Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a "shift" or "soften[ing]" of earlier views. That's because there isn't any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had -- whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.
Have a look at memory validator. I don't know if it supports 64 bit applications, but it has a great list of features and is the only decent memory validation tool I've ever seen on Windows.
As the (slightly terrified to find himself mentioned on slashdot) presenter in the video linked to above I thought I'd respond to a couple of comments in bulk. First off, I'm part of a much bigger team at RapidMind that builds this software to make targeting multicore and stream processors easier -- the system and the "chicken demo" was a group effort, and you can read more about it and the company in general in the article linked to from here, which unfortunately is PDF-only.
For those crying out about multi-threading not being the solution: you're absolutely right! Our platform's approach to programming multi-core processors is to expose a data parallel model. In this model, the programmer explicitly deals with parallel programming (writing algorithms to work well on arbitrarily many cores) but all of the standard multi-threading issues such as deadlocks and race conditions are avoided, and the developer doesn't worry about how many cores there actually are.
And no, the chicken demo didn't run each chicken on an individual core;). But it did automatically scale to however many cores were available -- 6 SPUs and a PPU on the PS3, and 16 SPUs and 2 PPUs on a Cell Blade (on which we originally showed the simulation at GDC 2006).
If you want to learn more, drop by our website at http://www.rapidmind.net. You can sign up for a free no-strings-attached evaluation version if you want to try it yourself.
Unfortunately, the developers of Sh chose to publish the book which details features which are not yet supported in the library.
Yes, this is true. If we had written the book based entirely on what we had implemented at the time, it would however have become out of date completely very quickly. Instead we chose to write the book as a specification. Too many programming language books, and books describing systems become out of date as soon as they are published, so it's a tough decision to make.
I should point out that we are getting closer to full support of everything in the book every day. Most of the missing features are very simple things like missing library functions. Sh works, right now, and can be used to write real shaders.
With the next release I will post a fixed version of the glut example. As unfortunately happens so often, the example got broken during book writing stage...
You're welcome to browse our Issue Tracker. Progress has been slow of late because I've been working hard on the optimizer, and we've been busy with non-Sh-related things. However, note that most of the issues in the track are either "easy" or "bitesized", and once development gets on track again (in a week or so) I expect most of them to be resolved quite quickly.
From the review, it sounds like SH is basically a library, and that library invocations are dressed up through the use of operator overloading.
Is this "metaprogramming"?
Yes, because rather than just executing the the operations you specify, Sh has a special "retained mode", which instead collects these operations, builds an intermediate representation of them, runs an optimizer and passes them on to a backend compiler. For example:
void foo() { ShAttrib3f x, y, z;// three Sh variables x = y + z;// Executes immediately ShProgram prg = SH_BEGIN_PROGRAM() { ShAttrib3f i, j, k; i = j + k;// Doesn't execute, gets collected } SH_END; }
So, the bits that are written inside the declaration of "prg" (the above is valid C++/Sh), are actually collected into prg, instead of being executed. prg can then be compiled to a GPU (or CPU) backend and sent to the GPU to run. Thus, your C++ program is used to write Sh programs at runtime. This allows all sorts of metaprogramming techniques.
We also provide further levels of metaprogramming with the shader algebra operations, but that's at an even higher level. These let you take previously written Sh programs and combine them in various ways, at run time. See our SIGGRAPH paper for details.
(Disclaimer: I'm Stefanus Du Toit, one of the authors of this book and implementer of most of the Sh compiler/library)
I think it will be a while before sh / GPU metaprogramming will be commonly used for "real" games programming. For example, their paper on Worley shaders claimed interactive rates of 14 FPS on a very simple single model for stone shading on the fastest video hardware (6800GT) currently available.
I should point out that the Worley shaders are rather large shaders. It's not that they're written in Sh that makes them so huge, it's simply the way the algorithm works. The shaders would be approximately the same size if written in Cg (or HLSL, etc.).
The benefit of HLSL and Cg are that they achieve performance close to or better than the PS/VS-Asembler implementations and are orders of magnitude easier to program.
The same holds true for Sh. Both Sh and Cg target "assembly" interfaces such as RB_fragment_program. Sh provides a superset of Cg's functionality. Because in both the case of Sh and Cg the actual program is executed by the GPU, not in any way the system itself, the only difference in performance that might be caused between the two languages would be due to the optimizer. I've actually just rewritten the Sh optimizer, and the only major optimization left to do is common subexpression elimination, and some arithmetic simplifications.
In fact, we already provide an optimization that no other shading language provides (this will be in the next release, and is working in the subversion repository) called uniform lifting. Sh will automatically discover computations which do not change from one fragment to the next, and move them to the host where they can be evaluated more efficiently. This is something that would be difficult to do in other shading languages.
So, to summarize, there is nothing intrinsic about Sh that makes it any slower than Cg. In fact, we're thinking of adding a Cg backend, so that your Sh code can automatically be converted to equivalent Cg code. Then, if you really want, you can take advantage of the backends and optimizations provided by Cg while using the modularity facilities of Sh.
And some of the screenshots are treble, like this one
That "screenshot" is not a screenshot of Fresco. It's a screenshot of gv displaying postscript generated by a very early version of the Postscript DrawingKit -- in effect demonstrating that Fresco can now print.
At Singapore Airport they're building this kind of thing up too. They've had little access points all over the place for Palms a long time (which is neat if you have software installed that can make use of it - like a ssh client (mmmhm)).
Now they're setting up a place with several round desks with flat screens, mouse and keyboard, infra red ports for Palms, notebooks, etc., wires to plug your notebook into the screen/mouse/keyboard and all hooked up to high speed internet access. I believe you can use those terminals without your own PC too, but I may be wrong there.
In any case, it's all quite neat if you have some time there (I just returned from 45 hours of flying/sitting in airports).
Well, I wrote a little (small, but rather neat) library called Atlas-C++ in C++ as part of the WorldForge project earlier this year. It uses templates and other "advanced" C++ techniques a lot, giving it amazing flexibility, but making it slightly hard for some compilers to grok. Now, it compiled fine with GCC 2.95.2, after all, that's the current stable release, that's what I use, that's what I expect people to be using. Now, unfortunately, it did not compile (read: threw Internal Compiler Errors) with the gcc snapshot shipped with RH7. This lead to people having to go through a lot of trouble trying to get it to just compile and link properly. *sigh*. This was quite an annoyance.
Which is really an odd thing, considering public perception of the demand for and value of IT skills vs artistic skills, right now. You don't see the US Congress authorizing temporary visas for 100K animators at a time, do you?
Well, no, not really. The place we get our members from is the Internet, not Real Life. Now, most people coming to WorldForge stumble onto it through slashdot, freshmeat, happy penguin, Linux Weekly News, etc. Quite obviously these are much more populated by coders than artists.
I'm sure there are masses of good artists out there, I'm just not quite sure how to reach them.
However I must say that we have been lucky. People like Uta Szymanek (who has contributed literally tons of media) were a large reason that we still survive today - and that I believe we will continue to strive towards our goals in the future.
That said, if there are any artists out there who are interested in contributing to something like this, whether with 2D, 3D or music, sound or any other kind of media, then please check us out!.
No, it's not a hack. A hack would be bypassing some sort of security. In this case there was none. Combined with the server crashes, it was much more a race than a hack.
"Looks like the folks at WorldForge want some of the golden nuggets the emporer might leave behind."
I can't stand this sort of reply. I posted that comment with no intentions other than voicing my opinion, and instantly I get alleged of writing this comment to, as you so put it, "kiss ass" for WorldForge at Andover.net.
Sure, it would be cool if WorldForge got this prize, but I don't believe it will, mainly due to the tiny amount of people that are actually familiar with the project.
I spend a lot of my time coding for WorldForge and put a lot of effort in the project, but I do have a life outside WorldForge. Just because it's in my signature, doesn't mean every single comment I post here is related to WorldForge.
Yes, at WorldForge one of the things that I like about the way we're planning it is that any player can run an "NPC client" while he/she is not logged in that follows a script and pretends to be alive normally. We have some pretty good AI folk and it all looks rather promising. This corresponds to the "borgs" that you have been talking about.
Don't forget that this isn't news however - it's something different.
I agree that slashdot has for a long while been rather biased towards linux + open source stuff (although that does seem to reflect the main portion of the slashdot readers). But this is not news, it's a really nice thing of Andover.net to give to the Open Source community (which, if you look at the sites they own, seem to be their main target market).
It makes sense that Andover.net choose to give these awards mainly for open-source achievements - they are, after all a business and do have a target market.
My choice is biased, of course, since I'm a developer at the WorldForge project, but I must say there has been amazing progress at WorldForge in the last year.
In only about 13 months, we have gone from nothing to 25 megabytes of code in CVS, 23 megabytes of media, an amazing amount of information on the website, many very productive and friendly members, several hundred people on the mailing lists and a very warm-hearted community. I have never seen an online project that smells so much of success as this one does.
For those who don't know about WorldForge, it's an effort to create a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (similar to titles such as Everquest and Ultima Online) system, that will allow world developers full customisability and clients that can connect to any server through a single protocol (Atlas). We even have support for multiple client types - 3D, 2D isometric, even text - of which we already have several functioning implementations. We have many talented graphics artists (both 2D and 3D) and many, many coders from various locations of the world. All code is covered by the GPL (or LGPL if it proves more appropriate for libraries) and content (graphics, music, text,...) is covered by the OPL. On September 13 1999 we released our first public client/server demonstration, the Skeleton demo, featuring a server that supports collision detection, visibility and hearing limitations, in-world chat and movement, and an isometric client with very nice graphics:).
Trying to be as objective as possible, I think WorldForge deserves it. Take a look at what's on our website or drop by at irc.worldforge.org and you'll see how far this project has advanced in only one year.
Welcome to Your Rights Online. This is a seperate section from the normal slashdot, and the colours are there to let you know that. Try clicking on the other sections in the little box labelled "Sections" at the left-top of the page and you will see what I mean.
Take a look at WorldForge. While we're still early in the development stage, we're aiming to make exactly that:
An open source, free, massively multiplayer online role-playing game that doesn't suck.
How do we wish to do this? Well, take a look at what makes open-source software cool in general: the freedom you get with it. Open source allows you to modify a software product to whatever you want it to do (assuming you have the skill to do so). We're planning to make WorldForge not a one-time release, packaged game, but rather a gaming system, that allows you, the player/system administrator/story writer to customise it to suit your world.
If you want to help us reach this goal - and it is looking good, we have many talented coders/graphics artists/musicians/story writers - then feel free to come by our website and take a look:).
Interesting article (I find it useful actually because I'm just showing a Linux newbie around and I really don't feel like explaining every single thing to him. Often one doesn't know where to start though:).
I found it a little sad that it was rather Red Hat-biased at some points (like talking about installing the new kernel using RPM). I wonder though, how easy it for authors of articles such as this one to make their articles fully independent from any distribution specifics. It's rather sad to see how many articles talk about "Linux" in the header but when you look at the article itself are really about "Distribution XYZ".:/. Ah well, I guess that's the cost one pays for having all these distros flying around.
Hmm, just a while ago a slashdot article about spam reminded me of looking at my own situation. I receive a lot of spam, mainly due to the fact that I once signed many guestbooks (those were the times when I thought you could leave your uncoded e-mail address around without receiving thousands of spam mails) and this made me take a look round the net for some methods against this (I was already using a procmail filter to cut out possible spam).
Anyways, so I came across brightmail. It is, indeed, pretty damn good. It's basically a POP-filter that acts as a proxy between you and your POP server and filters out SPAM. The spam mails are kept for 30 days and can be retrieved through some HTTPS interface. Now, I haven't received any spam in the past three days (it's already filtered out numerous messages). And I'm happy:). You might wanna try it.
Note: no, I don't work for Brightmail or have any kind of relation to them other than using their service.
Slashdot Mirror
Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a "shift" or "soften[ing]" of earlier views. That's because there isn't any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had -- whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.
(in vim only), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-X find the next number on the line starting at the cursor, and then increment or decrement it respectively.
Apart from being weird, these are surprisingly useful sometimes, e.g. toggling "#if 0" to "#if 1"...
She's not Canada's privacy commissioner, she's Ontario's (a province of Canada) Information and Privacy Commissioner.
Have a look at memory validator. I don't know if it supports 64 bit applications, but it has a great list of features and is the only decent memory validation tool I've ever seen on Windows.
Good morning slashdot!
As the (slightly terrified to find himself mentioned on slashdot) presenter in the video linked to above I thought I'd respond to a couple of comments in bulk. First off, I'm part of a much bigger team at RapidMind that builds this software to make targeting multicore and stream processors easier -- the system and the "chicken demo" was a group effort, and you can read more about it and the company in general in the article linked to from here, which unfortunately is PDF-only.
For those crying out about multi-threading not being the solution: you're absolutely right! Our platform's approach to programming multi-core processors is to expose a data parallel model. In this model, the programmer explicitly deals with parallel programming (writing algorithms to work well on arbitrarily many cores) but all of the standard multi-threading issues such as deadlocks and race conditions are avoided, and the developer doesn't worry about how many cores there actually are.
And no, the chicken demo didn't run each chicken on an individual core ;). But it did automatically scale to however many cores were available -- 6 SPUs and a PPU on the PS3, and 16 SPUs and 2 PPUs on a Cell Blade (on which we originally showed the simulation at GDC 2006).
If you want to learn more, drop by our website at http://www.rapidmind.net. You can sign up for a free no-strings-attached evaluation version if you want to try it yourself.
Unfortunately, the developers of Sh chose to publish the book which details features which are not yet supported in the library.
Yes, this is true. If we had written the book based entirely on what we had implemented at the time, it would however have become out of date completely very quickly. Instead we chose to write the book as a specification. Too many programming language books, and books describing systems become out of date as soon as they are published, so it's a tough decision to make.
I should point out that we are getting closer to full support of everything in the book every day. Most of the missing features are very simple things like missing library functions. Sh works, right now, and can be used to write real shaders.
With the next release I will post a fixed version of the glut example. As unfortunately happens so often, the example got broken during book writing stage...
You're welcome to browse our Issue Tracker. Progress has been slow of late because I've been working hard on the optimizer, and we've been busy with non-Sh-related things. However, note that most of the issues in the track are either "easy" or "bitesized", and once development gets on track again (in a week or so) I expect most of them to be resolved quite quickly.
From the review, it sounds like SH is basically a library, and that library invocations are dressed up through the use of operator overloading. Is this "metaprogramming"?
Yes, because rather than just executing the the operations you specify, Sh has a special "retained mode", which instead collects these operations, builds an intermediate representation of them, runs an optimizer and passes them on to a backend compiler. For example:
So, the bits that are written inside the declaration of "prg" (the above is valid C++/Sh), are actually collected into prg, instead of being executed. prg can then be compiled to a GPU (or CPU) backend and sent to the GPU to run. Thus, your C++ program is used to write Sh programs at runtime. This allows all sorts of metaprogramming techniques.
We also provide further levels of metaprogramming with the shader algebra operations, but that's at an even higher level. These let you take previously written Sh programs and combine them in various ways, at run time. See our SIGGRAPH paper for details.
The About Page on our homepage tries to explain this in more detail.
(Disclaimer: I'm Stefanus Du Toit, one of the authors of this book and implementer of most of the Sh compiler/library)
I think it will be a while before sh / GPU metaprogramming will be commonly used for "real" games programming. For example, their paper on Worley shaders claimed interactive rates of 14 FPS on a very simple single model for stone shading on the fastest video hardware (6800GT) currently available.
I should point out that the Worley shaders are rather large shaders. It's not that they're written in Sh that makes them so huge, it's simply the way the algorithm works. The shaders would be approximately the same size if written in Cg (or HLSL, etc.).
The benefit of HLSL and Cg are that they achieve performance close to or better than the PS/VS-Asembler implementations and are orders of magnitude easier to program.
The same holds true for Sh. Both Sh and Cg target "assembly" interfaces such as RB_fragment_program. Sh provides a superset of Cg's functionality. Because in both the case of Sh and Cg the actual program is executed by the GPU, not in any way the system itself, the only difference in performance that might be caused between the two languages would be due to the optimizer. I've actually just rewritten the Sh optimizer, and the only major optimization left to do is common subexpression elimination, and some arithmetic simplifications.
In fact, we already provide an optimization that no other shading language provides (this will be in the next release, and is working in the subversion repository) called uniform lifting. Sh will automatically discover computations which do not change from one fragment to the next, and move them to the host where they can be evaluated more efficiently. This is something that would be difficult to do in other shading languages.
So, to summarize, there is nothing intrinsic about Sh that makes it any slower than Cg. In fact, we're thinking of adding a Cg backend, so that your Sh code can automatically be converted to equivalent Cg code. Then, if you really want, you can take advantage of the backends and optimizations provided by Cg while using the modularity facilities of Sh.
And some of the screenshots are treble, like this one
That "screenshot" is not a screenshot of Fresco. It's a screenshot of gv displaying postscript generated by a very early version of the Postscript DrawingKit -- in effect demonstrating that Fresco can now print.
At Singapore Airport they're building this kind of thing up too. They've had little access points all over the place for Palms a long time (which is neat if you have software installed that can make use of it - like a ssh client (mmmhm)).
Now they're setting up a place with several round desks with flat screens, mouse and keyboard, infra red ports for Palms, notebooks, etc., wires to plug your notebook into the screen/mouse/keyboard and all hooked up to high speed internet access. I believe you can use those terminals without your own PC too, but I may be wrong there.
In any case, it's all quite neat if you have some time there (I just returned from 45 hours of flying/sitting in airports).
Well, I wrote a little (small, but rather neat) library called Atlas-C++ in C++ as part of the WorldForge project earlier this year. It uses templates and other "advanced" C++ techniques a lot, giving it amazing flexibility, but making it slightly hard for some compilers to grok. Now, it compiled fine with GCC 2.95.2, after all, that's the current stable release, that's what I use, that's what I expect people to be using. Now, unfortunately, it did not compile (read: threw Internal Compiler Errors) with the gcc snapshot shipped with RH7. This lead to people having to go through a lot of trouble trying to get it to just compile and link properly. *sigh*. This was quite an annoyance.
It makes me glad I use a distribution whose goal is not profits.
Which is really an odd thing, considering public perception of the demand for and value of IT skills vs artistic skills, right now. You don't see the US Congress authorizing temporary visas for 100K animators at a time, do you?
Well, no, not really. The place we get our members from is the Internet, not Real Life. Now, most people coming to WorldForge stumble onto it through slashdot, freshmeat, happy penguin, Linux Weekly News, etc. Quite obviously these are much more populated by coders than artists.
I'm sure there are masses of good artists out there, I'm just not quite sure how to reach them.
However I must say that we have been lucky. People like Uta Szymanek (who has contributed literally tons of media) were a large reason that we still survive today - and that I believe we will continue to strive towards our goals in the future.
That said, if there are any artists out there who are interested in contributing to something like this, whether with 2D, 3D or music, sound or any other kind of media, then please check us out!.
Anybody else noticed that all the titles in the shots say "AltOS"? :)
rm: cannot remove `rf': No such file or directory - :P
No, it's not a hack. A hack would be bypassing some sort of security. In this case there was none. Combined with the server crashes, it was much more a race than a hack.
You might want to take a look at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/j argon/html/entry/hack.html. Particularly sense 5.
"Looks like the folks at WorldForge want some of the golden nuggets the emporer might leave behind."
I can't stand this sort of reply. I posted that comment with no intentions other than voicing my opinion, and instantly I get alleged of writing this comment to, as you so put it, "kiss ass" for WorldForge at Andover.net.
Sure, it would be cool if WorldForge got this prize, but I don't believe it will, mainly due to the tiny amount of people that are actually familiar with the project.
I spend a lot of my time coding for WorldForge and put a lot of effort in the project, but I do have a life outside WorldForge. Just because it's in my signature, doesn't mean every single comment I post here is related to WorldForge.
Yes, at WorldForge one of the things that I like about the way we're planning it is that any player can run an "NPC client" while he/she is not logged in that follows a script and pretends to be alive normally. We have some pretty good AI folk and it all looks rather promising. This corresponds to the "borgs" that you have been talking about.
Don't forget that this isn't news however - it's something different.
I agree that slashdot has for a long while been rather biased towards linux + open source stuff (although that does seem to reflect the main portion of the slashdot readers). But this is not news, it's a really nice thing of Andover.net to give to the Open Source community (which, if you look at the sites they own, seem to be their main target market).
It makes sense that Andover.net choose to give these awards mainly for open-source achievements - they are, after all a business and do have a target market.
My choice is biased, of course, since I'm a developer at the WorldForge project, but I must say there has been amazing progress at WorldForge in the last year.
In only about 13 months, we have gone from nothing to 25 megabytes of code in CVS, 23 megabytes of media, an amazing amount of information on the website, many very productive and friendly members, several hundred people on the mailing lists and a very warm-hearted community. I have never seen an online project that smells so much of success as this one does.
For those who don't know about WorldForge, it's an effort to create a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (similar to titles such as Everquest and Ultima Online) system, that will allow world developers full customisability and clients that can connect to any server through a single protocol (Atlas). We even have support for multiple client types - 3D, 2D isometric, even text - of which we already have several functioning implementations. We have many talented graphics artists (both 2D and 3D) and many, many coders from various locations of the world. All code is covered by the GPL (or LGPL if it proves more appropriate for libraries) and content (graphics, music, text, ...) is covered by the OPL. On September 13 1999 we released our first public client/server demonstration, the Skeleton demo, featuring a server that supports collision detection, visibility and hearing limitations, in-world chat and movement, and an isometric client with very nice graphics :).
Trying to be as objective as possible, I think WorldForge deserves it. Take a look at what's on our website or drop by at irc.worldforge.org and you'll see how far this project has advanced in only one year.
...is there gonna be a SlashDotEffectAddendumAddendum? :)
Welcome to Your Rights Online. This is a seperate section from the normal slashdot, and the colours are there to let you know that. Try clicking on the other sections in the little box labelled "Sections" at the left-top of the page and you will see what I mean.
Hmm, "geeks can be nerds, but nerds can't be geeks"....
class Nerd : public HomoSapiens {
public:
virtual void hack();
virtual void drink(Cup& c);
protected:
double m_caffeine;
}
class Geek : public Nerd {
public:
virtual void act_socially(const HomoSapiens& other);
}
In any case, that's pretty much my definition. :). Sorry - too much C++ on my mind.
Take a look at WorldForge. While we're still early in the development stage, we're aiming to make exactly that:
An open source, free, massively multiplayer online role-playing game that doesn't suck.
How do we wish to do this? Well, take a look at what makes open-source software cool in general: the freedom you get with it. Open source allows you to modify a software product to whatever you want it to do (assuming you have the skill to do so). We're planning to make WorldForge not a one-time release, packaged game, but rather a gaming system, that allows you, the player/system administrator/story writer to customise it to suit your world.
If you want to help us reach this goal - and it is looking good, we have many talented coders/graphics artists/musicians/story writers - then feel free to come by our website and take a look :).
Interesting article (I find it useful actually because I'm just showing a Linux newbie around and I really don't feel like explaining every single thing to him. Often one doesn't know where to start though :).
I found it a little sad that it was rather Red Hat-biased at some points (like talking about installing the new kernel using RPM). I wonder though, how easy it for authors of articles such as this one to make their articles fully independent from any distribution specifics. It's rather sad to see how many articles talk about "Linux" in the header but when you look at the article itself are really about "Distribution XYZ". :/. Ah well, I guess that's the cost one pays for having all these distros flying around.
Hmm, just a while ago a slashdot article about spam reminded me of looking at my own situation. I receive a lot of spam, mainly due to the fact that I once signed many guestbooks (those were the times when I thought you could leave your uncoded e-mail address around without receiving thousands of spam mails) and this made me take a look round the net for some methods against this (I was already using a procmail filter to cut out possible spam).
Anyways, so I came across brightmail. It is, indeed, pretty damn good. It's basically a POP-filter that acts as a proxy between you and your POP server and filters out SPAM. The spam mails are kept for 30 days and can be retrieved through some HTTPS interface. Now, I haven't received any spam in the past three days (it's already filtered out numerous messages). And I'm happy :). You might wanna try it.
Note: no, I don't work for Brightmail or have any kind of relation to them other than using their service.