet PC, heck, maybe someone has. You couldn't sell it as an Apple. Graphic designers will buy Apple tablets with Wacom parts like chocolate bars. Digital sketchbook done right, yay.
I'd love a tablet. I don't care about the high price right now, I don't care about the lower cpu power. All I care about is that the current tablets run Windows and are made by insane PC firms. You just can't rely on the sleep functionality in Windows laptops.... not until someone you know has been using the specific model you're going to buy for three years and has had no problems.
Shows like cops give the suspect a chance to have his face blurred. These were real-time of recognizable individuals. As set up, there simple wasn't a chance for anyone to ensure anonymity... too much footage.
Niven was slyly referring to when Archimedes actually DID that. Archimedes used a burning mirror to defend the harbor of Syracuse against the Romans.
By this I mean that the reason lift, posh, ming, and many other British words ordinarily pose no problem is that they can be picked up from context.
This sentence makes sufficient sense even though it has one wrong cabbage.
When the supporting structure is undermined, these regionalisms become more problematic. As I said, the Australians seem to do surprisingly well, despite having as many variant words as the British. "Free clothes" is one phrase I had to pick up that way. To me, it reeked of hobo chic.
That's a problem. It brings accents into the typing realm. British people AOLspeak very differently from Americans. Australians tend to just type relatively well, which is odd, but they do have their own short forms.
The various slangs are based on whatever shorter way there is to spell the way the typist pronounces a word. Unlike the original online abbreviations such as LOL and ROFL, these new ones are not based on the typographic version of the word.
Accents online is something we don't need. The beauty of someone typing properly is that anyone can read that text and understand it, short of something like "lift" vs. "elevator". I couldn't walk into Manchester's poorer districts and converse reliably. I now find the same is true of typing with Manchester residents.
With Brit AOLSpeak, the first phrase you have to learn is "soz wot" which I think means "sorry, I don't follow." The second phrase is "i fink u spk 2 mingin posh u bastard" meaning "I am angry that you don't type the way I do." I'm not making that up, though I profess no great mastery of the form.
Even within the single local group, the AOL speak tends to vary based on what kind of half-assed typing is being used. People who use three fingers on each hand choose different short forms than those who use only the indexes.
Just as we need other web standards, we need a standard way of writing. It's not unprecedented... consider italic and cursive.
a) The first geek actually does know the truth about the point the second is bringing up, but differences in mode of expression and the lack of handy paper obscure this for a while as the two belabor the obvious. Eventually the first geek realizes what ridiculous mistake the second believes the first to have made, and laughs mightily.
b) The first geek does not know the truth about the point the second is bringing up, but would require a course in linear algebra and another in data structures to catch it, so he can't be convinced anyway.
c) The two work together or are in school together, and so one has grasped a point earlier than the other and is teaching it.
Strange that, though option c is least common among geeks, it's the one we tend to assume applies. In this case, we're at a.
So yeah, there's nothing wrong with your original post that a good dose of clearer terminology wouldn't cure. As it stood, it looked like sphoistry that happened to come out with the right conclusion. Turns out it's the right conclusion based on the right logic, casually expressed.
On the topic of clear terminology, I like your use of vectors (algebra), vectors (streams), vectors (graphics), etc... very useful in the more imprecise field of Graphic Design where I'm now applying my mathematical training. *sigh*
Wouldn't you say there's something linguistically missing if you say their Puppy nature is why they're so suited? They're also suited for hushing babies.
Vector processors (big-V) are suited for dealing with vectors (little-v) because a Vector can contain the elements of a vector. Right. However, the elements of a Vector may not be a vector in any important sense, or worse, in a sense that twists the original meaning of the vector.
The Vector you deal with may be composed of a dozen scalars you want to multiply by another scalar really fast. You store them in a Vector, you perform what is technically a vector operation on them, but they are not in any important sense a little-v vector.
Say you're calculating the tax on a dozen shirts.... the vector containing the prices of all those shirts is not importantly a vector. If you let sV be a vector of shirt prices in the space of untaxed items, then you transform that into the vector space of taxed items... you're losing something important on the semantic front. The fact that you can view it this way is why it's called a vector processor, but it's naive. There isn't a thing in the world that isn't a vector when you're start talking that way, and the word loses its meaning.
More telling is the case in which, for reasons of limited cache and to avoid stall, you have a set of spatial vectors Vn, and you define a Vector xComponentsVector to contain all the x components of spatial vectors in your scene. The operation you perform on xComponent completely obliviates the concept of a direct mapping between Vectors and your vectors.
So all I'm pointing out is that there's a meaningful difference between a Vector and a vector, and that the reason Quartz and AltiVec are yummy to program for is that you can hand off vectors to the processor, yes... in the API. The Vectors that the processor calculates are very different indeed once the compiler has had its way, as with any data type.
If you're genuinely hand-coding assembly language AltiVec algorithms and the Vector you throw at the processor is always significantly a mathematical vector on a symbolic level, I'll eat my hat while we discuss the many optimization opportunities you're passing up.
The point is that 3-D card compositing is actually much faster than 2-D compositing on today's cards. The hardware is no longer super-optimized for 2-D... nobody cares about 2-D hardware anymore. The way Windows moves windows is insanely slow.
If I drag the window this browser is in on my 2.4 GHz machine with a Radeon 9800, I get tearing and it jumps around a bit. I have "display windows contents while dragging" on.
2-D on Windows is a fifteen year old setup, more or less. It's time for a new model, with less programmer complication.
If I run Quake III with vSync on, I get no tearing and I'm running at well past my monitors refresh rate... objects have apparent physical reality instead of this flitty flit windows nonsense.
Today if you turn off 32-bit colour for 8-bit color, you don't make your machine faster. It's slower because Windows stores internally as RGB. Turn to 256 color graphics and you have to set the palette all the time through BIOS calls. Yuck.
The same is true here... Windows is moving to a newer, faster graphics model. It's faster to have each application draw to its own framebuffer and let the 3-D card composite it. It's faster to not deal with actual blitting loops within applications that tie up the whole processor.
No more clipping calculations for the various windows, no more trouble with more than one video application trying to use the god-damned overlay mixer, no more trouble with overlays not working on the second monitor of a dual-monitor setup....
Don't think of it as 3-D bloat... that's inaccurate. Think of it as enabling the 3-D coprocessor that almost every computer will have at that time. You already know your P2-266 won't run Longhorn. 3-D doesn't make that more true.
"Vector processors" do not accelerate the same kind of vectors that are involved in "vector graphics."
A vector processor works the kind of vector that is a data structure including many data elements. A scalar processor handles one piece of data at a time.
Vector processor
It's true that vector processing makes it faster to process vector graphics, but only because you can use it to process large lists of 3-D data very fast. Vectors (arrays) of vectors (quantities with both magnitude and direction).
The kind of "vector processing" you're thinking of is called a "transform and lighting engine." GPUs have that, the G5 does not per se.
Writing in Quartz 2D is yummy because Apple did the data type design pretty well, has some really useful calls, and you're surrounded by eyecandy.
"The VentrAssist, which is made by Australian company Ventracor, is of a type known as left ventricular assist devices. LVADs are not designed to replace the heart but are implanted alongside it under the rib cage."
Emphasis mine.
You're getting the full thrust of my frustration with the two sibling posts before you that also made this error... sorry.
It is a permanent device, but the heart must survive for this device to work. Grandparent brings up a valuable point about whether the heart will be weakened by non-pulsatile flow.
In particular, see Balzac...
As for today's games, that's about money, not the limitations of a particular dimensional medium. Terrible games were rampant just before the big crash in the 80s... too much demand for the artists to meet well.
Facial expressions run deep into our primordial consciousness... just try to ignore that someone is frowning at you from across the room. You can tell the expressions of everyone around you instantly.
It's called a group mentality. The reason horses seem so intelligent is not that they think much... on an analytical level they are dumb as bricks. They do have a herding awareness that approaches telepathy, and so when they are around people, they seem to read our minds.
This kind of group mentality is enormously useful for huge lumbering things running around at high speed. Horses are perched on ungainly legs, run at twenty miles and hour, and wheel about in amazing configurations. Antelopes, zebra... these animals don't have lines on the ground, they don't have rules, but they very, very rarely crash.
No, the problem won't be being distracted by the facial expressions. The problem will be how to set the expressions. If they're keyed to those of the driver, then the car of a mother with troublesome kids in the back seat may look like it's about to crash. If they're set manually, it will probably be rude to do anything but smile.
None of this applies to DVD-A. Nobody is really buying the kinds of things you might give away DVD-A capability in. When people drop a huge wad of money on music, it's on playing MP3s. Music has moved beyond the disc.
That's on the market side. On the sensory side, "good enough" will be when the TV picture is indistinguishable from real life.
There's a layman's sense that a CD is "the same" as the song of which it is a recording, even though sure, the acoustics are better at a concert. With someone like Britney Spears, it IS the same as real life... what they're playing on the speakers is a digital recording with some real-time elements.
This sense doesn't exist with TV... you can still "feel" how HD-TV falls short. With standard DVDs, it's painfully clear. We've got a whole 'nother generation of higher-res televisions to sell before it feels "good enough".
Fill in missing areas with plaster.
Scan plastered original.
Subtract model of original from plastered original.
Carve the resulting patch models from wood or stone.
Glue absolutely perfect replacement pieces onto original.
On the contrary, demos produce far better graphics in many, many cases. Download something like The Popular Demo and run it 1280x1024 on a nice new card... the result is vastly beyond anything you're going to get on a DVD.
60 frames a second, high-resolution graphics have an appeal that beats the Pixar alternative... either 480p blur on a DVD or 24 FPS shuddering in the movie theatre.
There's a sense of physical reality there that is more than just "how closely does this shading model reflect reality." Would you criticize a cut diamond because of its low poly count? In some ways, that simplicity and mathematical clarity is the appeal.
Of course, you have to do it properly, which is why I refer to The Popular Demo... the dancing figures made of mirrored glass completely obviate any talk of realism in favor of simply gorgeous animation. No stiff Final Fantasy movie soap-person has ever seemed so alive.
I guess the best parallel in the real world would be stained glass. Is a painting inherently better than stained glass just because it can come closer to photo-realism? Hardly.
See Daniel Dennett and the intentional stance... Art is always intentional. Even if you just drop your ketchup by accident then think it is pretty and photograph it for the wall, you're still accomplishing intention after having made the pattern. You're intending it to be something.
This is why not every shit you take or every footprint you make is a work of art. You don't intend them to be. You can easily intend one to be if you like. At that point we can start having heated discussions about whether the shit can be art, but not before.
In this case, then, you could easily say that the program is a piece of art, but any invidual animation is NOT. It is the totality of the images which is art, and that totality was not created by the computer. The program is a sort of multi-dimensional sculpture visible only from a certain perspective. The artist is the programmer.
To say the computer is the artist here is the equivalent of taking the missing arms of the Venus de Milo, then saying that the arms are a work of art and that the Venus made that work. The Venus didn't make anything, it just existed and broke.