Go back to elementary physics class, doodyhead. "Freezing point" and "melting point" are the same damn thing, therefore NO degrees of difference. It's a heat transfer thing, man.
Try to comprehend that not everyone in the world speaks english as their first language. Any moron should be able to understand the point he or she is making from context without speculating on their understanding of physics.
I laughed myself silly at that one. Not that I read anything on the site, just at the idea that someone has to go through life with a name like Buddy Weiserman.
Tungsten Graphics were recently contracted by the weather channel to write accelerated xfree86 drivers for the Radeon. You can get a beta from their site. Given that ATI make their specs available and the influx of cash you'd expect the drivers to develop well.
I am pretty sure the above post is just rubbish someone made up to make a couple of moderators look stupid.
AFAIK Cg is a C like language designed to make writing vertex and pixel shaders easier. Real time shaders for nvidia's and ati's are currently done in assembly. It is not supposed to be a new language like C or Python or insert-language-here. All it has to do are transforms on 3d vertex or pixel information.
A vertex shader takes as input position, normal, colour, lighting and other relevent information for a single vertex. It performs calculations with access to some constant and temporary registers, then outputs a single vertex (this is what the chip is built for). It does this for every vertex in the object being shaded. Pixel shaders are a little more complex but similar.
Points 1-7 have nothing to do with Cg.
There is a very good article on vertex and pixel shaders here
would much rather pay 10% extra for faster processing hardware than 20% extra on my programming budget to have people's memory allocation bugs discovered and fixed.
And very often automatic garbage collection is undesirable. If I am writing a complicated 3d game I don't want the garbage collector kicking in halfway through rendering a frame. I know in some languages such as Python you can control its behaviour but this is way more of a pain than looking after your own memory.
If you are writing a high performance app or for an embedded appliance memory considerations are important. Pointers are an excellent way to get the most out of your resources.
I don't doubt that C# is a great language for writing web interfaces to MS databases. However calling it "better" than C++ is silly.
C++ was from the start a language with major difficulties. C had a bunch of problems that could only be fixed by taking bad ideas out of C, C++ took nothing out and added a lot more complexity in.
Simpler I/O, simpler memory allocation, a standard library of useful types all make C++ a lot easier to program in than C. The standard library containers also make it a lot easier to avoid buffer overflows.
But the main reason for using C# or Java is that you don't have the tortured aaa::b.c->d.e->g (x,y) syntax which is only necessary because in the dim and distant past much of the C and C++ core was coded as separate preprocessors.
If someone *really* needs to use a member function of some member pointer in some pointer in some namespace I'd like to see how C# or java avoids syntax like this without trivial substitutions of "." for "->".
As for the efficiency question, C# is certainly as fast as C++ if you use the compile on install option and for numeric stuff is quite a bit better as the compilers are optimised for the specific intel processors.
and I think C# is infinitely better than C++ (then again, what isn't...). I'm looking forward to playing with C# on my Linux machine.
Language X > Language Y statements are some of the most pointless ever made. Suppose you wanted to write an accelerated 3d game? Suppose you wanted to do some numerical physics?
And you might be waiting a while for C# on your linux machine. You can still get java which does the same stuff however.
As an aside, this article brings one more thing to mind: every environmentalist needs to understand that he is not "saving the Earth." He is only saving himself and his descendants. The Earth will recover from every incosiderate act man has done to it in the blink of an eye (relative to its lifetime), and graciously replace us with other species if we destroy our way of life.
This is a fact of nature. It happens with mice, antelope, fish, bacteria, and apes. Why would people think it wouldn't happen to humans? Sorry, creation scientists, we're animals too, and though we use different resources, we're not immune to laws of nature because of divine providence.
Humans beings are unique on this planet in that they are able to completely drain a natural resource, to the point where there is nothing left to recover if the species dies off. The real fear of environmentalists is well illustrated in Australia where the arrival of Europeans has had an irreperable effect. Much of the country sustained a diverse, balanced ecosystem which is now destroyed. Not destroyed as in let it lie fallow for a few years and it will recover, but destroyed as in gone. These areas which previously hosted numerous species of flora and fauna are now deserts and will remain so.
People still seem to think of the earth as an infinite sink which can cope with as much garbage as we throw at it and recover if left alone for a little while. Life on earth isn't inevitable or invulnerable and it's usually only religious types who think it's here solely for the purpose of us that think so.
Speaking of E, when the hell is there going to be a usable release of e17?? I know they're rewriting it all from scratch again, but it's been years now!
The key point here is that the theory predicts that the conversion of microwaves to gravity waves will be reasonably efficient. So this is testable, and is being tested.
The joke of it all is that after a year some journalist asked why they didn't just stick it on a regular commercial jet but they didn't think of it at the time.
Can you imagine the excess baggage allowance on an atomic clock?
His letter is a long way of saying, "Please decide which side of your mouth to speak out of." By the third time he pointed out, "This contradicts what you said in the previous paragraph," I had tears streaming down my face. I thought there was more than that. On several occassions he had good arguments to dispute what MS were saying directly.
But it was fantastic. My favourite bit was his respone to MS's comments about
" The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of... guarantee"
He replied by politely mentioning that the EULA distributed with ms products basically offers no guarantee:)
If they played it in a restaurant for customers, that would be one thing, but this is private activity completely unrelated to the job.
The weird thing is, when I did time in coffee shops we'd play music without a public licence and the number of customers who's come up and ask "what cd is that and where can I buy it from?" Essentially they're looking to charge you money for promoting their products.
Basically, it's like this, proofs are as much a social event as a mathematical cedrtainty. Proofs are presented, and believed, and then refuted.
Most proofs are presented, not believed, and refuted. Good proofs are presented, not believed, subjected to scrutiny, bolstered by alternative proofs and finally accepted. The peer review process is remarkably successful because most mathematicians and scientists actively pratice skepticism. Name one proof that has been accepted for 50 years and then shown to be incorrect.
I'm sure that I've proved things incorrectly before, and believed them
That's not much of a peer review process is it?
Peer review does not imply flawlessness.
The original poster didn't actually mention peer review - you did. He/she was referring to the absolute certainty that seems to be inherent in some mathematical theorems. I put it to you that Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers is flawless.
NVidia has closed development and docs for the cards. Binary only parts that work only on certain distributions. No *BSD development (closed = bad)
So what? They have no obligation to open up their development and they might have good reasons for not doing so. The fact remains they provide linux drivers out of goodwill (i'm pretty sure they're not making enough money from linux users to justify development on them) and they deserve kudos for doing so. ATI doesn't provide squat for linux.
No GL or DRI support unless you are running a distribution that they support
I use Debian. It's not 'supported'. Both GL and DRI work fine.
Works great until you upgrade the kernel and discover it's now incompatable with the interface changes.
I have never had this happen with the 2.4 kernel series and I upgrade regularly. From the nvidia documentation
"... cd into the NVIDIA_kernel directory. Type 'make install'. This will compile the kernel interface to the NVdriver... "
Or if you have a kernel crash and discover that you now get NO support from anyone since they can't debug that driver.
Once again I have never had a kernel crash with an nvidia driver. What makes you think it was at fault?
I've actually banned my employer's supplier from including nvidia card so I can be more flexable about what OS I want to put on the machines later.
Your and your employers loss. Besides if you don't like the accelerated drivers just use the Xfree86 one. It's not like you'll get good 3d for linux with any other card.
Yeah. The sysadmin for the visualisation laboratory here was given orders from "on high" to make all the sgi workstations dual-boot linux and win2k - previously they were all just linux. As you'd imagine the machines are all used primarily for 3d-stuff yet no appropriate software has been provided for the win partitions.
The funniest story I have about this sort of thing concerns some complaints in my department about admin people (the pay officer for example) requiring all documents to be submitted in.doc format. After hearing about the complaints the dean decided he'd start a faculty wide campaign to ensure "No staff member is without access to microsoft office!".
I still send them pdf files. Probably why I haven't been paid in 2 months:)
Slashdot Mirror
Go back to elementary physics class, doodyhead. "Freezing point" and "melting point" are the same damn thing, therefore NO degrees of difference. It's a heat transfer thing, man.
Try to comprehend that not everyone in the world speaks english as their first language. Any moron should be able to understand the point he or she is making from context without speculating on their understanding of physics.
I laughed myself silly at that one. Not that I read anything on the site, just at the idea that someone has to go through life with a name like Buddy Weiserman.
Tungsten Graphics were recently contracted by the weather channel to write accelerated xfree86 drivers for the Radeon. You can get a beta from their site. Given that ATI make their specs available and the influx of cash you'd expect the drivers to develop well.
You are probably thinking of a Casimir Operator.
If so they are not related.
I am pretty sure the above post is just rubbish someone made up to make a couple of moderators look stupid.
AFAIK Cg is a C like language designed to make writing vertex and pixel shaders easier. Real time shaders for nvidia's and ati's are currently done in assembly. It is not supposed to be a new language like C or Python or insert-language-here. All it has to do are transforms on 3d vertex or pixel information.
A vertex shader takes as input position, normal, colour, lighting and other relevent information for a single vertex. It performs calculations with access to some constant and temporary registers, then outputs a single vertex (this is what the chip is built for). It does this for every vertex in the object being shaded. Pixel shaders are a little more complex but similar.
Points 1-7 have nothing to do with Cg.
There is a very good article on vertex and pixel shaders here
The previous "largest server farm in the Southern Hemisphere" was in Tonga where 7 486s could render a scene from Tribes 2 in less than 17 minutes.
So suck on that Tonga. And you never had the first dawn of the new millenium either.
Which is handled by garbage collection.
would much rather pay 10% extra for faster processing hardware than 20% extra on my programming budget to have people's memory allocation bugs discovered and fixed.
And very often automatic garbage collection is undesirable. If I am writing a complicated 3d game I don't want the garbage collector kicking in halfway through rendering a frame. I know in some languages such as Python you can control its behaviour but this is way more of a pain than looking after your own memory.
If you are writing a high performance app or for an embedded appliance memory considerations are important. Pointers are an excellent way to get the most out of your resources.
I don't doubt that C# is a great language for writing web interfaces to MS databases. However calling it "better" than C++ is silly.
C++ was from the start a language with major difficulties. C had a bunch of problems that could only be fixed by taking bad ideas out of C, C++ took nothing out and added a lot more complexity in.
Simpler I/O, simpler memory allocation, a standard library of useful types all make C++ a lot easier to program in than C. The standard library containers also make it a lot easier to avoid buffer overflows.
But the main reason for using C# or Java is that you don't have the tortured aaa::b.c->d.e->g (x,y) syntax which is only necessary because in the dim and distant past much of the C and C++ core was coded as separate preprocessors.
If someone *really* needs to use a member function of some member pointer in some pointer in some namespace I'd like to see how C# or java avoids syntax like this without trivial substitutions of "." for "->".
As for the efficiency question, C# is certainly as fast as C++ if you use the compile on install option and for numeric stuff is quite a bit better as the compilers are optimised for the specific intel processors.
Could you provide links to some benchmarks?
and I think C# is infinitely better than C++ (then again, what isn't...). I'm looking forward to playing with C# on my Linux machine.
Language X > Language Y statements are some of the most pointless ever made. Suppose you wanted to write an accelerated 3d game? Suppose you wanted to do some numerical physics?
And you might be waiting a while for C# on your linux machine. You can still get java which does the same stuff however.
As an aside, this article brings one more thing to mind: every environmentalist needs to understand that he is not "saving the Earth." He is only saving himself and his descendants. The Earth will recover from every incosiderate act man has done to it in the blink of an eye (relative to its lifetime), and graciously replace us with other species if we destroy our way of life.
This is a fact of nature. It happens with mice, antelope, fish, bacteria, and apes. Why would people think it wouldn't happen to humans? Sorry, creation scientists, we're animals too, and though we use different resources, we're not immune to laws of nature because of divine providence.
Humans beings are unique on this planet in that they are able to completely drain a natural resource, to the point where there is nothing left to recover if the species dies off. The real fear of environmentalists is well illustrated in Australia where the arrival of Europeans has had an irreperable effect. Much of the country sustained a diverse, balanced ecosystem which is now destroyed. Not destroyed as in let it lie fallow for a few years and it will recover, but destroyed as in gone. These areas which previously hosted numerous species of flora and fauna are now deserts and will remain so.
People still seem to think of the earth as an infinite sink which can cope with as much garbage as we throw at it and recover if left alone for a little while. Life on earth isn't inevitable or invulnerable and it's usually only religious types who think it's here solely for the purpose of us that think so.
Speaking of E, when the hell is there going to be a usable release of e17?? I know they're rewriting it all from scratch again, but it's been years now!
This question deserves its own story.
The key point here is that the theory predicts that the conversion of microwaves to gravity waves will be reasonably efficient. So this is testable, and is being tested.
How? Are they actually *detecting* gravity waves?
Well, if that site is also hosted on his "home linux server" then it wont be running any cron jobs for a little while.
The joke of it all is that after a year some journalist asked why they didn't just stick it on a regular commercial jet but they didn't think of it at the time.
Can you imagine the excess baggage allowance on an atomic clock?
Perfect opportunity for Linux users to consider switching back to Windows, is more like it.
I love watching the people with sub 1000 user ids. They sound more and more jaded as the years go by.
We'll probably be swimming but more likely in molten polar icecaps.
His letter is a long way of saying, "Please decide which side of your mouth to speak out of." By the third time he pointed out, "This contradicts what you said in the previous paragraph," I had tears streaming down my face.
... guarantee"
:)
I thought there was more than that. On several occassions he had good arguments to dispute what MS were saying directly.
But it was fantastic. My favourite bit was his respone to MS's comments about
" The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of
He replied by politely mentioning that the EULA distributed with ms products basically offers no guarantee
Just for the non C++ programmers, here's a (real) example of those STL template errors.
This is superficially complicated. All you really need to look at is
conversion from _List_iterator
which tells you you probably haven't dereferenced an iterator before trying to use it or something similiar.
If they played it in a restaurant for customers, that would be one thing, but this is private activity completely unrelated to the job.
The weird thing is, when I did time in coffee shops we'd play music without a public licence and the number of customers who's come up and ask "what cd is that and where can I buy it from?" Essentially they're looking to charge you money for promoting their products.
50 years?
Basically, it's like this, proofs are as much a social event as a mathematical cedrtainty. Proofs are presented, and believed, and then refuted.
Most proofs are presented, not believed, and refuted. Good proofs are presented, not believed, subjected to scrutiny, bolstered by alternative proofs and finally accepted. The peer review process is remarkably successful because most mathematicians and scientists actively pratice skepticism. Name one proof that has been accepted for 50 years and then shown to be incorrect.
I'm sure that I've proved things incorrectly before, and believed them
That's not much of a peer review process is it?
Peer review does not imply flawlessness.
The original poster didn't actually mention peer review - you did. He/she was referring to the absolute certainty that seems to be inherent in some mathematical theorems. I put it to you that Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers is flawless.
NVidia has closed development and docs for the cards. Binary only parts that work only on certain distributions. No *BSD development (closed = bad)
So what? They have no obligation to open up their development and they might have good reasons for not doing so. The fact remains they provide linux drivers out of goodwill (i'm pretty sure they're not making enough money from linux users to justify development on them) and they deserve kudos for doing so. ATI doesn't provide squat for linux.
No GL or DRI support unless you are running a distribution that they support
I use Debian. It's not 'supported'. Both GL and DRI work fine.
Works great until you upgrade the kernel and discover it's now incompatable with the interface changes.
... cd into the NVIDIA_kernel directory. Type 'make install'. This will compile the kernel interface to the NVdriver ... "
I have never had this happen with the 2.4 kernel series and I upgrade regularly. From the nvidia documentation
"
Or if you have a kernel crash and discover that you now get NO support from anyone since they can't debug that driver.
Once again I have never had a kernel crash with an nvidia driver. What makes you think it was at fault?
I've actually banned my employer's supplier from including nvidia card so I can be more flexable about what OS I want to put on the machines later.
Your and your employers loss. Besides if you don't like the accelerated drivers just use the Xfree86 one. It's not like you'll get good 3d for linux with any other card.
Thats $70 million Australian dollars. About $7000 US.
Yeah. The sysadmin for the visualisation laboratory here was given orders from "on high" to make all the sgi workstations dual-boot linux and win2k - previously they were all just linux. As you'd imagine the machines are all used primarily for 3d-stuff yet no appropriate software has been provided for the win partitions.
.doc format. After hearing about the complaints the dean decided he'd start a faculty wide campaign to ensure "No staff member is without access to microsoft office!".
:)
The funniest story I have about this sort of thing concerns some complaints in my department about admin people (the pay officer for example) requiring all documents to be submitted in
I still send them pdf files. Probably why I haven't been paid in 2 months