Rockoon, you are mistaken in a lot of your points. Even if you seem a bit angry, please allow me to explain. (I work for nvidia, but I do not speak for them).
Firstly, in rasterization, 4xAA does mean 4 samples per-pixel. The short version is that 4xAA basically means that we render into buffers that are twice as large in the X and Y direction (so 2*2 is 4), and then resolve the extra pixels with hardware when we go to present the backbuffer into the front buffer.
I can't speak to 4xAA in raytracing, but to be apples-to-apples, it would have to literally be extra rays in the X and Y directions. Note that I'm not claiming there's a 4x performance penalty here, though, because modern ray tracers rely a lot on cache coherency to be performant. Algorithmically, I would agree that there really is a potential for 4x the cost, but algorithmically we don't care about the constants we multiply by, right?
Third, it's important to consider what current cards do because they're the largest install base, and they are what developers will target. It's also important if you believe that hybrid raytracing is the future--almost all modern raytracers use rasterization for the eye rays to try to help with the pixel complexity problem.
Fourth, you are correct. In fact, there are probably relatively few hardware inventions that didn't begin their life as a software implementation--CPUs excepted.
Finally, you are incorrect. Raytracing scales O(pixels) and O(ln(complexity)). Rasterization is relatively constant in the number of pixels, and O(complexity). I agree, scene complexity has gone up considerably (and continues to go up considerably) every generation of new titles. Fortunately, in the same time period rasterization has massively decreased the cost of processing geometry while simultaneously increasing the ability to parallelize those types of workloads. Modern GPUs (like the relatively old 8800 GTX) can process in the neighborhood of 300M visible triangles per second. That means that if you're trying to redraw your scene at 60Hz, you can have around 5M triangles per scene per frame. The closest I've seen of most modern titles is in the 500K-1M range, so I think we still have some head room in this regard. Modern techniques, such as soft shadowing and depth-only passes definitely eat into this count, which is why we're seeing much higher counts than we used to.
Regarding pixel complexity, the number of pixels that matters is more than just the resolution, it's also how many times you'd like to draw those pixels in a given second. Seven years ago, you were lucky to find a CRT that drew 1280x1024 (which is a weird, 5:4 resolution, but I digress) at more than 60 Hz. 85 was reasonably common, but finding a monitor that drew at 1600x1200x85 was pretty rare.
Now, you can find monitors that render at 1920x1200x120 for relatively cheap. And 240 Hz is on the way. That's a lot of pixel data to be moving and redrawing. And speaking from experience, I can say that leveraging coherence within a single frame is hard, and leveraging coherence between frames is virtually unheard of.
It's not that raytracing is an impossible dream, it's just that the GP was correct: it's no panacea.
I'd like to reiterate: though I work for nvidia, I do not speak for them.
Except that as an undergraduate, you're not being paid by the university. The university is being paid by you and the [state|fund] for the purpose of educating you. Public universities aren't (supposed) to be profit making endeavors. They exist to educate students and further research that isn't profitable (yet). Private universities *may* be profit generating, but they're not supposed to. They're still supposed to be institutions of learning and research.
Now, 100% of what you said applies to corporations.
He's claiming that the US has more free speech than Germany.
But I don't buy that argument--being less free somewhere else doesn't mean that I should take it when the government tries to take my rights away from me.
Actually, it's largely irrelevant what the actual value of your house is, so long as any of the following are true:
1) You're not selling your house. 2) You're selling your house to move into another house (ie, you're not leaving the housing market) 3) Your house hasn't performed worse than the market at large.
If you buy a house for a million dollars, then then market tanks by 90%, and your house is now worth $100K, then all of the other million dollar houses are also just $100K, now. You will be able to buy an equivalent house with the $100K you can get out of your old house.
The real value of housing only matters to you if you decide to leave the market.
There's a difference between being a complete and utter asshole and talking someone to death.
If you, while a drunken bastard, had talked someone off the ledge (the wrong side of the ledge), I would feel no sympathy for you as they announced your guilty verdict--whether you remembered it or not.
Or apparently while they announced your 3 misdemeanor convictions.
First off, I disagree with your characterization of the GP as a coward. He's hit the nail right on the head: this isn't an issue of pro-abortion, it's pro-choice. As in, "I don't know the circumstances of your situation, so I shouldn't be sticking my nose into your business to make a decision for you. You should have a choice." You can call it cowardice, but then we're just talking past each other. Maybe we are anyways.
I'm surprised you don't agree that viability is a reasonable standard: if the fetus cannot survive on its own, that's not a baby. It's a parasite. Does your tapeworm have a right to live because it's inside and a part of you? They're both carbon-based lifeforms and have an equal chance of surviving if removed from your body before they're ready.
Moreover, there's a difference between "counseling against" and "making illegal." In general, I don't think most people who have abortions do so as a form of birth control. Some of my very close friends are ob/gyns, and the number one cause they wind up performing any form of abortion is because the baby isn't viable (there are literally hundreds of reasons this can happen) and the mother makes the decision to not deliver a full-term, stillborn child. Make no mistake: these fetuses would've been dead long before they became a babies.
Let me ask you this: if we made abortion illegal, and a woman went and had an illegal abortion, do you believe she should be punished? Should we throw her in jail?
Without a punishment, the criminalizing of abortions would just serve to make you feel better and wouldn't actually stop someone who was really determined to have an abortion.
You were modded offtopic and I will be too, but I feel I have to respond.
So if atheists ran things we'd legalize legitimate behaviors between consenting adults and would stop pretending that religious morality has a place in government?
Except for the disgusting lynching at the end, I fail to see what's wrong with the rest of your post.
If you trust people on slashdot implicitly, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Personally, I agree with the GP. Instead of asking slashdot, this should've been a google question.
My personal editor of choice is 'whatever editor is great on that platform.' I use Smultron on the Mac, Crimson Edit on Windows and VI on linux.
Cross-platform user-software almost universally suffers from the 'jack of all trades, master of none' syndrome. The conventions are different on the different platforms, why try to fit one editor for all of them? (For example, ctrl-c on windows versus command-c on mac).
As a variation on this theme, my (now) wife and I went and picked out the engagement ring together *before* I proposed. We'd been together for 5 years at the time and knew we wanted to be together in a more legal position (we'd been common-law for about 3 years before getting hitched).
The fact that we were going to be engaged wasn't a surprise to her, but the timing of when I finally asked her was. (I waited for a few months after I got the ring back before I finally popped the question).
And the reason we did this? I know I'm not a mind reader, and so does she. I knew it'd be important to her to like the ring, because she was going to wear it everyday. And, what she picked out and what she thought she'd pick out were completely different. So even though we'd talked about it beforehand, the ring she actually chose was completely different than what I would've picked for her.
I totally agree with the sibling post though that it's not about being a spineless doormat. It is all about deferring on the things you don't care about, being honest about the things you do care about and talking about what you disagree on.
And my wife is an ubergeek, she's an Ob/gyn. Nothing says 'geek' like voluntarily going to school for an extra four years followed by another four year apprenticeship. (Or maybe that says cabinet-maker, I'm not really sure).
You know what I love about Slashdot? When people post snarky grammar corrections that are themselves incorrect. So someone should go ahead and fire up their response to me now.
I do not think the word 'objective' means what you think it means. It doesn't mean 'rigorous scientific study'. It means
ob jec tive 5. not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion.
So, for example, if you were to turn on an FPS display (for example, by pressing CTRL-R in WoW), then run once in linux and run the same scene in Windows, then reported the framerate the display told you, that would be objective.
If instead, you just ran around in the game on both platforms and said 'this one feels slower than that one', that would be subjective.
Of course, don't let silly things like 'facts' get in the way of being snarky to an anonymous person on the internet. I sure didn't.:)
I don't agree with your first statement, but it seems from the rest of your post that neither do you. (Although we do agree for the rest of your post.:))
There can be a clear and obvious difference between where the signal gets upscaled based on the algorithm used in scaling. For example, with the kind of processing afforded by a GPU, you could upscale content with hints from frame-to-frame coherency, whereas a simple streaming processor (for example) won't have the bandwidth or memory storage to do so.
I recently purchased a PS3 (figuring it to be a mid-range bluray player that actually can update itself). Prior to that, I used a plain-old-dvd player that output 480p. My TV's native resolution is 1920x1080. My DVDs looked pretty much like I expected them to: blown up, but not particularly beautiful or anything (the TV was upscaling from 480 to 1080).
I'm actually quite impressed by the upscaling of the PS3. Most of my DVDs look much clearer, and even my low-tech family can tell the difference between the TV's scaling and the PS3's scaling (in a blind taste-test).:)
It seems like all Hollywood does these days is re-cover movies they've already made (which were generally adaptations of books in the first place).
Seriously, there's only one of two reasons why these are successful: 1) Nostalgia. 2) The idea was good the first time around.
We're rarely improving on the ideas at all. It's just mindless drivel rereleased again and again.
NBC's fall line up consists of a Jekyll and Hyde remake, followed by Knight Rider, followed by... A movie studio (not sure who) is making another "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", and yet another is making a sequel to Wargames.
Seriously Hollywood: stop. Just stop it. You're embarrassing yourself.
There are plenty of other books that you could make into movie that would translate well. For example, the Feist series of books, starting with Magician: Apprentice would translate pretty well to the screen.
What utopia do you live in, and do you have room for one more?
Your argument is flawed. You somehow assume that if Windows gaming goes away that the consoles will suddenly make up and decide that it's better for them if they provide a cross platform API, which is also compatible with the Mac, Linux and Windows... That's just not what console manufacturers are interested in. Each console manufacturer would love to sweep the other two under the rug. The only way to do that is by distinguishing yourself from your competition.
The consoles will be disjoint until one of them wins. Then you'll have genuine, single-platform gaming.
Oh, and you could have cross-platform gaming right now on the PC if you really wanted to. There are numerous libraries to help that. Here's the reason that games don't show up on the mac (until later) and rarely show up on linux at all. For the cost of supporting one platform, I could have 91% of the market. If I double the cost I spent on supporting my windows specific code, I could add 7%. If I triple the cost, I could add an additional 0.65%.
What developer is going to look at that and decide it's a good idea?
However, the Turing test is hardly the holy grail of AI. In fact, Alan Turing thought it would be solved within a few years. I can't find a direct quote for that, but from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
There is little doubt that Turing would have been disappointed by the state of play at the end of the twentieth century.
The Turing test was just supposed to be a minor stop on the way to truly great AI systems. Saying the Turing test is the holy grail of AI is like saying that two celled organisms are the holy grail of evolution. Sure, it's a significant milestone, but it's far from the multi-celled organisms that are writing responses to this inane article (which are themselves not the holy grail of molecular evolution).
No, the human eye doesn't have a resolution limit, anymore than 35mm film has 'resolution'.
The human eye is an analog processing device. It's basically nonsensical to talk about the 'resolution' that such a device can discern. However, I'll posit this: a good printer is 600-1200 dots per inch. It'd be difficult for most people to tell where the dots are at 600 dots per inch, although you can still tell in certain situations.
Current monitors display data at around 96 dpi (monitors for Windows, anyways). That's off by a factor of 6-12, depending on which end of the spectrum you're going for. For a 20.8" monitor to match print quality, it'd need to have a resolution of around 9984x7500 pixels. (I ballparked the measurements, that could be off by 1% or so).
Monitors are going up in resolution all the time. I use a 2560x1980 monitor at work. I could definitely find space for another.
Slashdot Mirror
Rockoon, you are mistaken in a lot of your points. Even if you seem a bit angry, please allow me to explain. (I work for nvidia, but I do not speak for them).
Firstly, in rasterization, 4xAA does mean 4 samples per-pixel. The short version is that 4xAA basically means that we render into buffers that are twice as large in the X and Y direction (so 2*2 is 4), and then resolve the extra pixels with hardware when we go to present the backbuffer into the front buffer.
I can't speak to 4xAA in raytracing, but to be apples-to-apples, it would have to literally be extra rays in the X and Y directions. Note that I'm not claiming there's a 4x performance penalty here, though, because modern ray tracers rely a lot on cache coherency to be performant. Algorithmically, I would agree that there really is a potential for 4x the cost, but algorithmically we don't care about the constants we multiply by, right?
Third, it's important to consider what current cards do because they're the largest install base, and they are what developers will target. It's also important if you believe that hybrid raytracing is the future--almost all modern raytracers use rasterization for the eye rays to try to help with the pixel complexity problem.
Fourth, you are correct. In fact, there are probably relatively few hardware inventions that didn't begin their life as a software implementation--CPUs excepted.
Finally, you are incorrect. Raytracing scales O(pixels) and O(ln(complexity)). Rasterization is relatively constant in the number of pixels, and O(complexity). I agree, scene complexity has gone up considerably (and continues to go up considerably) every generation of new titles. Fortunately, in the same time period rasterization has massively decreased the cost of processing geometry while simultaneously increasing the ability to parallelize those types of workloads. Modern GPUs (like the relatively old 8800 GTX) can process in the neighborhood of 300M visible triangles per second. That means that if you're trying to redraw your scene at 60Hz, you can have around 5M triangles per scene per frame. The closest I've seen of most modern titles is in the 500K-1M range, so I think we still have some head room in this regard. Modern techniques, such as soft shadowing and depth-only passes definitely eat into this count, which is why we're seeing much higher counts than we used to.
Regarding pixel complexity, the number of pixels that matters is more than just the resolution, it's also how many times you'd like to draw those pixels in a given second. Seven years ago, you were lucky to find a CRT that drew 1280x1024 (which is a weird, 5:4 resolution, but I digress) at more than 60 Hz. 85 was reasonably common, but finding a monitor that drew at 1600x1200x85 was pretty rare.
Now, you can find monitors that render at 1920x1200x120 for relatively cheap. And 240 Hz is on the way. That's a lot of pixel data to be moving and redrawing. And speaking from experience, I can say that leveraging coherence within a single frame is hard, and leveraging coherence between frames is virtually unheard of.
It's not that raytracing is an impossible dream, it's just that the GP was correct: it's no panacea.
I'd like to reiterate: though I work for nvidia, I do not speak for them.
Except that as an undergraduate, you're not being paid by the university. The university is being paid by you and the [state|fund] for the purpose of educating you. Public universities aren't (supposed) to be profit making endeavors. They exist to educate students and further research that isn't profitable (yet). Private universities *may* be profit generating, but they're not supposed to. They're still supposed to be institutions of learning and research.
Now, 100% of what you said applies to corporations.
Moderators have no sense of humor. I found it to be both on topic and funny.
You have the freedom to reread his post.
He's claiming that the US has more free speech than Germany.
But I don't buy that argument--being less free somewhere else doesn't mean that I should take it when the government tries to take my rights away from me.
The CEO of a company that promotes collaboration and community between companies says that the traditional model of OSS is broken.
Instead, he says, successful companies will work with each other to form communities and collaborate with one another to make money.
Film at 11. /vertisement.
Actually, it's largely irrelevant what the actual value of your house is, so long as any of the following are true:
1) You're not selling your house.
2) You're selling your house to move into another house (ie, you're not leaving the housing market)
3) Your house hasn't performed worse than the market at large.
If you buy a house for a million dollars, then then market tanks by 90%, and your house is now worth $100K, then all of the other million dollar houses are also just $100K, now. You will be able to buy an equivalent house with the $100K you can get out of your old house.
The real value of housing only matters to you if you decide to leave the market.
Of course, it freaks people out anyways.
There's a difference between being a complete and utter asshole and talking someone to death.
If you, while a drunken bastard, had talked someone off the ledge (the wrong side of the ledge), I would feel no sympathy for you as they announced your guilty verdict--whether you remembered it or not.
Or apparently while they announced your 3 misdemeanor convictions.
First off, I disagree with your characterization of the GP as a coward. He's hit the nail right on the head: this isn't an issue of pro-abortion, it's pro-choice. As in, "I don't know the circumstances of your situation, so I shouldn't be sticking my nose into your business to make a decision for you. You should have a choice." You can call it cowardice, but then we're just talking past each other. Maybe we are anyways.
I'm surprised you don't agree that viability is a reasonable standard: if the fetus cannot survive on its own, that's not a baby. It's a parasite. Does your tapeworm have a right to live because it's inside and a part of you? They're both carbon-based lifeforms and have an equal chance of surviving if removed from your body before they're ready.
Moreover, there's a difference between "counseling against" and "making illegal." In general, I don't think most people who have abortions do so as a form of birth control. Some of my very close friends are ob/gyns, and the number one cause they wind up performing any form of abortion is because the baby isn't viable (there are literally hundreds of reasons this can happen) and the mother makes the decision to not deliver a full-term, stillborn child. Make no mistake: these fetuses would've been dead long before they became a babies.
Let me ask you this: if we made abortion illegal, and a woman went and had an illegal abortion, do you believe she should be punished? Should we throw her in jail?
Without a punishment, the criminalizing of abortions would just serve to make you feel better and wouldn't actually stop someone who was really determined to have an abortion.
To say that every abortion kills a baby is a bit like being outraged that every period kills an egg.
Greatest line ever.
You were modded offtopic and I will be too, but I feel I have to respond.
So if atheists ran things we'd legalize legitimate behaviors between consenting adults and would stop pretending that religious morality has a place in government?
Except for the disgusting lynching at the end, I fail to see what's wrong with the rest of your post.
I play only with friends on b.net all the time.
It's really easy. We have a standing game name and password. foo/foo.
oops.
(Seriously though, we do just agree on a game name + password over IM. I don't see what the big deal is).
Yes, I couldn't possibly imagine how I would get Xcode to run on any other windowing system...
Like Xwindows. That would just never work. /ducks
If you trust people on slashdot implicitly, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Personally, I agree with the GP. Instead of asking slashdot, this should've been a google question.
My personal editor of choice is 'whatever editor is great on that platform.' I use Smultron on the Mac, Crimson Edit on Windows and VI on linux.
Cross-platform user-software almost universally suffers from the 'jack of all trades, master of none' syndrome. The conventions are different on the different platforms, why try to fit one editor for all of them? (For example, ctrl-c on windows versus command-c on mac).
As a variation on this theme, my (now) wife and I went and picked out the engagement ring together *before* I proposed. We'd been together for 5 years at the time and knew we wanted to be together in a more legal position (we'd been common-law for about 3 years before getting hitched).
The fact that we were going to be engaged wasn't a surprise to her, but the timing of when I finally asked her was. (I waited for a few months after I got the ring back before I finally popped the question).
And the reason we did this? I know I'm not a mind reader, and so does she. I knew it'd be important to her to like the ring, because she was going to wear it everyday. And, what she picked out and what she thought she'd pick out were completely different. So even though we'd talked about it beforehand, the ring she actually chose was completely different than what I would've picked for her.
I totally agree with the sibling post though that it's not about being a spineless doormat. It is all about deferring on the things you don't care about, being honest about the things you do care about and talking about what you disagree on.
And my wife is an ubergeek, she's an Ob/gyn. Nothing says 'geek' like voluntarily going to school for an extra four years followed by another four year apprenticeship. (Or maybe that says cabinet-maker, I'm not really sure).
You know what I love about Slashdot? When people post snarky grammar corrections that are themselves incorrect. So someone should go ahead and fire up their response to me now.
I do not think the word 'objective' means what you think it means. It doesn't mean 'rigorous scientific study'. It means
So, for example, if you were to turn on an FPS display (for example, by pressing CTRL-R in WoW), then run once in linux and run the same scene in Windows, then reported the framerate the display told you, that would be objective.
If instead, you just ran around in the game on both platforms and said 'this one feels slower than that one', that would be subjective.
Of course, don't let silly things like 'facts' get in the way of being snarky to an anonymous person on the internet. I sure didn't. :)
"How do you kill that which has no life?"
I don't agree with your first statement, but it seems from the rest of your post that neither do you. (Although we do agree for the rest of your post. :))
:)
There can be a clear and obvious difference between where the signal gets upscaled based on the algorithm used in scaling. For example, with the kind of processing afforded by a GPU, you could upscale content with hints from frame-to-frame coherency, whereas a simple streaming processor (for example) won't have the bandwidth or memory storage to do so.
I recently purchased a PS3 (figuring it to be a mid-range bluray player that actually can update itself). Prior to that, I used a plain-old-dvd player that output 480p. My TV's native resolution is 1920x1080. My DVDs looked pretty much like I expected them to: blown up, but not particularly beautiful or anything (the TV was upscaling from 480 to 1080).
I'm actually quite impressed by the upscaling of the PS3. Most of my DVDs look much clearer, and even my low-tech family can tell the difference between the TV's scaling and the PS3's scaling (in a blind taste-test).
Anyhoo...
Did you actually read Dune? What on earth are you talking about?
Did you mean 'He who controls the spice controls the universe?'
It seems like all Hollywood does these days is re-cover movies they've already made (which were generally adaptations of books in the first place).
Seriously, there's only one of two reasons why these are successful:
1) Nostalgia.
2) The idea was good the first time around.
We're rarely improving on the ideas at all. It's just mindless drivel rereleased again and again.
NBC's fall line up consists of a Jekyll and Hyde remake, followed by Knight Rider, followed by... A movie studio (not sure who) is making another "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", and yet another is making a sequel to Wargames.
Seriously Hollywood: stop. Just stop it. You're embarrassing yourself.
There are plenty of other books that you could make into movie that would translate well. For example, the Feist series of books, starting with Magician: Apprentice would translate pretty well to the screen.
Are you serious? I thought TLTWaTW was a terrible, terrible adaptation. And that book was short, there was no excuse.
Now, the first and second Harry Potters were shockingly faithful to the books (although they've diverged as they get further and further along).
What utopia do you live in, and do you have room for one more?
Your argument is flawed. You somehow assume that if Windows gaming goes away that the consoles will suddenly make up and decide that it's better for them if they provide a cross platform API, which is also compatible with the Mac, Linux and Windows... That's just not what console manufacturers are interested in. Each console manufacturer would love to sweep the other two under the rug. The only way to do that is by distinguishing yourself from your competition.
The consoles will be disjoint until one of them wins. Then you'll have genuine, single-platform gaming.
Oh, and you could have cross-platform gaming right now on the PC if you really wanted to. There are numerous libraries to help that. Here's the reason that games don't show up on the mac (until later) and rarely show up on linux at all. For the cost of supporting one platform, I could have 91% of the market. If I double the cost I spent on supporting my windows specific code, I could add 7%. If I triple the cost, I could add an additional 0.65%.
What developer is going to look at that and decide it's a good idea?
However, the Turing test is hardly the holy grail of AI. In fact, Alan Turing thought it would be solved within a few years. I can't find a direct quote for that, but from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
The Turing test was just supposed to be a minor stop on the way to truly great AI systems. Saying the Turing test is the holy grail of AI is like saying that two celled organisms are the holy grail of evolution. Sure, it's a significant milestone, but it's far from the multi-celled organisms that are writing responses to this inane article (which are themselves not the holy grail of molecular evolution).
It's too bad slashdot doesn't have a 'sad but true' moderation.
No, the human eye doesn't have a resolution limit, anymore than 35mm film has 'resolution'.
The human eye is an analog processing device. It's basically nonsensical to talk about the 'resolution' that such a device can discern. However, I'll posit this: a good printer is 600-1200 dots per inch. It'd be difficult for most people to tell where the dots are at 600 dots per inch, although you can still tell in certain situations.
Current monitors display data at around 96 dpi (monitors for Windows, anyways). That's off by a factor of 6-12, depending on which end of the spectrum you're going for. For a 20.8" monitor to match print quality, it'd need to have a resolution of around 9984x7500 pixels. (I ballparked the measurements, that could be off by 1% or so).
Monitors are going up in resolution all the time. I use a 2560x1980 monitor at work. I could definitely find space for another.
I'm sorry, but you are simply mistaken. Rasterization is an embarassingly parallel problem.