I believe you DO misunderstand him, he's describing a sub-orbital flight, as opposed to Low Earth Orbit which is 300-1000km. Anything below 250-300km altitude will be sub-orbital due to atmospheric drag.
It's the difference between the X-2 (they lost a couple due could have gone higher than 38kM, but would need attitude jets) and the Titan (which could take Carmack's vehicle into LEO)... But the X-Prize isn't about LEO, so that's okay. The X-Prize target is 100kM, because they want cheap commercial ICBMs, not rocket-planes.
Area lighting (you were calling it Diffuse lighting, area lighting is the cg term usually...) requires an array of point lights to make the soft shadows you want. Yep, they're more realistic, but they are an order of mangitude harder to compute.
first of all I called it a "diffuse light source", not "diffuse lighting" - a critical distinction between the source and the product. What's more "diffuse lighting" is a cg term too, albeit one you don't seem to know, and "area lighting" is subset of it. If you select "spotlight" instead of "area light" in your copy of lightwave or 3DStudio Max it's still a diffuse light. Pretty much everything but a laser is a form of diffuse light.
and secondly I'm glad you agree with me that they're more realistic but harder to compute. that was my point. they should have put a few sources in each lighting object instead of scattering loads of individual ones around. If that was the sort of level they wanted to use.
I'd love to hear of what you'd think would be a good example of a level that utilizes lights that have a physical size of 0 by 0 meters.
The names escape me, but of the stock levels any of the ones that are floating in space. y'know, space - where all the lights are really far away and cast hard shadows. For example, this effect is why the moon doesn't have a dawn or dusk, just a terminator line.
It's a okay as a technology demo, but it's ugly and what's more it's terrible coding for a raytracing engine.
They have used point sources, presumably to cut down on the ray-tracing required and show obviously ray-traced lighting, but it's the wrong sort of lighting...
Most of the light sources in Quake 3 are not point sources, but would in fact be slightly diffuse and should be rendered as such. You only get shadows like that from a very bright light far away. nearby light sources produce diffuse shadows - for example my lightbulb at 4 metres produces noticably diffuse shadow edges.
Using point sources on obviously diffuse light sources may give crisp, clear shadows, and a faster render speed, but it makes the raytrace less realistic and less impressive than the original.
If they wanted to show off their real-time raytracing using point-sorces they should have designed some levels that matched the ray tracing to the visible lightsource.
Lossless is a waste of space on iPods
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
your plan has merits, but one colossal drawback.
The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.
Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.
The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...
Yup. Ever since NASAs dead hand crushed the Saturn as a launch vehicle, there hasn't been anything really capable of putting my large granite house into geosychronous orbit.
Not that I think I'd use it, but it annoys me that I can't.
I work advising on travel arrangements - a form of travel agent, except I'm not selling anything. My employer used to test numeracy and geography, which is clearly applicable to the job.
The geography test was basically a national map with dots on it and a list of place names, including several fairly obscure ones. If you scored less than 75% you didn't get the job.
My employer no longer tests these things. This has resulted in a lower grade of new-starter, but if they're intelligent they learn, and if they have numeracy problems they didn't disclose it quickly becomes apparent in training.
But in the mid to long term this has no impact. If they don't know how they learn on-the-job. If they won't learn they're gone.
I see no reason why this can't apply to IT too, as ANY job has some sort of learning curve, but in a small company I expect it's safer to test basic skills - you're more likely to get useful results out of them straight away.
from their site "The Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum." and they're funded by "public intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." Although if these "intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." are so public, why don't they want to publicly put their names to this organisation.
It seems to me that they're a professional political lobbyists - guns for hire, if you will - but who pays their wages? I don't like the idea of raising the profile of an organisation without knowing exactly who they are......after all, for all we know, next month they'll get hired by neo-nazis and start promoting death camps and slavery!
If that was the engine used in Time Commanders I'm not impressed. Graphically it successfully portrayed the action, but was certainly not particularly lifelike, but the finished product may be better.
In AI terms, the players generally whipped the pants clean off the computer, even though none of them had any war or wargaming experience whatsoever. Even though they had the advantage - The players always got to play the historical winner, such as Hannibal when he ripped Scipio and Sempronius (and their troops) a new one at the river Tribius IIRC. "greatest military minds of all time" my arse, although it may have been crippled so the contestants would have a chance...
AFAIK legal/IP is not a very good reason not to distribute binaries. if the binary contains copyrighted code you can be certain the source does too. And if you distribute code under the educational and non-profit patent relaxations, then you can distribute compiled code too.
What is a good reason not to distribute binaries is the bandwidth, and I believe that's the main reason - that's why I say they should at least link to a site which distributes current binaries
Re:Xvid NEED win32 compiles on their front page
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Is it really? I think you are presuming people know that:
1: you cannot get binaries from xvid.org, and therefore don't waste their time looking.
2: Koepi compiles XviD for win32
3: nic's and uMandiac's builds are vastly out of date.
A google search for the keywords xvid binary bring up uManiac's site 1st and nic's 2nd. At this time, neither of them have updated their builds in about a year.
It would be cool if the Xvid people linked to the homepages of those distributing current builds for various OS platforms, but they don't, which means some people will unknowingly end up with out of date or slightly incompatible codecs.
Xvid NEED win32 compiles on their front page
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
The big problem with Xvid is they only provide the source. AFAIK 99% of users want a precompiled binary for their OS, which you have to download from other sites e.g. Koepi. Hosting pre-optimised OS specific compiled installers and/or directly linking to their download page from their front page would greatly increase Xvid popularity. Easier to get = more users. It's a no-brainer, so I guess that's not what the Xvid dev folks care about...
My friend has the same opinion of/. and in some respects he's probably right - there always has to be a compromise somewhere between speed, quality, and catering to the lowest common denominator. In the end nobody gets quite what they want...
Incidentally, he doesn't read the comments anymore. He lost hope in/. he realised I was using it. That's why I can say this with impugnity: Os, you code like a girl!
Now it's up to the slashdot readers to figure out if that's a compliment or an insult.
I'll keep that in mind the next time I go to shut down a windows machine and I click on the "Start" button todo so.
I don't see the problem. If you're going to be pedantic about it, The Start menu is appropriate. You are not Stopping the shutdown process, after all...
Though one of my peeves is the dumb windows gui for the file types gui. Considering the importance that file extensions have in windows, doesn't it make sense that this should be its own object in the control panel?
Well, the power-user can use the console with the 'assoc' and 'ftype' commands in the NT flavours, or through the folder options menu. Presumably MS feel 99% of regular users will never need more than the 'right-click|open with...' menu. You're entitled to your own pet peeves, of course, but I personally don't feel limited by it.
Could they make it look any more like Windows. This here is a linux OS that is trying to look as much like linux as possible.
Woah, there. That doesn't even BEGIN to make sense. (unless that's some weird, round about way of saying it doesn't look like MS Windows)
Incidentally, I don't think anyones got any business knocking the windows GUI. There are many things wrong with the Redmond family of operating systems but, to give them their due, they've put a hell of a lot of work into making the desktop work reasonably well.
well, to be truly accurate Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini are both dead and so neither make better cars, but for the 8 years or so mr Lamborghini ran his company the 350GT and 400GT were lauded as handling spectacularly well by critics and drivers, and demand far outstripped supply. Of course, Lambourghini never used his top design staff designing formula 1 vehicles to advertise his road vehicles, so his cars had the full attention of the design team he cherry-picked from ex-Ferrari staff after the mass walk out in 1961.
Oh, and the problem Lamborghini had was that the clutch on his personal Ferrari kept slipping - allegedly a common problem at the time. After Ferrari told him where to shove it he retrofitted a different clutch himself...
so maybe Lamborghini(a division of audi/VW) don't make better cars now, but Ferruccio Lamborghini did. IMHO anyway.
An LCD screen, keyboard and the right case will do just fine. IMHO laptops are best reserved for travel, where other passengers would complain about you carrying around a full PC and car battery.
And it's sheer power to cash outlay ratio where laptops always fall down. In fact, a friend of mine constructed a fantastic "luggable" from off-the-shelf components fitted to a flight case because he thought laptops simply didn't justify their cost/benifit ratio...
Re:My laptop is running Windows
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I've discovered some people here don't really read the mod guidlines, and will mark a post as a troll if they don't have a sense of humour, instead of saving it for GNAA/anti-slash/etc...
I have also seen people use overrated modding on unmodded posts. I suspect this is because they are idiots who set modifiers (ie +5 for positive karma) and forgot about them...
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you DO misunderstand him, he's describing a sub-orbital flight, as opposed to Low Earth Orbit which is 300-1000km. Anything below 250-300km altitude will be sub-orbital due to atmospheric drag.
It's the difference between the X-2 (they lost a couple due could have gone higher than 38kM, but would need attitude jets) and the Titan (which could take Carmack's vehicle into LEO)... But the X-Prize isn't about LEO, so that's okay. The X-Prize target is 100kM, because they want cheap commercial ICBMs, not rocket-planes.
Area lighting (you were calling it Diffuse lighting, area lighting is the cg term usually...) requires an array of point lights to make the soft shadows you want. Yep, they're more realistic, but they are an order of mangitude harder to compute.
first of all I called it a "diffuse light source", not "diffuse lighting" - a critical distinction between the source and the product. What's more "diffuse lighting" is a cg term too, albeit one you don't seem to know, and "area lighting" is subset of it. If you select "spotlight" instead of "area light" in your copy of lightwave or 3DStudio Max it's still a diffuse light. Pretty much everything but a laser is a form of diffuse light.
and secondly I'm glad you agree with me that they're more realistic but harder to compute. that was my point. they should have put a few sources in each lighting object instead of scattering loads of individual ones around. If that was the sort of level they wanted to use.
I'd love to hear of what you'd think would be a good example of a level that utilizes lights that have a physical size of 0 by 0 meters.
The names escape me, but of the stock levels any of the ones that are floating in space. y'know, space - where all the lights are really far away and cast hard shadows. For example, this effect is why the moon doesn't have a dawn or dusk, just a terminator line.
It's a okay as a technology demo, but it's ugly and what's more it's terrible coding for a raytracing engine.
They have used point sources, presumably to cut down on the ray-tracing required and show obviously ray-traced lighting, but it's the wrong sort of lighting...
Most of the light sources in Quake 3 are not point sources, but would in fact be slightly diffuse and should be rendered as such. You only get shadows like that from a very bright light far away. nearby light sources produce diffuse shadows - for example my lightbulb at 4 metres produces noticably diffuse shadow edges.
Using point sources on obviously diffuse light sources may give crisp, clear shadows, and a faster render speed, but it makes the raytrace less realistic and less impressive than the original.
If they wanted to show off their real-time raytracing using point-sorces they should have designed some levels that matched the ray tracing to the visible lightsource.
your plan has merits, but one colossal drawback.
The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.
Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.
The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...
Yup. Ever since NASAs dead hand crushed the Saturn as a launch vehicle, there hasn't been anything really capable of putting my large granite house into geosychronous orbit.
Not that I think I'd use it, but it annoys me that I can't.
I work advising on travel arrangements - a form of travel agent, except I'm not selling anything. My employer used to test numeracy and geography, which is clearly applicable to the job.
The geography test was basically a national map with dots on it and a list of place names, including several fairly obscure ones. If you scored less than 75% you didn't get the job.
My employer no longer tests these things. This has resulted in a lower grade of new-starter, but if they're intelligent they learn, and if they have numeracy problems they didn't disclose it quickly becomes apparent in training.
But in the mid to long term this has no impact. If they don't know how they learn on-the-job. If they won't learn they're gone.
I see no reason why this can't apply to IT too, as ANY job has some sort of learning curve, but in a small company I expect it's safer to test basic skills - you're more likely to get useful results out of them straight away.
from their site "The Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum."
...after all, for all we know, next month they'll get hired by neo-nazis and start promoting death camps and slavery!
and they're funded by "public intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." Although if these "intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." are so public, why don't they want to publicly put their names to this organisation.
It seems to me that they're a professional political lobbyists - guns for hire, if you will - but who pays their wages? I don't like the idea of raising the profile of an organisation without knowing exactly who they are...
If you had to play real time, you would be there for years.
Perfect - Longevity is important in a full-price strategy game!
If that was the engine used in Time Commanders I'm not impressed. Graphically it successfully portrayed the action, but was certainly not particularly lifelike, but the finished product may be better.
In AI terms, the players generally whipped the pants clean off the computer, even though none of them had any war or wargaming experience whatsoever. Even though they had the advantage - The players always got to play the historical winner, such as Hannibal when he ripped Scipio and Sempronius (and their troops) a new one at the river Tribius IIRC. "greatest military minds of all time" my arse, although it may have been crippled so the contestants would have a chance...
Yep, that's because cryptography falls under military tech and is classified as munitions(!).
You need a government licence to export munitions.
Guess the NRA never told the US Govt "Crypto doesn't kill people, people kill people"!
AFAIK legal/IP is not a very good reason not to distribute binaries. if the binary contains copyrighted code you can be certain the source does too. And if you distribute code under the educational and non-profit patent relaxations, then you can distribute compiled code too.
What is a good reason not to distribute binaries is the bandwidth, and I believe that's the main reason - that's why I say they should at least link to a site which distributes current binaries
Is it really? I think you are presuming people know that:
1: you cannot get binaries from xvid.org, and therefore don't waste their time looking.
2: Koepi compiles XviD for win32
3: nic's and uMandiac's builds are vastly out of date.
A google search for the keywords xvid binary bring up uManiac's site 1st and nic's 2nd.
At this time, neither of them have updated their builds in about a year. It would be cool if the Xvid people linked to the homepages of those distributing current builds for various OS platforms, but they don't, which means some people will unknowingly end up with out of date or slightly incompatible codecs.
The big problem with Xvid is they only provide the source. AFAIK 99% of users want a precompiled binary for their OS, which you have to download from other sites e.g. Koepi. Hosting pre-optimised OS specific compiled installers and/or directly linking to their download page from their front page would greatly increase Xvid popularity. Easier to get = more users. It's a no-brainer, so I guess that's not what the Xvid dev folks care about...
I like to believe these things happen by magic.
Satirical pieces on the infighting merely detracts from the mystery!
It eaats your branes!
My friend has the same opinion of /. and in some respects he's probably right - there always has to be a compromise somewhere between speed, quality, and catering to the lowest common denominator. In the end nobody gets quite what they want...
/. he realised I was using it. That's why I can say this with impugnity: Os, you code like a girl!
Incidentally, he doesn't read the comments anymore. He lost hope in
Now it's up to the slashdot readers to figure out if that's a compliment or an insult.
fair enough. Everyone's entitled to a bit of message garbling brain-failiure, now and then!
Linux has creeping featurism/bloat too.
I, and many others, remember the 0.99 and 1.0 kernels - they were much smaller than a 2.6 compile.
An' you didn't need any of those fancy schmancy newfangled pen-tee-ums to run it. 16 megabytes? You don't know you're born! ^_^
It isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Some of those features make life easier, etc.
I'll keep that in mind the next time I go to shut down a windows machine and I click on the "Start" button todo so.
I don't see the problem. If you're going to be pedantic about it, The Start menu is appropriate. You are not Stopping the shutdown process, after all...
Though one of my peeves is the dumb windows gui for the file types gui. Considering the importance that file extensions have in windows, doesn't it make sense that this should be its own object in the control panel?
Well, the power-user can use the console with the 'assoc' and 'ftype' commands in the NT flavours, or through the folder options menu. Presumably MS feel 99% of regular users will never need more than the 'right-click|open with...' menu. You're entitled to your own pet peeves, of course, but I personally don't feel limited by it.
Could they make it look any more like Windows. This here is a linux OS that is trying to look as much like linux as possible.
Woah, there. That doesn't even BEGIN to make sense. (unless that's some weird, round about way of saying it doesn't look like MS Windows)
Incidentally, I don't think anyones got any business knocking the windows GUI. There are many things wrong with the Redmond family of operating systems but, to give them their due, they've put a hell of a lot of work into making the desktop work reasonably well.
well, to be truly accurate Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini are both dead and so neither make better cars, but for the 8 years or so mr Lamborghini ran his company the 350GT and 400GT were lauded as handling spectacularly well by critics and drivers, and demand far outstripped supply. Of course, Lambourghini never used his top design staff designing formula 1 vehicles to advertise his road vehicles, so his cars had the full attention of the design team he cherry-picked from ex-Ferrari staff after the mass walk out in 1961.
Oh, and the problem Lamborghini had was that the clutch on his personal Ferrari kept slipping - allegedly a common problem at the time. After Ferrari told him where to shove it he retrofitted a different clutch himself...
so maybe Lamborghini(a division of audi/VW) don't make better cars now, but Ferruccio Lamborghini did. IMHO anyway.
Actually, once upon a time, Lamborghini only made tractors. And mister ferrari lived nearby.
Then one day, mister Ferrari said something rude about mister lamborghini and the quality of his tractors.
Mister Lamborghini took it personally.
Nowadays, of course, Lamborghini and Ferrari still live within a couple of miles of each other.
But mister Lamborghini makes better cars.
"Could you fit it in a duffel?"
why yes. yes, I could.
An LCD screen, keyboard and the right case will do just fine. IMHO laptops are best reserved for travel, where other passengers would complain about you carrying around a full PC and car battery.
And it's sheer power to cash outlay ratio where laptops always fall down. In fact, a friend of mine constructed a fantastic "luggable" from off-the-shelf components fitted to a flight case because he thought laptops simply didn't justify their cost/benifit ratio...
"My laptop's running Windows."
congratulations.
My laptop keeps running from Windows.
or indeed "eVoting banned in only CA, but it's a start"
I've discovered some people here don't really read the mod guidlines, and will mark a post as a troll if they don't have a sense of humour, instead of saving it for GNAA/anti-slash/etc...
I have also seen people use overrated modding on unmodded posts. I suspect this is because they are idiots who set modifiers (ie +5 for positive karma) and forgot about them...
where's the requested focus on positive modding?