One thing I've learnde really matters is radiosity, practically no image without it can ever lock real, with exception of special cases like solarsystems and stuff. But the problem is that radiosity takes time to render, and often it aren't perfectly implemented in the renderer either.
But when it comes to faces only radiosity doesn't cut it, they also need Subsurface Scattering and that's even more time consuming than radiosity.
Note that both those techniques can sometimes be faked, but that often onvolves lots of manual tweaking on the behalf of the artist, it's often a balance between computer time and human time.
That "Water Powered Clock" is as good as fake. Though I guess most of you already have figured out that it doesn't really get power out of water. It works just like a regular car battery.
There's a difference between politicians being on the large companies side and politicians being directly paid by them.
Even in a working democracy there can be support for stupid legislation to help companies. It's all down to what the public wants, if they'd want more leftist government they'd vote for some of the other two parties in the current coallition. Note that such a vote is not wasted in the same way that it is in USA, every party that gets more than 4% of votes gets places in the parliament.
Because they were the ones who paid the politicians to draft, advocate and pass the law. Don't make the mistake of thinking that only the US suffers from this problem. Any country with a large, highly centralised government (which is pretty much the entire Western World) is going to suffer from the same issue.
It doesn't happen that way here in Sweden. And I'm sure there are many countries where that is not the case. I think what's important is that there is some choice, the fact that we have seven governmental parties puts some pressure on the top ones, if they would appear to sell them out to corporate interests, they'd instantly lose lots of votes to smaller parties with similar politics.
Don't make general conclusions out of some few countries. Not every western country has such bad political system as USA have. It is, for sure, possible to not let the large companies rule the country as they wish.
It isn't really that easy, you can't watch your children 24/7, especially not if you want them to have some integrity of their own, which is reasonable at 15-17 years age.
One way for the parents to act would be only allowing the children to access only "safe" sites wouldn't it? Like that AOL service claimed to be. It'slike if a parent bought a game for children and it contained harsh violence and strong sex references. Would that be the parents fault?
It seems the Slashdot crowd is very fast on judging parents, but have you really thought this through? Maybe you should try to imagine how it would be to have a child n your own? Would you be that perfect parent that you expect everyone else to be?
I think that what they are telling you is that they don't search their index for "is" and "a". That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter when they are sorting the results by relevance though, which usually give the same result, even though not necessarily. If you, for instance, would search for a term that only are used on a few pages which don't have the word "is" on them, you'd get the results anyway if you don't explicitly state that "is" should be included.
I'd guess that is one of those things that seam more important to the programmer than it actually is for the user.
I find it interesting that you believe it's better to have Chinese geniuses developing weapons in China than USA, ok I can agree on that USA isn't a well functioning democracy, but China?
Aside from that though, why would scientist work for "their" country's pride and honor rather than work for their belief in science. Interest in science makes people work where they get most funding to do good or interesting stuff. To me the country you are born in should be just that, the country you are born in, not your identity, there's too much nationalism in the world!
Maybe, but they can't claim ignorance. Adobe's suit was widely publicized. Whether Adobe's claims are legit or not, I really don't care. It strikes me that they should follow the spirit of patent law regardless. Patent protected? No prob, innovate. Do things a little differently, improve upon them, and suddenly you have stronger reasons for your development to be adopted. Additionally, you don't have to fear nastygrams! Two birds with one stone, yadda yadda yadda.
The problem with Gimp is that they have innovated instead of copied. That is a problem because some people are used to the way Photoshop works, that's why GimpShop was made.
It's like the MP3 patents. Sure, it's possible to innovate instead of infringing on patents, and therefore we have the free Ogg Vorbis format. The problem is that most of the portable music players only support the MP3 format. Innovation doesn't help when you have to deal with vendor lock-in, which is true for both file formats and user interfaces.
I tried with WordPerfect 12:s Gramatik and it caomplained on
all double !:es and the following in []s:
In A.D. 2101 war was beginning.
What [happen]?
Somebody set [up us] the bomb.
We get [signal].
What!
Main screen [turn] On.
It's you!!
How are [you] [gentlemen]!!
All your base are [belong] to us.
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say!!
You have no chance to survive [make] your time.
[Ha Ha] Ha
Captain!!
Take off every 'Zig'!!
You know what you doing.
Move 'Zig'.
For great justice.
It also explained what the errors were in all cases, in some of them it was able to provide a correct replacement.
I'm not a WordPerfect user, I downloaded the trial just for this because I've heard that it would be good for this kind of things.
I'm sorry but I don't like wasting fuel and money, Going somewhere by bike is much better, I can get to work by bike in the same time it takes to get the car one block in those traffic jams.
Well, just as my argument doesn't hold up, if not else, just by the fact that millions of people use the car every day to get to their work makes it apparent that it has some uses, your argument doesn't hold up.
Apparently people did find that feature useful or ingteresting. It spread across blogs and friends quite fast, and it's popularity may even be the reason it got taken down.
What you think is useable and interesting doesn't neccescarily equal to what other people do.
But then, whining about the amount of uninteresting google-news are about as a sure way of getting modded up as flaming apple is to get modded down.:)
That's why there still are a strong EU-critical movement atleast in sweden. I personally firmly believe that a democracy cease to function when it ges too large, USA shows it today, EU will show it tomorrow, when the politicians get too far from the people, people lose interest, just compare the last national election's participation (81%) to EU election's particpation (38%).
I think it is because google has such a good track record. When google does something you know that it wont have spyeare for one. Just think of VoIP application with the ease and functionality compared to Picasa, for free*. That is more encouraging than when the former owner of Kazaa release their software**.
*They can get their money from internet-to-phone calls. *Wich actually have proven to be better than you'd think no spyware there, so don't hesistate to try/use Skype.
Doesn't Mozilla have an IRC channel for development questions, or mailing lists for the various components?
I guess it was a rethorical question but in case anyone wonders:
irc.mozilla.org have channels such as #firefox and #mozilla, Mozillazine forums covering all topics related to Mozilla.
Maybe a tad offtopic, but I have for some time thought of spiders and their logic, it would be interesting to see project that spin an artificial net, simulating the thought process of a spider.
Interesting reply. I guess you got me there on the last note...:)
But I still feel that you mix up depth and 3D it's two whole different things.
To illustrate what I mean I'm going to ask you to think of an apple, how do you see it? I'd guess that many people would just think of an 2D projection of the apple, some people would think of it as a half one, thereby also visulising the flesh and core of the apple. But very few would think of it in real 3D - every part of the apple at the same time, both the complete outside, the flesh and the core without a cut. That's what'd be required to call it real 3D IMHO.
But when I think of it, that probably doesn't have much to do with 3D interfaces, so I guess I should just shut it...:)
The depth we see is not more that just one extra channel. Instead of Red, Green and Blue, we have Red Green, Blue and Depth. Think of it a while and you'll see. Or just notice that to make those stereoscopical pattern images you need only a greyscale depth image to create something that looks "3D" for us mere humans with four channels 2D vision.
Yeah sure, the 3D-desktop maybe can bring out some new GUI ideas, but no good one that isn't possible in a 2D gui, what difference does it make that the computer seas the desktop as a 3D space, rather than a layered 2D space? That's the difference we are talking about, not that we suddenly will see our desktops in 3D.
They aren't even planning to bring a depth channel into it for what I know. (that'd demand either special screens r special glasses)
So, in conclusion: The development of 3D-desktops may prove to be good, in that it gives ideas that isn't as obvious with the 2D-desktop mindset. But there's no reason for an end user to want a 3D-desktop over a similary featured 2D-desktop.
Damn I'm annyed by those "3d-desktops" why doesn't people realize that: 1. Humans have 2-dimensional vision. 2. We already have "3D". Windows can already be placed before another, that is as much 3D you get on a 2D screen.
None of the good features a "3D-desktop" gives you really need the 3D-part, you could implement it in any normal window-manager already.
Probably the biggest reason they aren't is that there's no demand, people don't really want the feature of making the windows distorted by "perspective" or the extra work it creates.
What exactly is the feature you miss in your current windowmanager? If it's a good one you probably can get them to implement it, maybe it already is?
It wasn't apparent on the site that that is the case, so it's good that he informs anyone, who otherwise would have downloaded and tried, that it's just a waste of time if you aren't going to buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've learnde really matters is radiosity, practically no image without it can ever lock real, with exception of special cases like solarsystems and stuff. But the problem is that radiosity takes time to render, and often it aren't perfectly implemented in the renderer either.
But when it comes to faces only radiosity doesn't cut it, they also need Subsurface Scattering and that's even more time consuming than radiosity.
Note that both those techniques can sometimes be faked, but that often onvolves lots of manual tweaking on the behalf of the artist, it's often a balance between computer time and human time.
Yeah, it's very annoying when they tell you to change a registry entry, I mean, the OSX doesn't even have a registry! I hate it when they say that. ;)
That "Water Powered Clock" is as good as fake. Though I guess most of you already have figured out that it doesn't really get power out of water. It works just like a regular car battery.
You can read more about how batteries work at howstuffworks.com
There's a difference between politicians being on the large companies side and politicians being directly paid by them.
Even in a working democracy there can be support for stupid legislation to help companies. It's all down to what the public wants, if they'd want more leftist government they'd vote for some of the other two parties in the current coallition. Note that such a vote is not wasted in the same way that it is in USA, every party that gets more than 4% of votes gets places in the parliament.
Because they were the ones who paid the politicians to draft, advocate and pass the law. Don't make the mistake of thinking that only the US suffers from this problem. Any country with a large, highly centralised government (which is pretty much the entire Western World) is going to suffer from the same issue.
It doesn't happen that way here in Sweden. And I'm sure there are many countries where that is not the case. I think what's important is that there is some choice, the fact that we have seven governmental parties puts some pressure on the top ones, if they would appear to sell them out to corporate interests, they'd instantly lose lots of votes to smaller parties with similar politics.
Don't make general conclusions out of some few countries. Not every western country has such bad political system as USA have. It is, for sure, possible to not let the large companies rule the country as they wish.
It isn't really that easy, you can't watch your children 24/7, especially not if you want them to have some integrity of their own, which is reasonable at 15-17 years age.
One way for the parents to act would be only allowing the children to access only "safe" sites wouldn't it? Like that AOL service claimed to be. It'slike if a parent bought a game for children and it contained harsh violence and strong sex references. Would that be the parents fault?
It seems the Slashdot crowd is very fast on judging parents, but have you really thought this through? Maybe you should try to imagine how it would be to have a child n your own? Would you be that perfect parent that you expect everyone else to be?
I don't think they mean the technincal aspect of server, but rather the public acess kind of server, to serve webpages, ftp or games.
If they meant server in the protcol way they could just as well block all incomming traffic.
I think that what they are telling you is that they don't search their index for "is" and "a". That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter when they are sorting the results by relevance though, which usually give the same result, even though not necessarily. If you, for instance, would search for a term that only are used on a few pages which don't have the word "is" on them, you'd get the results anyway if you don't explicitly state that "is" should be included.
I'd guess that is one of those things that seam more important to the programmer than it actually is for the user.
I find it interesting that you believe it's better to have Chinese geniuses developing weapons in China than USA, ok I can agree on that USA isn't a well functioning democracy, but China?
Aside from that though, why would scientist work for "their" country's pride and honor rather than work for their belief in science. Interest in science makes people work where they get most funding to do good or interesting stuff. To me the country you are born in should be just that, the country you are born in, not your identity, there's too much nationalism in the world!
It's like the MP3 patents. Sure, it's possible to innovate instead of infringing on patents, and therefore we have the free Ogg Vorbis format. The problem is that most of the portable music players only support the MP3 format. Innovation doesn't help when you have to deal with vendor lock-in, which is true for both file formats and user interfaces.
I'm not a WordPerfect user, I downloaded the trial just for this because I've heard that it would be good for this kind of things.
You probably meant couple of hours...
Though Google usually have more than one story posted each day
I'm sorry but I don't like wasting fuel and money, Going somewhere by bike is much better, I can get to work by bike in the same time it takes to get the car one block in those traffic jams.
:)
Well, just as my argument doesn't hold up, if not else, just by the fact that millions of people use the car every day to get to their work makes it apparent that it has some uses, your argument doesn't hold up.
Apparently people did find that feature useful or ingteresting. It spread across blogs and friends quite fast, and it's popularity may even be the reason it got taken down.
What you think is useable and interesting doesn't neccescarily equal to what other people do.
But then, whining about the amount of uninteresting google-news are about as a sure way of getting modded up as flaming apple is to get modded down.
That's why there still are a strong EU-critical movement atleast in sweden. I personally firmly believe that a democracy cease to function when it ges too large, USA shows it today, EU will show it tomorrow, when the politicians get too far from the people, people lose interest, just compare the last national election's participation (81%) to EU election's particpation (38%).
I think it is because google has such a good track record. When google does something you know that it wont have spyeare for one. Just think of VoIP application with the ease and functionality compared to Picasa, for free*. That is more encouraging than when the former owner of Kazaa release their software**.
*They can get their money from internet-to-phone calls.
*Wich actually have proven to be better than you'd think no spyware there, so don't hesistate to try/use Skype.
Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless released as open source from MS. Maybe Apple isn't the new Microsoft after all?
Maybe a tad offtopic, but I have for some time thought of spiders and their logic, it would be interesting to see project that spin an artificial net, simulating the thought process of a spider.
Have anyone seen such a thing?
There you see, dupes are good!
Interesting reply. :)
:)
I guess you got me there on the last note...
But I still feel that you mix up depth and 3D it's two whole different things.
To illustrate what I mean I'm going to ask you to think of an apple, how do you see it? I'd guess that many people would just think of an 2D projection of the apple, some people would think of it as a half one, thereby also visulising the flesh and core of the apple. But very few would think of it in real 3D - every part of the apple at the same time, both the complete outside, the flesh and the core without a cut. That's what'd be required to call it real 3D IMHO.
But when I think of it, that probably doesn't have much to do with 3D interfaces, so I guess I should just shut it...
Binocular vision - right.
3D vision - false.
The depth we see is not more that just one extra channel. Instead of Red, Green and Blue, we have Red Green, Blue and Depth. Think of it a while and you'll see. Or just notice that to make those stereoscopical pattern images you need only a greyscale depth image to create something that looks "3D" for us mere humans with four channels 2D vision.
Yeah sure, the 3D-desktop maybe can bring out some new GUI ideas, but no good one that isn't possible in a 2D gui, what difference does it make that the computer seas the desktop as a 3D space, rather than a layered 2D space? That's the difference we are talking about, not that we suddenly will see our desktops in 3D.
They aren't even planning to bring a depth channel into it for what I know. (that'd demand either special screens r special glasses)
So, in conclusion: The development of 3D-desktops may prove to be good, in that it gives ideas that isn't as obvious with the 2D-desktop mindset. But there's no reason for an end user to want a 3D-desktop over a similary featured 2D-desktop.
Damn I'm annyed by those "3d-desktops" why doesn't people realize that:
1. Humans have 2-dimensional vision.
2. We already have "3D".
Windows can already be placed before another, that is as much 3D you get on a 2D screen.
None of the good features a "3D-desktop" gives you really need the 3D-part, you could implement it in any normal window-manager already.
Probably the biggest reason they aren't is that there's no demand, people don't really want the feature of making the windows distorted by "perspective" or the extra work it creates.
What exactly is the feature you miss in your current windowmanager? If it's a good one you probably can get them to implement it, maybe it already is?
45 degrees?? That's really hot! Why wouldn't you want ice cream a day like that?
It wasn't apparent on the site that that is the case, so it's good that he informs anyone, who otherwise would have downloaded and tried, that it's just a waste of time if you aren't going to buy it.
The bottom line is: When it's free, you just never know.
That's why no one should use Linux for secure servers, Windows is the way to go!
[/sarcasm]