Attempt 1) get shot down Attempt 2) get shot down Attempt 3) get stuck in tree and then shot Attempt 4) get shot down Attempt 5) get stuck in tree and spend 5 minutes press the 'escape' key then get shot on ground Attempt 6) get shot down Attempt 7) kill some nazis then get shot Attempt 8) get shot down Attempt 9) get shot down Attempt 10) get shot down Attempt 11) get shot down Attempt 12) be sneakier and kill more nazis then get shot Attempt 13) download FAQ and type special 'idkfa' cheat and walk around like Rambo and have more fun playing the video game as escapism where you become a hero. You've just had your fill of realism, now you want entertainment. You want to play the role of the top 1% that didn't die or get wounded instead of just another peon.
Maybe for a dozen people in the world smart enough to figure it out, but the majority of people are casual users that just want to log in and play a game or two of their favourite RTS or FPS or do a quest in their favourite MMO. Or just chat in forums about games. Very few actually want to spend the effort to cheat.
The best solution is to not trust the client at all. Most of the problems you listed are because the client, which one needs to assume is cheating, is telling you where he is. Instead of running and telling the server where you are you should give input saying "I am running now"
This is why you won't find cheating in a good RTS or MMO, the server or peers can run everything in parallel. The only cheating that can happen is "aimbots", but fortunately there isn't much use for them in a MMO or RTS. Maybe the AI could run on a cheater's system, but I have never seen good AI in an RTS. At best you'll be able to write AI smart enough to beat some n00bs, but that'll only climb you to level 2 or 3 on a ladder.
Unfortunately for a FPS you'd need to be on a decent LAN for this to work. Broadband is only good enough for this in a few places, and generally speaking the US and most of Europe is not one of them.:(
Windows system requirements
* PC with USB 2.0 port
* Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate Edition; or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later
* iTunes 7.3 or later
It does not specify 32bit. There is no indication Vista Ultimate needs to Vista Ultimate 32bit.
MS is really pushing 64bit. You can't get a 32bit driver WHQL certified anymore unless there is a 64bit version. This is so people don't need to worry about 32bit or 64bit, the customer just needs to read "requires Vista" and the IHV just needs to print "requires Vista". Nice and simple. Apple is writing "requires Vista" and then behaving differently than the rest of the Windows ecosystem. While this is shameful for any company, it's extra shameful for one that prides itself on just working.
Who needs 64bit? Today, all Vista users that are gamers. Company of Heroes (for non gamers out there it's a RTS set in ww2 that is a Games For Windows game and it won a ton of Game of the Year 2006 awards-It's a pretty big fully windows designed game, not just some weird exception to the rule nobody plays that I've found.) will actually run out of Virtual Address space and crash in Vista when CoH worked fine on the exact same system using XP drivers! The user can either figure out how to boot into 3 gig mode in Vista32, or just use Vista 64.
CoH was released in September 2006 and is bumping into the 32bit Virtual Address space limitations! (A 32bit PC can only see 4 gigabytes, generally 2 gigabytes is for the OS and each application gets 2gigabytes. In 64bit mode the 32bit application gets a full 4 gigabytes of VA space.) What is going to happen with all the new games released this coming Autumn? They're obviously going to use more memory than year old games.
Water = 0 calories
Cola = 105 calories
Milk = 150 calories
Apple juice = 120 calories
Grape juice = 145 calories
Those are empty calories in a cola. Your body still needs all the vitamins and minerals found in fruit juice.
You end up consuming 105 empty calories and your body has no satisfaction, so you end up consuming another 105. Eventually you get full... However you still didn't get any nutrients, only calories. Which is fine for athletes looking to suplement their diet with additional calories. Regular people eventually end up missing out on nutrients and consuming too many calories and then end up overweight.
It's not all the fault of pop obviously, but repeat that with all junk food vs. the more traditional fruit/vegetable based foods and eventually you're fat and/or unhealthy, usually both.
Don't forget the Ripsaw used by TeamTMT. Their vehicle looks much cooler, and more fun to drive, than the wimpy one from UMass Dartmouth. All they need to do is figure out that AI problem and they're done...
if I shout "Fuck the FCC motherfuckers up their shitty asses with rubber cocks!" on TV or radio? Does that count as political speech, or would I (and/or the station) get fined?
I saw two minute rant on a Canadian show about this. Basically some people are allowed in Canada under some conditions. If you're a union protester on strike being interviewed you can say that you're "fucking tired of the bullshit the corporation is giving you" and then the reporter would reply "what kind of bull@#&% is making you #*&%ing tired?"
"On top of that, since when is being religious a bad thing?"
Since religion was used as an excuse to fly planes into skyscrapers?..Crusades...molestation scandals...Those are some pretty bad things if you ask me. It seems that blind faith in all its many forms, including religion, is a very dangerous thing indeed
Flying planes into buildings was an anti-US thing. They didn't fly into the vadican to kill the pope or get back at any countries that had crusades against them. It would've happened even if the US was a predominatly muslim nation. Americans like to blame religion for this rather than admit the real reason was because people hated the US.
Just because religion has been used as mask for doing some pretty horrible things doesn't mean it is bad, just that it can't really transform people. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, whether you're a King or a Pope. I don't think the christianity or muslim relgions have sections in their books saying it's ok to ignore the rules about not killing and start wars... Bad things happen. Wars happen. There have been plenty of wars, searches for scapegoats, and invasions not in the name of xxx.
Molestation happens with sports coaches, scout leaders, teachers, or even weathly pop stars. Molestation isn't done in the name of xxx and no religion I'm aware of supports any form of it. Just a case of bad people who happened to be religious.
Basically your list seems to be a reflection of human nature. And with traditionally religion playing a major part in people's lives it was incorporated into those events. With the soviets they tore down many beautiful churches in the name of removing religion from the state. Then they went are their own inquisitions in the name of totalatarism and communism as it was the major thing at the time. Like you said, blind faith.
I guess what I'm getting at is how does that largely historical list relate to people's lives today? There was only one valid example in your list, discrimination of homosexuals and it is fortunately changing.
What about the good things people do in the name of religion? In my city of 2million probably 75% of the free meals to homeless are provided by the Church or xxx or St. somebody's chunch. My vehicle has been broken into a couple times. I'm pretty sure that theif isn't worried that there is an all seeing being (be it god or santa's elves) that saw him do bad stuff and will give him an afterlife of burning in fire for eterinity for sinning.
In my contact with religion it generally makes people do good things like give time to charities and not do bad things like steal. I'm not worried about walking around late at night and being mugged by a christian, jew, muslim, or buddist.
As far as I'm concerned compilers are better than 99% of the programmers out there. Just write clear code and let the compiler do it's trick. However there are a couple cases where things aren't automatically optimized that I can think of.
It's not really a coding trick like an XOR swap, but most compilers don't yet seem to fully unroll parallel loops into good SIMD instructions or multiple threads.
The only time I've needed to bother to look at assembly output in recent years (other than debugging a release mode program) is when writing HLSL shaders. HLSL is the high level shading languge (C like) for shaders that is part of Direct3D 9. HLSL can be compiled to SM1, SM2, or SM3 assembly.
With pixel shader 2.0 you've only got 64 instruction slots, and some important instructions like POW (power), NRM (normalize), and LRP (interpolate) take multiple slots. 64 slots is not enough for a modern shader. I curse ATI for setting it bar so low.;)
There are two flaws I've found with the Dec 04 HLSL compiler in the DirectX. Sometimes it will not automatically detect a dot product opportunity. I had some colour code to convert to black and white in a shader and wrote it as y = colour.r*0.299 + colour.g*0.587 + colour.b*0.114; as I thought that was the most clear way to write it. Under certain circumstances the compiler didn't want to convert to a single dot instruction so I had to write as y = dot( colour.rgb, half3(.299h,.587h,.0114h)); I'm not sure if that bug still exists in the current compiler release or not.
Another is often a value in the range of -1 to +1 is passed in as a colour, which means it must be packed into 0-1 range. To get it back you've got to double it and add 1. a = p*2+1; gets converted into a single MAD instruction which takes one slot. a = (p-0.5)*2; gets converted into an ADD and then a MUL.
Also conventional wisdom says you've got to write assembly to get maximum performance out of pixel shader 1.1 as it is basically just eight instruction slots. I don't have any snippets to verify this though.
I think this thread demonstrates that either compilers are mature enough you don't need any code tricks to help them do their job or/. posters just aren't aware of the short commings of compilers (see first sentence of this post) and would rather post obvious advice than not post at all.:)
"I ask the Slashdot crowd, what they believe the compiler can be trusted to optimize and what must be hand optimized? Give examples of code optimizations that you think the compiler can/can't be trusted to do."
Somehow 99% of the readers took this to mean "What is the difference between NULL and the zero bit pattern and do you think it is a good idea to write clear code and do the profile/algorithm change cycle until there is nothing left to optimize or should I write low level optimized code from the start?"
sigh.. I've only found two comments with code so far after going through hundreds of posts. This is possibly the worst signal to noise ratio I've witnessed on/.
Here in Vancouver we have Shaw selling Lite always on cable connections that are "up to 5x faster than dial up" for $25CDN ($20.29 US today) and Telus selling regular DSL for $30 CDN ($24.35 US today) if you sign up for a year. Sounds like what you're looking for. Too bad your local companies don't have something like that.
Hopefully prices will come down for you guys. Prices may come down for us now that Shaw (cable company) is offering digital cable phone services in cities like Calgary, Alberta to completely remove Telus from the loop. Competition is good:)
" One thing that hasn't been pointed out much is that it will cost Russia virtually nothing to enforce Kyoto. Basically, the treaty stipulates that pollution levels cannot rise above their level about fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, Russia was still Soviet and had a lot more heavy industry. They were a massive polluter. These days, they don't have as much industry anyway, so they won't have to institute controls to meet targets."
So basically.. Russia is still a mess right now, even worse than Soviet days. They have no money and need to concetrate on getting their country going. Fair enough. Once they manage to do this to the point they match where they were 15 years ago and get some money they then need to worry about being a good citizen.
This sounds fair to me since. I can't see any other way to get a poor country to come on board with something like this.
If the US was on board and got themselves compliant NOW then in perhaps 10-15years when Russia needed to worry about changing things for the environment the US would have a huge advantage because they would already be finished. All US industry would could go ahead opperating as normal while Russia is now spending money upgrading. And because the US was first it would likely have patents on all the cool technology that Russia/China/India needed to use. More money for the US! And the US would have industries of environmental improvement companies finishing their work in the US looking for new markets to sell their services to.
It is amazing to me how bad things are in the US right now that many citizens can't look more than a couple years into the future. What about sacraficing a little to make things a lot better for your own children and grandchildren?
"We'll do it when others do it. Get India and China on the list and we'll talk."
The decline of the US is interesting to watch from abroad. Decades ago the US was proud and optimistic and lead the world in practically everything.
Today many US citizens are happy letting other first world countries like Japan and the EU (even Russia!!) lead the way and compare themselves underdeveloped 2nd world nations.
But there is a flaw in Stewart's arguement. The news shows are like they are because people watch them.
It isn't a matter of providing the most entertaining show for the masses, it is about having a news program that doesn't suck for the sake of having a good news program. Generally news doesn't get high ratings, entertainment does. As a gross oversimplification the further from being a news show and the more towards entertainment the higher the ratings. However the amount of news watched remains constant, either 100 watch a show containing only 10% real news or 10 people watch a 100% news program.
I'm sure there are millions of smart people in the US who would watch a worthy news program if a news program were to provide "news for nerds". These same people are often not be watching the trashy news shows with the high ratings.
I'm sure the bulk of the/. readers can't stand the Infotainment Fox, CNN, etc put on. A more intellegent news program certainly would not be able to compete with the sensationalistic shows in terms of ratings, but is that a requirement? I don't know, but I do know I saw a show on quilting this morning! How can we have dozens of fishing shows, entire channels dedicated to reruns of 60s sitcoms or cowboy movies, and even a quilting show on the air, but there isn't enough of a niche audience left in America to justify a news program like Stewart was arguing for?
There are quiteafew 3d engines out there. The biggest I guess are Crystal Space 3D, Genesis3D, OGRE, Toque (Tribes2), Quake and Quake II. Of course there are others to fill certin niches like Yeti or ExoEngine and libraries like DevLib and G3D for those who want to write their own engine, but don't feel like they need to implement yet another file loader. I'm not sure why 0.7 of Irrlicht was worth mentioning on/. as it is isn't clear what its roll is compared to those other engines.
I was at Siggraph 2004 and attended a round table on "how will you (game developers) feed next generation games". The problem is going from a Playstation1 to Playstation2 many developers found games now took roughly 2 to 3x the man years to create. But profits didn't really go up that much to compensate. This has happened every console generation and will happen again with the up coming generation. PC games don't have clear generations, but the same concept applies.
The main ideas were to reuse content. For example if you're making a Matrix game, get the 3d models from the movie instead of making your own and start from there. Or if you're making a port try to reuse as much as possible. Future games will have a lot of computer generated stuff which is artist guided instead of artist created so that one artist creates a forest instead of creating a bunch of leafs on a single tree.
A big surprise to me was open source wasn't mentioned until somebody asked. A company like id will implement something cool like unified lighting for all objects first, but a year later everybody has their own implementation of it. Every year has something like this that gets the anual lens flare award; colour lighting, ground clutter, normal mapping, rag doll physics, etc. Yawn. Every company spends all this time re-implementing the exact same technology. All developers can read the same papers from Siggraph, Eurographics, or GDC and then discuss them on the same mailing lists so there is plenty of open sharing happening already. So I was surprised to hear none of the guys at the round table thought open source would really be useful to help save them money in the future other than for rather basic things like zlib, lua, etc.
It sure would be nice to see some engines reach commercial quality to used in some good games instead of getting more and more re-implementations of the foundation, which/. apparently is finds interesting. Once it happens there will be a huge snow ball effect where it picks up a LOT of developer attention. Maybe in five years one of the existing engines will reach a level of maturity that it can start to be really used and then in another ten we'll see it catching on like GNU/Linux is now?
Are there any wireless motion triggered cameras out there suitable for vehicles? I don't yet own a mobile phone, but I'd love to hide a little camera in my vehicle and when there is motion inside my vehicle have it phone me and show me a video feed of what is going on. In the unlikely case somebody is actually breaking in I'll call 911 and tell them there is a robbery in progress in my car. Or maybe trigger a 130db alarm.:)
At the very least I'll have a video of the crook. Hopefully it'll be useful to convict him.
I mean if stalkers can hide GPS systems in ex's cars why can't we do something like this?
Lets travel back, way back. There was the Adlib audio. Then Creative Labs introduced the 8bit, 11Khz Sound Blaster, then the Sound Blaster Pro which added stereo. Then there was the Sounds Blaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) back in 1991.
The GUS was way ahead of the others. It could mix up to 32 channels in hardware. It always played the sound back at 44Khz via interpolation (unless you had too many channels active at once). It had up to 1meg of on board sound memory so it could be totally independent of your CPU. The Demo scene loved it. It had faked 3d sound via QSound..
It never caught on:( Creative's control was too powerful. Even the GUS PnP which was based on the AMD Interwave sound chip failed. Eventually Gravis was bought and the exited the sound business.
Years later Aureal, attempted to bring good audio to the PC and break Creative's control with its Vortex sound card. They ran into money issues. Creative sued them. They won, but the lawsuit drained their money and they went bankrupt. Creative then bought the remains (patents) of the company.
But rumours are nVidia hired many of the out of work engineers, which developed the Sound Storm for the Xbox. Which then nVidia fortunately brought to the nForce. Which unfortunately won't be in future versions because nobody is willing to pay for it. Even if it is "free". Gamers are more interested in a "free" hardware firewall.
Looking back at how Gravis, AMD, Aureal, and others have failed despite having superior products makes me wounder how a company could successfully introduce better audio to gamers. Maybe if it helped you win at FPS games... Seeing nVidia leave the audio market is sad, but I've been sad about this many times before. I'm kind of numb to the pain of seeing a great new technology with high hopes of making things better fail due to lack of interest.
I have a feeling we'll be stuck using Intel's "Azalea" for a long long time. It's certainly not bad, but it has the CPU do the work instead of a coprocessor. What do you expect from Intel when they made a nice new DX9 graphics core, but didn't use hardware T&L? Gotta try to create a market for those faster CPUs somehow... Sure, it can output some Dolby signals if they are precomputed (i.e. DVDs), but it can't encode them if they are dynamic (i.e. games). Unless you have a really powerful CPU. Oh well, at least Intel High Definition Audio as it is officially known now beats AC'97.
I didn't see anybody else link to Green Density. Look at the Compute Density (Mflops/sf) of Green Destiny+ vs ASCI Q from back in 2002. It makes a very strong case for using a ton of weaker more effcient processors. I don't think I'd want a bunch of p4 or athlons sitting under my desk making the room super hot.
Of course "Which would you rather use to plow a field, two strong oxen or 1024 chickens" - Seymore Cray (or something along those lines)
sRGB can't describe all the colours we can see
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I couldn't see this info elsewhere. I was at a colour course at Siggraph 2004 last Sunday for most of the day (8:30am to 5:30pm on just colour!). I also got to see both the IRODORI wide gamut display and the HDR display, both were very cool. Once we get HDTV it is clear we can go at least one more step.
The problem with RGB is it can't describe all colours the eye can see. This was a problem for the guys that made Salem Cigarettes. The problem is their brand's colour lies outside of the small RGB gamut! The best they can display for their brand in RGB is only an approximization. Sure it is a blue-ish green-ish colour when you see it on TV, but it isn't what you would actually see in reality or with a wide gamut colour device. They weren't the only company with this problem.
This is a huge problem for hundreds of thousands of people every day. There are colours that exist that they can't see in their work. They can sit down on a computer and work in an alternative colour space such as L*a*b* and create these colours and even print these colours, but thanks to our RGB monitors they can't view them! What do they do when they have to print an add for Salem Cigarettes? Guess and check I suppose...
Technically RGB can represent more colours than we give it credit for, you just have to allow for negative values which is only useful mathematically until we invent anti-photons to remove light...
Here is a short link to make explain details: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CourseCentral/365/l i/material/notes/Chap3/Chap3.3/Chap3.3.html
A few more things I'll add from that course; HVS is basically the worst colour space and CIELAB or L*a*b* is the best. CYMK is technically multiplicitive, not subtractive like so many people like to call it. Our eyes are sensitive to short, medium, and long wavelengths, not Red/Green/Blue. RGB happens to mostly match up with what we percive, but it is an over simplification.
For the real keeners here is a nice FAQ about this: http://www.poynton.com/notes/colour_and_gam ma/Colo rFAQ.html
Why control the camera angle? So when a director tries to build suspense you can ruin it by peaking around the corner?
Re:Until I upgrade my eyes, why should I care?
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
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· Score: 1
It is true that you have three basic types of "sensors" in your eyes, but they are only exclusively RGB sensitive if you like to over simplify things.
Your eye is sensitive not to Red/Green/Blue, but to Long/Medium/Short wavelengths which roughly corrispond to RGB. But a light with a wavelength around 500nm will trigger a reaction in all sensors.
The problem these are solving is that there are visible colours that an RGB device can not reproduce. You can see them in real life. You can work with them in a different colourspace on your computer and print them, but you can not display them on your RGB monitor. You can approximate them, but you that's as good as it gets.
Actually all you need to do is use YCrCb or Yuv or signed RGB (which is a bit weird since there aren't anti-photons to subtract light).
We can do this just fine without increasing the bandwidth. In fact nearly all visual compression algorithms switch images from RGB to Yuv or some variant for compression purposes. All we'll be doing is changing the Yuv->RGB step into Yuv->whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Attempt 1) get shot down
Attempt 2) get shot down
Attempt 3) get stuck in tree and then shot
Attempt 4) get shot down
Attempt 5) get stuck in tree and spend 5 minutes press the 'escape' key then get shot on ground
Attempt 6) get shot down
Attempt 7) kill some nazis then get shot
Attempt 8) get shot down
Attempt 9) get shot down
Attempt 10) get shot down
Attempt 11) get shot down
Attempt 12) be sneakier and kill more nazis then get shot
Attempt 13) download FAQ and type special 'idkfa' cheat and walk around like Rambo and have more fun playing the video game as escapism where you become a hero. You've just had your fill of realism, now you want entertainment. You want to play the role of the top 1% that didn't die or get wounded instead of just another peon.
Well some of us nerds are busy earning money just like you, but we do it by making video games :P
Maybe for a dozen people in the world smart enough to figure it out, but the majority of people are casual users that just want to log in and play a game or two of their favourite RTS or FPS or do a quest in their favourite MMO. Or just chat in forums about games. Very few actually want to spend the effort to cheat.
The best solution is to not trust the client at all. Most of the problems you listed are because the client, which one needs to assume is cheating, is telling you where he is. Instead of running and telling the server where you are you should give input saying "I am running now"
:(
This is why you won't find cheating in a good RTS or MMO, the server or peers can run everything in parallel. The only cheating that can happen is "aimbots", but fortunately there isn't much use for them in a MMO or RTS. Maybe the AI could run on a cheater's system, but I have never seen good AI in an RTS. At best you'll be able to write AI smart enough to beat some n00bs, but that'll only climb you to level 2 or 3 on a ladder.
Unfortunately for a FPS you'd need to be on a decent LAN for this to work. Broadband is only good enough for this in a few places, and generally speaking the US and most of Europe is not one of them.
iPhone requirements as of today:
Windows system requirements
* PC with USB 2.0 port
* Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate Edition; or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later
* iTunes 7.3 or later
It does not specify 32bit. There is no indication Vista Ultimate needs to Vista Ultimate 32bit.
MS is really pushing 64bit. You can't get a 32bit driver WHQL certified anymore unless there is a 64bit version. This is so people don't need to worry about 32bit or 64bit, the customer just needs to read "requires Vista" and the IHV just needs to print "requires Vista". Nice and simple. Apple is writing "requires Vista" and then behaving differently than the rest of the Windows ecosystem. While this is shameful for any company, it's extra shameful for one that prides itself on just working.
Who needs 64bit? Today, all Vista users that are gamers. Company of Heroes (for non gamers out there it's a RTS set in ww2 that is a Games For Windows game and it won a ton of Game of the Year 2006 awards-It's a pretty big fully windows designed game, not just some weird exception to the rule nobody plays that I've found.) will actually run out of Virtual Address space and crash in Vista when CoH worked fine on the exact same system using XP drivers! The user can either figure out how to boot into 3 gig mode in Vista32, or just use Vista 64.
CoH was released in September 2006 and is bumping into the 32bit Virtual Address space limitations! (A 32bit PC can only see 4 gigabytes, generally 2 gigabytes is for the OS and each application gets 2gigabytes. In 64bit mode the 32bit application gets a full 4 gigabytes of VA space.) What is going to happen with all the new games released this coming Autumn? They're obviously going to use more memory than year old games.
Every new computer should have a 64bit OS now.
Water = 0 calories
Cola = 105 calories
Milk = 150 calories
Apple juice = 120 calories
Grape juice = 145 calories
Those are empty calories in a cola. Your body still needs all the vitamins and minerals found in fruit juice.
You end up consuming 105 empty calories and your body has no satisfaction, so you end up consuming another 105. Eventually you get full... However you still didn't get any nutrients, only calories. Which is fine for athletes looking to suplement their diet with additional calories. Regular people eventually end up missing out on nutrients and consuming too many calories and then end up overweight.
It's not all the fault of pop obviously, but repeat that with all junk food vs. the more traditional fruit/vegetable based foods and eventually you're fat and/or unhealthy, usually both.
Don't forget the Ripsaw used by TeamTMT. Their vehicle looks much cooler, and more fun to drive, than the wimpy one from UMass Dartmouth. All they need to do is figure out that AI problem and they're done...
if I shout "Fuck the FCC motherfuckers up their shitty asses with rubber cocks!" on TV or radio?
Does that count as political speech, or would I (and/or the station) get fined?
I saw two minute rant on a Canadian show about this. Basically some people are allowed in Canada under some conditions. If you're a union protester on strike being interviewed you can say that you're "fucking tired of the bullshit the corporation is giving you" and then the reporter would reply "what kind of bull@#&% is making you #*&%ing tired?"
"On top of that, since when is being religious a bad thing?"
Since religion was used as an excuse to fly planes into skyscrapers?..Crusades...molestation scandals...Those are some pretty bad things if you ask me. It seems that blind faith in all its many forms, including religion, is a very dangerous thing indeed
Flying planes into buildings was an anti-US thing. They didn't fly into the vadican to kill the pope or get back at any countries that had crusades against them. It would've happened even if the US was a predominatly muslim nation. Americans like to blame religion for this rather than admit the real reason was because people hated the US.
Just because religion has been used as mask for doing some pretty horrible things doesn't mean it is bad, just that it can't really transform people. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, whether you're a King or a Pope. I don't think the christianity or muslim relgions have sections in their books saying it's ok to ignore the rules about not killing and start wars... Bad things happen. Wars happen. There have been plenty of wars, searches for scapegoats, and invasions not in the name of xxx.
Molestation happens with sports coaches, scout leaders, teachers, or even weathly pop stars. Molestation isn't done in the name of xxx and no religion I'm aware of supports any form of it. Just a case of bad people who happened to be religious.
Basically your list seems to be a reflection of human nature. And with traditionally religion playing a major part in people's lives it was incorporated into those events. With the soviets they tore down many beautiful churches in the name of removing religion from the state. Then they went are their own inquisitions in the name of totalatarism and communism as it was the major thing at the time. Like you said, blind faith.
I guess what I'm getting at is how does that largely historical list relate to people's lives today? There was only one valid example in your list, discrimination of homosexuals and it is fortunately changing.
What about the good things people do in the name of religion? In my city of 2million probably 75% of the free meals to homeless are provided by the Church or xxx or St. somebody's chunch. My vehicle has been broken into a couple times. I'm pretty sure that theif isn't worried that there is an all seeing being (be it god or santa's elves) that saw him do bad stuff and will give him an afterlife of burning in fire for eterinity for sinning.
In my contact with religion it generally makes people do good things like give time to charities and not do bad things like steal. I'm not worried about walking around late at night and being mugged by a christian, jew, muslim, or buddist.
As far as I'm concerned compilers are better than 99% of the programmers out there. Just write clear code and let the compiler do it's trick. However there are a couple cases where things aren't automatically optimized that I can think of.
;)
.587h, .0114h)); I'm not sure if that bug still exists in the current compiler release or not.
/. posters just aren't aware of the short commings of compilers (see first sentence of this post) and would rather post obvious advice than not post at all. :)
It's not really a coding trick like an XOR swap, but most compilers don't yet seem to fully unroll parallel loops into good SIMD instructions or multiple threads.
The only time I've needed to bother to look at assembly output in recent years (other than debugging a release mode program) is when writing HLSL shaders. HLSL is the high level shading languge (C like) for shaders that is part of Direct3D 9. HLSL can be compiled to SM1, SM2, or SM3 assembly.
With pixel shader 2.0 you've only got 64 instruction slots, and some important instructions like POW (power), NRM (normalize), and LRP (interpolate) take multiple slots. 64 slots is not enough for a modern shader. I curse ATI for setting it bar so low.
There are two flaws I've found with the Dec 04 HLSL compiler in the DirectX. Sometimes it will not automatically detect a dot product opportunity. I had some colour code to convert to black and white in a shader and wrote it as y = colour.r*0.299 + colour.g*0.587 + colour.b*0.114; as I thought that was the most clear way to write it. Under certain circumstances the compiler didn't want to convert to a single dot instruction so I had to write as y = dot( colour.rgb, half3(.299h,
Another is often a value in the range of -1 to +1 is passed in as a colour, which means it must be packed into 0-1 range. To get it back you've got to double it and add 1.
a = p*2+1; gets converted into a single MAD instruction which takes one slot.
a = (p-0.5)*2; gets converted into an ADD and then a MUL.
Also conventional wisdom says you've got to write assembly to get maximum performance out of pixel shader 1.1 as it is basically just eight instruction slots. I don't have any snippets to verify this though.
I think this thread demonstrates that either compilers are mature enough you don't need any code tricks to help them do their job or
"I ask the Slashdot crowd, what they believe the compiler can be trusted to optimize and what must be hand optimized? Give examples of code optimizations that you think the compiler can/can't be trusted to do."
/.
Somehow 99% of the readers took this to mean "What is the difference between NULL and the zero bit pattern and do you think it is a good idea to write clear code and do the profile/algorithm change cycle until there is nothing left to optimize or should I write low level optimized code from the start?"
sigh.. I've only found two comments with code so far after going through hundreds of posts. This is possibly the worst signal to noise ratio I've witnessed on
Here in Vancouver we have Shaw selling Lite always on cable connections that are "up to 5x faster than dial up" for $25CDN ($20.29 US today) and Telus selling regular DSL for $30 CDN ($24.35 US today) if you sign up for a year. Sounds like what you're looking for. Too bad your local companies don't have something like that.
Hopefully prices will come down for you guys. Prices may come down for us now that Shaw (cable company) is offering digital cable phone services in cities like Calgary, Alberta to completely remove Telus from the loop. Competition is good :)
" One thing that hasn't been pointed out much is that it will cost Russia virtually nothing to enforce Kyoto.
Basically, the treaty stipulates that pollution levels cannot rise above their level about fifteen years ago.
Fifteen years ago, Russia was still Soviet and had a lot more heavy industry. They were a massive polluter. These days, they don't have as much industry anyway, so they won't have to institute controls to meet targets."
So basically.. Russia is still a mess right now, even worse than Soviet days. They have no money and need to concetrate on getting their country going. Fair enough. Once they manage to do this to the point they match where they were 15 years ago and get some money they then need to worry about being a good citizen.
This sounds fair to me since. I can't see any other way to get a poor country to come on board with something like this.
If the US was on board and got themselves compliant NOW then in perhaps 10-15years when Russia needed to worry about changing things for the environment the US would have a huge advantage because they would already be finished. All US industry would could go ahead opperating as normal while Russia is now spending money upgrading. And because the US was first it would likely have patents on all the cool technology that Russia/China/India needed to use. More money for the US! And the US would have industries of environmental improvement companies finishing their work in the US looking for new markets to sell their services to.
It is amazing to me how bad things are in the US right now that many citizens can't look more than a couple years into the future. What about sacraficing a little to make things a lot better for your own children and grandchildren?
"No, the treaty is just horribly flawed."
/..... Care to back that up with facts?
ahh good ol'
"We'll do it when others do it. Get India and China on the list and we'll talk."
The decline of the US is interesting to watch from abroad. Decades ago the US was proud and optimistic and lead the world in practically everything.
Today many US citizens are happy letting other first world countries like Japan and the EU (even Russia!!) lead the way and compare themselves underdeveloped 2nd world nations.
But there is a flaw in Stewart's arguement. The news shows are like they are because people watch them.
It isn't a matter of providing the most entertaining show for the masses, it is about having a news program that doesn't suck for the sake of having a good news program. Generally news doesn't get high ratings, entertainment does. As a gross oversimplification the further from being a news show and the more towards entertainment the higher the ratings. However the amount of news watched remains constant, either 100 watch a show containing only 10% real news or 10 people watch a 100% news program.
I'm sure there are millions of smart people in the US who would watch a worthy news program if a news program were to provide "news for nerds". These same people are often not be watching the trashy news shows with the high ratings.
I'm sure the bulk of the /. readers can't stand the Infotainment Fox, CNN, etc put on. A more intellegent news program certainly would not be able to compete with the sensationalistic shows in terms of ratings, but is that a requirement? I don't know, but I do know I saw a show on quilting this morning! How can we have dozens of fishing shows, entire channels dedicated to reruns of 60s sitcoms or cowboy movies, and even a quilting show on the air, but there isn't enough of a niche audience left in America to justify a news program like Stewart was arguing for?
This is off topic, but this discussion really made my curious. All those cities listed are American.
How do cities in other countries compare? London, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto, Athens, Seoul.
There are quite a few 3d engines out there. The biggest I guess are Crystal Space 3D, Genesis3D, OGRE, Toque (Tribes2), Quake and Quake II. Of course there are others to fill certin niches like Yeti or ExoEngine and libraries like DevLib and G3D for those who want to write their own engine, but don't feel like they need to implement yet another file loader. I'm not sure why 0.7 of Irrlicht was worth mentioning on /. as it is isn't clear what its roll is compared to those other engines.
I was at Siggraph 2004 and attended a round table on "how will you (game developers) feed next generation games". The problem is going from a Playstation1 to Playstation2 many developers found games now took roughly 2 to 3x the man years to create. But profits didn't really go up that much to compensate. This has happened every console generation and will happen again with the up coming generation. PC games don't have clear generations, but the same concept applies.
The main ideas were to reuse content. For example if you're making a Matrix game, get the 3d models from the movie instead of making your own and start from there. Or if you're making a port try to reuse as much as possible. Future games will have a lot of computer generated stuff which is artist guided instead of artist created so that one artist creates a forest instead of creating a bunch of leafs on a single tree.
A big surprise to me was open source wasn't mentioned until somebody asked. A company like id will implement something cool like unified lighting for all objects first, but a year later everybody has their own implementation of it. Every year has something like this that gets the anual lens flare award; colour lighting, ground clutter, normal mapping, rag doll physics, etc. Yawn. Every company spends all this time re-implementing the exact same technology. All developers can read the same papers from Siggraph, Eurographics, or GDC and then discuss them on the same mailing lists so there is plenty of open sharing happening already. So I was surprised to hear none of the guys at the round table thought open source would really be useful to help save them money in the future other than for rather basic things like zlib, lua, etc.
It sure would be nice to see some engines reach commercial quality to used in some good games instead of getting more and more re-implementations of the foundation, which /. apparently is finds interesting. Once it happens there will be a huge snow ball effect where it picks up a LOT of developer attention. Maybe in five years one of the existing engines will reach a level of maturity that it can start to be really used and then in another ten we'll see it catching on like GNU/Linux is now?
Are there any wireless motion triggered cameras out there suitable for vehicles? I don't yet own a mobile phone, but I'd love to hide a little camera in my vehicle and when there is motion inside my vehicle have it phone me and show me a video feed of what is going on. In the unlikely case somebody is actually breaking in I'll call 911 and tell them there is a robbery in progress in my car. Or maybe trigger a 130db alarm. :)
At the very least I'll have a video of the crook. Hopefully it'll be useful to convict him.
I mean if stalkers can hide GPS systems in ex's cars why can't we do something like this?
Lets travel back, way back. There was the Adlib audio. Then Creative Labs introduced the 8bit, 11Khz Sound Blaster, then the Sound Blaster Pro which added stereo. Then there was the Sounds Blaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) back in 1991.
The GUS was way ahead of the others. It could mix up to 32 channels in hardware. It always played the sound back at 44Khz via interpolation (unless you had too many channels active at once). It had up to 1meg of on board sound memory so it could be totally independent of your CPU. The Demo scene loved it. It had faked 3d sound via QSound..
It never caught on :( Creative's control was too powerful. Even the GUS PnP which was based on the AMD Interwave sound chip failed. Eventually Gravis was bought and the exited the sound business.
Years later Aureal, attempted to bring good audio to the PC and break Creative's control with its Vortex sound card. They ran into money issues. Creative sued them. They won, but the lawsuit drained their money and they went bankrupt. Creative then bought the remains (patents) of the company.
But rumours are nVidia hired many of the out of work engineers, which developed the Sound Storm for the Xbox. Which then nVidia fortunately brought to the nForce. Which unfortunately won't be in future versions because nobody is willing to pay for it. Even if it is "free". Gamers are more interested in a "free" hardware firewall.
Looking back at how Gravis, AMD, Aureal, and others have failed despite having superior products makes me wounder how a company could successfully introduce better audio to gamers. Maybe if it helped you win at FPS games... Seeing nVidia leave the audio market is sad, but I've been sad about this many times before. I'm kind of numb to the pain of seeing a great new technology with high hopes of making things better fail due to lack of interest.
I have a feeling we'll be stuck using Intel's "Azalea" for a long long time. It's certainly not bad, but it has the CPU do the work instead of a coprocessor. What do you expect from Intel when they made a nice new DX9 graphics core, but didn't use hardware T&L? Gotta try to create a market for those faster CPUs somehow... Sure, it can output some Dolby signals if they are precomputed (i.e. DVDs), but it can't encode them if they are dynamic (i.e. games). Unless you have a really powerful CPU. Oh well, at least Intel High Definition Audio as it is officially known now beats AC'97.
I didn't see anybody else link to Green Density. Look at the Compute Density (Mflops/sf) of Green Destiny+ vs ASCI Q from back in 2002. It makes a very strong case for using a ton of weaker more effcient processors. I don't think I'd want a bunch of p4 or athlons sitting under my desk making the room super hot.
Of course "Which would you rather use to plow a field, two strong oxen or 1024 chickens" - Seymore Cray (or something along those lines)
I couldn't see this info elsewhere. I was at a colour course at Siggraph 2004 last Sunday for most of the day (8:30am to 5:30pm on just colour!). I also got to see both the IRODORI wide gamut display and the HDR display, both were very cool. Once we get HDTV it is clear we can go at least one more step.
l i/material /notes/Chap3/Chap3.3/Chap3.3.html
m ma/Colo rFAQ.html
The problem with RGB is it can't describe all colours the eye can see. This was a problem for the guys that made Salem Cigarettes. The problem is their brand's colour lies outside of the small RGB gamut! The best they can display for their brand in RGB is only an approximization. Sure it is a blue-ish green-ish colour when you see it on TV, but it isn't what you would actually see in reality or with a wide gamut colour device. They weren't the only company with this problem.
This is a huge problem for hundreds of thousands of people every day. There are colours that exist that they can't see in their work. They can sit down on a computer and work in an alternative colour space such as L*a*b* and create these colours and even print these colours, but thanks to our RGB monitors they can't view them! What do they do when they have to print an add for Salem Cigarettes? Guess and check I suppose...
Technically RGB can represent more colours than we give it credit for, you just have to allow for negative values which is only useful mathematically until we invent anti-photons to remove light...
Here is a short link to make explain details:
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CourseCentral/365/
A few more things I'll add from that course; HVS is basically the worst colour space and CIELAB or L*a*b* is the best. CYMK is technically multiplicitive, not subtractive like so many people like to call it. Our eyes are sensitive to short, medium, and long wavelengths, not Red/Green/Blue. RGB happens to mostly match up with what we percive, but it is an over simplification.
For the real keeners here is a nice FAQ about this:
http://www.poynton.com/notes/colour_and_ga
Why control the camera angle? So when a director tries to build suspense you can ruin it by peaking around the corner?
It is true that you have three basic types of "sensors" in your eyes, but they are only exclusively RGB sensitive if you like to over simplify things.
Your eye is sensitive not to Red/Green/Blue, but to Long/Medium/Short wavelengths which roughly corrispond to RGB. But a light with a wavelength around 500nm will trigger a reaction in all sensors.
The problem these are solving is that there are visible colours that an RGB device can not reproduce. You can see them in real life. You can work with them in a different colourspace on your computer and print them, but you can not display them on your RGB monitor. You can approximate them, but you that's as good as it gets.
Actually all you need to do is use YCrCb or Yuv or signed RGB (which is a bit weird since there aren't anti-photons to subtract light).
We can do this just fine without increasing the bandwidth. In fact nearly all visual compression algorithms switch images from RGB to Yuv or some variant for compression purposes. All we'll be doing is changing the Yuv->RGB step into Yuv->whatever.