AMD supports OpenGL just fine? That's gotta be the quote of the day. If AMD ever supports OpenGL just fine I'll throw them a fucking parade. Kernel panicking and bringing the entire system to it's knees because AMD doesn't check to see if a target is attached to a shader output? Sloppy coding yes, but not an acceptable response by the driver as you have no idea where the crash is coming from.. No OpenGL error message, just a crashing system. GPU to GPU buffer copies don't work unless you do any other memory operations first on the target buffer on AMD... Numerical precision is often dodgy on AMD cards. Phantom shader errors on certain generations of cards with no error message string... just failure to compile. Hell there was a series of crashes with AMD cards just trying to bind and clear framebuffers that only ended up being fixed by a driver update. Allocating too many vbo ID's causes cascading memory consumption and kills your application. And those are just the bugs I remember off hand today (and these were for their supposedly "good" Windows drivers, I shudder to think how bad their Linux stuff is. )
If the spec is even remotely vague about something, it seems like AMD consistently chooses the least robust and slapdash manner to resolve that ambiguity.
As a side note I'm fairly certain AMD only opened up their drivers because they're so terrible at writing them they're hoping the community will do it for them. It's not altruism, it's bottom line they don't have the resources to do it well and decided to try and look good. It's just PR.
The rendering frame rate of their system leaves a lot to be desired. The VR hardware looks good for their needs and usage, but that frame rate totally kills the immersion. That's inexcusable in this day and age - people have better gaming rigs than that. My guess is they have a very poorly optimized modeling system that has to pull data from whatever CAD systems they use.
1) The framerate doesn't need to be optimized as they're not going for immersion, but rather the ability to look things over from novel angles in a semi natural way. In fact immersion might run counter to their goals in this situation.
2) The car models are probably extremely detailed and overmeshed even to guarantee that the model has high physical fidelity. A large amount of the performance in games that is lost in CAD is due to geometry bandwidth.
3) Also X-Ray mode implies some pretty interesting alpha blending type effects so they're probably losing most of their Z-Culling and line drawing also isn't as optimized in graphics hardware as most people don't use it. It's actually a selling point on several CAD workstation graphics cards that they accelerate line drawing.
4) The motion capture system tracking their hands and heads also probably introduces some level of system latency.
I am shocked! Shocked I say, that a company who's major VC investor sits on the board of Facebook was bought by Facebook.
Will this kill VR? Probably not. Is this going to usher in VR sooner? Maybe. Is this the wave of the future for social media? Probably not. Most people have no idea what the Oculus is nor do they care. The average person thinks you're a dork for wearing VR but will enjoy it for its novelty for a while. I say all this as someone who backed the Kickstarter and has a DK1.
VR is inherently anti-social and oriented for consumption of media. Most people want to hang out with their friends face to face and not in a virtual land because humans are hardwired for social contact (for the most part). Plus Facebook has an inherent asynchronous aspect that makes it appealing. It's a broadcast that people can respond to overtime. But VR demands equipment and attention. I don't see people having this commitment to VR for this sort of activity.
I honestly don't think it's just the technology not being there that held back VR all these years. The tech to do this has probably been here for about 6 to 10 years if the will to do it had been as well. I think the future of this sort of thing is much more likely in the field of Augmented Reality. Things that enhance your day to day life and help you complete tasks or activities. VR has some appeal for gaming/entertainment, but I think the only serious task I see for it might be teleoperation of robotic systems. Most of the time you want to be able to engage the world around you, not shut it out completely.
One last point, if VR is going to take off like people hope, we need rendering systems that can do real time photo realistic rendering of realistic scenes with serious fidelity. We're getting close, but it's still going to be a while and even then the computing power required is going to be stout.
There's nothing wrong with setters and getters provided one writes them well. It's extra work but I've had times where having setters and getters to put break points in would have allowed me to catch and fix highly insidious bugs caused by people doing bad things in other parts of the code. To be fair it was their use of globals that made it an issue in the first place:/.
That being said I always try to write them in attribute style as it looks almost as clean as direct public access.
Seriously, before DICE bought/. it seemed like I just didn't have enough time to catch up on all the articles I wanted to. Now I'm lucky if there's two or three articles a week that are interesting enough for even a second glance. And now this shit? Terrible...
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything. It can also be detrimental depending on what you want to do as some companies consider it too much or too expensive. You'll be better off starting in a Masters program and then deciding if you you really see a need or feel the desire to go for the PhD. A PhD is a LOT of work and time.
Really unless you plan to go into academia or hard core research I'd steer clear.
I have the same issue. Sleep study confirmed and everything. I was working with a clinical behavioral psychologist to improve some, but life went crazy and my sleep is back to pretty much being shit.
Light therapy did help some though. I need to get back on trying that.
No you don't. You just need to read the published paper and attempt to reproduce what the paper reports. (A good scientific paper includes enough information to make the work it reports on reproducible.)
That's the ideal and idyllic world. In many areas there's a ton of hidden parameters and secret sauce that doesn't get reported. I found this to be especially true in robotics and machine vision and other computer science papers.
I spent a year and a half working on trying to replicate results from one paper. Total failure. A few years later I was talking to one of the researchers and sure enough, the results only worked in that one case for that one data set and pretty much had no real chance of working any other way. That's pretty much the straw that broke my brain. The entire time it was my fault the results weren't being reproduced....
Correcting myself, NP-Hard isn't just the numerical version of NP-Complete. But rather the set of problems which are at least as hard as NP. NP-Hard includes the numerical versions. Sigh.
The numerical version of many NP-Complete decision problems are often NP-Hard.
I'd love to know what you consider the most basic algorithms. There are entire classes of problems which are polynomial and are not "basic". I also think you don't understand what it even means to be NP-Hard (which is just the numerical version of being NP-Complete.) Also to show that something is NP-Hard is equivalent to showing something is NP-Complete, which means you show there is a Polynomial time reduction to another problem in the appropriate class. Seriously, how did this get modded insightful.
Honestly, I don't think you even begin to understand complexity spaces or how they work.
Oh sure you've ruled out binary and unary, but you haven't eliminated ternary, hex, octal, and just about any other counting system. Won't somebody please think of the Slashdotters!
I had firefox 6 clock in at just under 4GB of ram with about 60 to 90 tabs open before the stuttering got so bad I started closing things. It went down to 2.2 GB after I closed about half the tabs. It's common for me to have even more tabs open across multiple windows given the way I use the browser, but I must say that was the first time I've seen it stutter at 4GB like that. Usually it would sit around 2GB of ram with anywhere from 100 to 200 tabs open.
So with 39 tabs open I'm happy to see just 390MB of usage right now on FF7. Usually we'd be approaching 700MB already.
I work a bit south of Baltimore. We felt it here for about 30 seconds. Of course my office is next to shipping and I thought maybe they'd finally lost it and knocked all the shelves over in an attempt to crush me finally. But nope.. earth quake. They've evacuated a number of office buildings in downtown Baltimore from what my wife is saying (she was sent home). Her brother said he felt it as far as Ft. Wayne IN as well.
Actually,
Seatbelts and automotive safety took off once Murphy(yes of Murphy's law) showed the army how many men it was losing to automobile crashes and how many could be saved by seatbelts. Thus the saftey of automobiles was born. Plus having the shit sued out of you because you didn't make your car as safe as possible has some pretty good economic motivation behind it. Surprisingly enough most people don't want to drive death traps if they can avoid it.
Nerd moment. Best raid leader I ever played with was the MT. He delegated subleaders, but if there's one person who relies on healers and dps not to die time and time again.. it's the MT. The MT has to know the encounter, the movements, the timings, etc etc. The dps are dependent on the MT to not lose aggro, but the MT is dependent on them to not go nuts and draw aggro. The healers have to keep the MT up or they die, but they also have to watch other people. But what probably made this guy the best was that if he didn't know a fight, but someone else did, he'd put ego aside to learn things. So he was exactly what this article calls for, an expert who was willing to delegate when needed, but had a good core knowledge of the system.
Further nerd moment, having played as both a tank and dps... The needs of the healers and the dps really are secondary to those of the tank. Without a tank nothing happens, without healing there can be no tanking, and without dps... well unless the fight has a timer... things just take longer.
To bring it back to the article, you need people with vision and skill running things, the only problem with having an engineer run the show is if he's got an ego and no social skills. But frankly I'd rather have an engineer in charge than someone from accounting or sales.
Whatever happened to posting stories that aren't filled with FUD and hate? Maybe HTML5 is more standards compliant and more widely available on other things... like say... Mobile devices... Which are probably one of the places many people would want to access the 'cloud' from. Or perhaps silverlight is too heavy for the task of being a portal UI... Whatever happened to using the right tool for the right job?
I believe your example of the Lyme disease is erroneous. Watson would be primed with that sort of information as it can be fed a list of common causes and common environmental issues quite easily. Watson could then say, "you're symptoms sound like Lyme disease, but that is not common here. Have you traveled to these areas recently?" Pretty much the same as a doctor or nurse at a clinic.
Watson will also be able to do things like search the entire patient history and perhaps identify lingering things that add up into a whole or flag symptoms for non-specialists. For instance, I had a history of shortness of breath in the morning and occasional acid reflux as well as sinus pressure/infection, I went to a couple of doctors/school nurses and they did the standard tests and found nothing wrong. I have very powerful lungs. Take some antibiotics, you'll be fine. However, 3 or 4 years later I'm on my ass with chronic fatigue due to allergies. I was even taking allergy meds.
Turns out the acid reflux and shortness of breath were a semi-obscure allergy symptom due to chronic drainage since my sinus were nearly swollen shut and the meds I were taking weren't in large enough doses to control the issue. My allergist spotted this almost instantly. You would have to think Watson would be able to learn that sort of behavior as well.
I do agree with you regarding the image processing capabilities. I have been doing research in medical imaging for the last 5 years, and it's a tough field. However, it's a field that's ripe for machine learning approaches(and I have colleagues who do this sort of research) since there's already large amounts of labeled data generated every day. You'd need technicians to take images, or measurements perhaps, but I think you're underestimating how powerful Watson could be in this area.
That said Watson isn't going to eliminate the need for doctors as it doesn't have hands and can't take readings or run MRI's, but it will probably greatly speed up diagnoses and like I said bring specialist knowledge to non-specialists.
To nitpick, I thought several metallurgical historians had pretty much established that Wootz steel ingots and a forging process with a high/medium heat cycle would result in Damascus steel due to the presence of vanadium or molybdenum. They've also found the presence of carbon nanotubes in the steel recently. I can't find the exact article, but there was an excellent article on the subject in the mid 2000's that seemed pretty definitive. The real speculation seems more to do with how the technique was lost and what the precise methods of forging the ancient smiths used, more than how to recreate it.
They're using the stems and leaves of the plants. As in the left over parts after food is processed. They can also use the plants that rot in the field or don't make the grade for edibility I'd imagine. There was word of Pepsi switching its bottling process over to use plastics made out of the leftover plant matter from their food processing plants a few weeks ago. I imagine this would be much the same and not like the corn based ethonal boondoggle.
You assume the cost of openness is free, but for a company like Apple it's probably much much greater than the pittance it will take them to make their own. Especially considering they might even get MS to actually help them with compliance.
Enslaved? Really? That's the analogy you want to work with?
Slavery implies that the person is forced to do something and stripped of their rights to do other things. Software is an object. An inanimate object. Saying someone has enslaved your software is like saying someone has enslaved the bricks they used to build their house, or since this is/. it's like saying your car has enslaved its tires.
If someone uses your code, they have not deprived you of the original code or indeed truly stolen anything of value. You can argue that you took all the time and effort to make the code and thus the code is valuable in the time it took to create. However, you chose to make it freely available. It's polite to contribute back to the code if you've made it better, certainly, as community tends to be an important element of the human social order, but really you haven't lost anything if someone else is using your code. Your code is still freely available, but the new product that someone else made with your code is not. But now something might exist that wouldn't have before your wrote your code. So your code is already increasing utility in the market.
GPL is saying if you want to use my code, then I have to be able to use your code. GPL then places a cost on using your code. So now your code is not free either in the sense of beer or liberty(for the developer, who lets be honest is really the person who's going to look at the code). So does it really surprise anyone that a group of developers would choose to avoid software which makes them less free?
Slashdot Mirror
AMD supports OpenGL just fine? That's gotta be the quote of the day. If AMD ever supports OpenGL just fine I'll throw them a fucking parade. Kernel panicking and bringing the entire system to it's knees because AMD doesn't check to see if a target is attached to a shader output? Sloppy coding yes, but not an acceptable response by the driver as you have no idea where the crash is coming from.. No OpenGL error message, just a crashing system. GPU to GPU buffer copies don't work unless you do any other memory operations first on the target buffer on AMD... Numerical precision is often dodgy on AMD cards. Phantom shader errors on certain generations of cards with no error message string... just failure to compile. Hell there was a series of crashes with AMD cards just trying to bind and clear framebuffers that only ended up being fixed by a driver update. Allocating too many vbo ID's causes cascading memory consumption and kills your application. And those are just the bugs I remember off hand today (and these were for their supposedly "good" Windows drivers, I shudder to think how bad their Linux stuff is. )
If the spec is even remotely vague about something, it seems like AMD consistently chooses the least robust and slapdash manner to resolve that ambiguity.
As a side note I'm fairly certain AMD only opened up their drivers because they're so terrible at writing them they're hoping the community will do it for them. It's not altruism, it's bottom line they don't have the resources to do it well and decided to try and look good. It's just PR.
The rendering frame rate of their system leaves a lot to be desired. The VR hardware looks good for their needs and usage, but that frame rate totally kills the immersion. That's inexcusable in this day and age - people have better gaming rigs than that. My guess is they have a very poorly optimized modeling system that has to pull data from whatever CAD systems they use.
1) The framerate doesn't need to be optimized as they're not going for immersion, but rather the ability to look things over from novel angles in a semi natural way. In fact immersion might run counter to their goals in this situation.
2) The car models are probably extremely detailed and overmeshed even to guarantee that the model has high physical fidelity. A large amount of the performance in games that is lost in CAD is due to geometry bandwidth.
3) Also X-Ray mode implies some pretty interesting alpha blending type effects so they're probably losing most of their Z-Culling and line drawing also isn't as optimized in graphics hardware as most people don't use it. It's actually a selling point on several CAD workstation graphics cards that they accelerate line drawing.
4) The motion capture system tracking their hands and heads also probably introduces some level of system latency.
I am shocked! Shocked I say, that a company who's major VC investor sits on the board of Facebook was bought by Facebook.
Will this kill VR? Probably not. Is this going to usher in VR sooner? Maybe. Is this the wave of the future for social media? Probably not. Most people have no idea what the Oculus is nor do they care. The average person thinks you're a dork for wearing VR but will enjoy it for its novelty for a while. I say all this as someone who backed the Kickstarter and has a DK1.
VR is inherently anti-social and oriented for consumption of media. Most people want to hang out with their friends face to face and not in a virtual land because humans are hardwired for social contact (for the most part). Plus Facebook has an inherent asynchronous aspect that makes it appealing. It's a broadcast that people can respond to overtime. But VR demands equipment and attention. I don't see people having this commitment to VR for this sort of activity.
I honestly don't think it's just the technology not being there that held back VR all these years. The tech to do this has probably been here for about 6 to 10 years if the will to do it had been as well. I think the future of this sort of thing is much more likely in the field of Augmented Reality. Things that enhance your day to day life and help you complete tasks or activities. VR has some appeal for gaming/entertainment, but I think the only serious task I see for it might be teleoperation of robotic systems. Most of the time you want to be able to engage the world around you, not shut it out completely.
One last point, if VR is going to take off like people hope, we need rendering systems that can do real time photo realistic rendering of realistic scenes with serious fidelity. We're getting close, but it's still going to be a while and even then the computing power required is going to be stout.
There's nothing wrong with setters and getters provided one writes them well. It's extra work but I've had times where having setters and getters to put break points in would have allowed me to catch and fix highly insidious bugs caused by people doing bad things in other parts of the code. To be fair it was their use of globals that made it an issue in the first place :/.
That being said I always try to write them in attribute style as it looks almost as clean as direct public access.
Seriously, before DICE bought /. it seemed like I just didn't have enough time to catch up on all the articles I wanted to. Now I'm lucky if there's two or three articles a week that are interesting enough for even a second glance. And now this shit? Terrible...
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything. It can also be detrimental depending on what you want to do as some companies consider it too much or too expensive. You'll be better off starting in a Masters program and then deciding if you you really see a need or feel the desire to go for the PhD. A PhD is a LOT of work and time.
Really unless you plan to go into academia or hard core research I'd steer clear.
I have the same issue. Sleep study confirmed and everything. I was working with a clinical behavioral psychologist to improve some, but life went crazy and my sleep is back to pretty much being shit.
Light therapy did help some though. I need to get back on trying that.
People are basically assclowns about it though.
No you don't. You just need to read the published paper and attempt to reproduce what the paper reports. (A good scientific paper includes enough information to make the work it reports on reproducible.)
That's the ideal and idyllic world. In many areas there's a ton of hidden parameters and secret sauce that doesn't get reported. I found this to be especially true in robotics and machine vision and other computer science papers.
I spent a year and a half working on trying to replicate results from one paper. Total failure. A few years later I was talking to one of the researchers and sure enough, the results only worked in that one case for that one data set and pretty much had no real chance of working any other way. That's pretty much the straw that broke my brain. The entire time it was my fault the results weren't being reproduced....
Correcting myself, NP-Hard isn't just the numerical version of NP-Complete. But rather the set of problems which are at least as hard as NP. NP-Hard includes the numerical versions. Sigh.
The numerical version of many NP-Complete decision problems are often NP-Hard.
I'd love to know what you consider the most basic algorithms. There are entire classes of problems which are polynomial and are not "basic". I also think you don't understand what it even means to be NP-Hard (which is just the numerical version of being NP-Complete.) Also to show that something is NP-Hard is equivalent to showing something is NP-Complete, which means you show there is a Polynomial time reduction to another problem in the appropriate class. Seriously, how did this get modded insightful.
Honestly, I don't think you even begin to understand complexity spaces or how they work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_class
Offer up your daughters to placate them? So they don't rape your angelic guests?
Huh,
I've carried a 2 dollar bill in the back of my wallet for years as a good luck charm.
Maybe I'm siphoning the luck away from these other people.
Deploy the Deathwatch! The Ordo Xenos protects.
Oh sure you've ruled out binary and unary, but you haven't eliminated ternary, hex, octal, and just about any other counting system. Won't somebody please think of the Slashdotters!
I had firefox 6 clock in at just under 4GB of ram with about 60 to 90 tabs open before the stuttering got so bad I started closing things. It went down to 2.2 GB after I closed about half the tabs. It's common for me to have even more tabs open across multiple windows given the way I use the browser, but I must say that was the first time I've seen it stutter at 4GB like that. Usually it would sit around 2GB of ram with anywhere from 100 to 200 tabs open.
So with 39 tabs open I'm happy to see just 390MB of usage right now on FF7. Usually we'd be approaching 700MB already.
I work a bit south of Baltimore. We felt it here for about 30 seconds. Of course my office is next to shipping and I thought maybe they'd finally lost it and knocked all the shelves over in an attempt to crush me finally. But nope.. earth quake. They've evacuated a number of office buildings in downtown Baltimore from what my wife is saying (she was sent home). Her brother said he felt it as far as Ft. Wayne IN as well.
Actually, Seatbelts and automotive safety took off once Murphy(yes of Murphy's law) showed the army how many men it was losing to automobile crashes and how many could be saved by seatbelts. Thus the saftey of automobiles was born. Plus having the shit sued out of you because you didn't make your car as safe as possible has some pretty good economic motivation behind it. Surprisingly enough most people don't want to drive death traps if they can avoid it.
Nerd moment. Best raid leader I ever played with was the MT. He delegated subleaders, but if there's one person who relies on healers and dps not to die time and time again.. it's the MT. The MT has to know the encounter, the movements, the timings, etc etc. The dps are dependent on the MT to not lose aggro, but the MT is dependent on them to not go nuts and draw aggro. The healers have to keep the MT up or they die, but they also have to watch other people. But what probably made this guy the best was that if he didn't know a fight, but someone else did, he'd put ego aside to learn things. So he was exactly what this article calls for, an expert who was willing to delegate when needed, but had a good core knowledge of the system.
... well unless the fight has a timer... things just take longer.
Further nerd moment, having played as both a tank and dps... The needs of the healers and the dps really are secondary to those of the tank. Without a tank nothing happens, without healing there can be no tanking, and without dps
To bring it back to the article, you need people with vision and skill running things, the only problem with having an engineer run the show is if he's got an ego and no social skills. But frankly I'd rather have an engineer in charge than someone from accounting or sales.
Whatever happened to posting stories that aren't filled with FUD and hate? Maybe HTML5 is more standards compliant and more widely available on other things... like say... Mobile devices... Which are probably one of the places many people would want to access the 'cloud' from. Or perhaps silverlight is too heavy for the task of being a portal UI... Whatever happened to using the right tool for the right job?
I believe your example of the Lyme disease is erroneous. Watson would be primed with that sort of information as it can be fed a list of common causes and common environmental issues quite easily. Watson could then say, "you're symptoms sound like Lyme disease, but that is not common here. Have you traveled to these areas recently?" Pretty much the same as a doctor or nurse at a clinic.
Watson will also be able to do things like search the entire patient history and perhaps identify lingering things that add up into a whole or flag symptoms for non-specialists. For instance, I had a history of shortness of breath in the morning and occasional acid reflux as well as sinus pressure/infection, I went to a couple of doctors/school nurses and they did the standard tests and found nothing wrong. I have very powerful lungs. Take some antibiotics, you'll be fine. However, 3 or 4 years later I'm on my ass with chronic fatigue due to allergies. I was even taking allergy meds.
Turns out the acid reflux and shortness of breath were a semi-obscure allergy symptom due to chronic drainage since my sinus were nearly swollen shut and the meds I were taking weren't in large enough doses to control the issue. My allergist spotted this almost instantly. You would have to think Watson would be able to learn that sort of behavior as well.
I do agree with you regarding the image processing capabilities. I have been doing research in medical imaging for the last 5 years, and it's a tough field. However, it's a field that's ripe for machine learning approaches(and I have colleagues who do this sort of research) since there's already large amounts of labeled data generated every day. You'd need technicians to take images, or measurements perhaps, but I think you're underestimating how powerful Watson could be in this area.
That said Watson isn't going to eliminate the need for doctors as it doesn't have hands and can't take readings or run MRI's, but it will probably greatly speed up diagnoses and like I said bring specialist knowledge to non-specialists.
To nitpick, I thought several metallurgical historians had pretty much established that Wootz steel ingots and a forging process with a high/medium heat cycle would result in Damascus steel due to the presence of vanadium or molybdenum. They've also found the presence of carbon nanotubes in the steel recently. I can't find the exact article, but there was an excellent article on the subject in the mid 2000's that seemed pretty definitive. The real speculation seems more to do with how the technique was lost and what the precise methods of forging the ancient smiths used, more than how to recreate it.
They're using the stems and leaves of the plants. As in the left over parts after food is processed. They can also use the plants that rot in the field or don't make the grade for edibility I'd imagine. There was word of Pepsi switching its bottling process over to use plastics made out of the leftover plant matter from their food processing plants a few weeks ago. I imagine this would be much the same and not like the corn based ethonal boondoggle.
You assume the cost of openness is free, but for a company like Apple it's probably much much greater than the pittance it will take them to make their own. Especially considering they might even get MS to actually help them with compliance.
Enslaved? Really? That's the analogy you want to work with?
/. it's like saying your car has enslaved its tires.
Slavery implies that the person is forced to do something and stripped of their rights to do other things. Software is an object. An inanimate object. Saying someone has enslaved your software is like saying someone has enslaved the bricks they used to build their house, or since this is
If someone uses your code, they have not deprived you of the original code or indeed truly stolen anything of value. You can argue that you took all the time and effort to make the code and thus the code is valuable in the time it took to create. However, you chose to make it freely available. It's polite to contribute back to the code if you've made it better, certainly, as community tends to be an important element of the human social order, but really you haven't lost anything if someone else is using your code. Your code is still freely available, but the new product that someone else made with your code is not. But now something might exist that wouldn't have before your wrote your code. So your code is already increasing utility in the market.
GPL is saying if you want to use my code, then I have to be able to use your code. GPL then places a cost on using your code. So now your code is not free either in the sense of beer or liberty(for the developer, who lets be honest is really the person who's going to look at the code). So does it really surprise anyone that a group of developers would choose to avoid software which makes them less free?