Not sure about racism in Rand's books, it's been a while since I've stuck my head far enough up my own ass to get through them.
But the GGP starts off his post with a racist statement: "On the other hand black athletes do overwhelmingly better than white ones."
He is qualifying performance based no nothing more than his opinion and race. It may not be the most vile of racist remarks, but it is a continuation of a steriotype and is a judgement based on nothing more than race.
Think of it this way: Genetics defines caps and predispositions, Society defines development and outcomes.
Meaning, no matter what society wants, if your genes say you're going to be 6' tall, you're going to be 6' tall. And while genetics may give you a bone structure and hormones to be physically active, if society pushes you to spend your whole life in a library, you aren't going to be a great football player.
He basically said that in the past there was racism. That racism was so widespread and consistent it became part of the social and educational structure. Black people couldn't be educated, so they couldn't go to college, so they couldn't get good jobs, and after generations and generations of such treatment, it becomes a structural problem. The person at the admissions post today may be completely unbiased, but because of the social structure, far less black people will make it to admissions and those that do will likely be of lesser education.
Which leads to his point that by being "colorblind", all we do is maintain the status quo. By ignoring race, we effectively continue a form of structured racism.
Although I think I would disagree with him on the need to target impacts on the older community (ie: EEO). While I think it is a novel approach, it isn't appearing to have the direct rammifications of breaking the racial structures we were hoping for. What I think a better approach would be is to target the youth. Sink more into education, especially those schools in minority/inner city districts that have the most to gain from modest improvements. Yeah, it'll take time, generations even, to break the structural issues, but IMO creating a better educated youth seems like a much more positive way to influence racial structures than by forcing the issue though EEO.
But then again, I think more education is the solution to almost all of our current problems.
Chrome moldings are the first give away that even the newest of them were from the early 90's. And most of them still had the old flat dashes. Some of them were quite likely the 88-95 Mexico models. But there were a bunch of the old beaters still cruising around.
Interestingly, most studies show the opposite. Having tight tree lines, curves, and non-straight roads forces drivers to be more attentive and result in less crashes.
That's not to say that everything should be a twisty-turny nightmare, but try driving in another country some time. Heck, Brazil driving is crazy. The paint on the roads is completely ignored, lanes only exist in a temporary state based on how many cars and motor cycles can squeeze side by side down the road. And for as agressive as they drive, there are surprizingly few accidents. Because every second of driving is filled with near calls, pot holes big enough to hide a house in, and other crazy drivers bouncing through lanes and there isn't a single large SUV to be found (I was actually surprized by the number of late 60's VW Bugs on the road).
All these folks in high efficiency death traps (many with out anti-lock breaks or air bags), and they all survive thanks to highly defensive, and aggresive driving styles. None of this applying make-up while driving arround in a 3-ton SUV or inattentive chattering on a cell phone while bumbling through lanes in a pickup truck.
Ireland is also insane. In cities like Dublin, it's a free for all with Bus drivers that have long since stopped caring if they run someone off the road and coked up taxi drivers popping up on the curbs when needed to clear traffic. Again, the hyper aggressive/defensive driving style demand constant attention. And the fact that when vehicle-to-vehicle collisions occur, we're talking about less than 4 tons coliding as opposed to 6-8 tons of American SUVs raming into eachother. If you're one guy in a little car, you're screwed. But if everyone is driving little cars, it's not nearly as bad.
And I have near-zero pitty for most single-car accidents. Drunk, high, innatentive, yeah, sucks when people wrap their Civic hatch back around a street light, but unless there was some sort of equipment or road failure, it's on them.
I am on some of them, but none of them have the information about who my former roommates are.
Specific knowledge of your living history isn't necesary. All that is need is the knowledge that you have previously communicated with this person, and possibly the extent that you did so. The "former roomate" was just a hypothetical to set up a scenario where someone that you had/have a social relationship with could be used to alter search result orders.
that would not allow them to know that a name that is associated with a google-saved bit of SQL code is the same person as my ex-roommate.
Unless they used the same user name, or posted it on a social media site that links their post to their google login, or if they include a contact email... Really, there are many ways to come up with this linking. Sure, it might not be 100%, but for the vast majority of the time, given sufficient data points, such links are relatively easy to create.
Then we'd have to get around the tiny detail that Google would somehow have to get that information from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, without my permission, to be able to use it.
Or they'd have to create their own social network? Or pay other social networks for such information. We already know Facebook sells their data, do you really think it would be that hard for Google to get intermittent updates of it?
I was unaware that using an RSS feed (such as/.'s) required listing with the provider anything about ex-roommates or their current web posting habits.
Are you using iGoogle as your RSS reader? Yeah, Google knows who's blogs you are following. Do you, and the author of any of those blogs use GMail, Google+, or sign into Google for search preferences? Yeah, Google knows who you are, what you are interested in, and who you socialize with. They might not know that Jim was your room mate in college, but they know that for a 2 year period you guys exchanged emails constantly.
I'm sorry, I thought the person I replied to said: "There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up." I assumed "written by your former room mate" meant it was from your former roommate.
I'm sorry, I thought you could follow along with a variety of hypothetical situations. If the task of following multiple possible scenarios in a system such as this is too great of a mental exercise, it's okay to sit this one out.
So, LIKE I SAID, you appear to want Google
Wooooh now. I never said anything about what I want. I just said that this is the next logical step in search results. It doesn't take me submitting anything to work either. Once they have a data index and a social index, as they increase the links between the two this is the logical outcome.
For instance, I have a lot of friends in the IT industry. I'm sure plenty of them frequent StackOverflow. But I know that some also freequent lesser known sites like LessThanDot.com. If one of my friends, not familiar with LTD is searching for something that is tech related, and Google finds a result on LTD, under the current system, since LTD is lighter on traffic/links/etc it would come in lower. But if the social weighting was included, my friends search would be more likely to display the LTD result higher as the search match, my relationship to them, and my activity their combine to bring it up.
Like it, hate it, who cares? It's the next logical step in search result ordering. And they are already doing it.
Microsoft iceberg aside, the Nokia leadership managed to keep Nokia as the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. They're not looking so hot right now, but they still push more phones into the market than any other company. Just saying, they've been exceptionally successful thus far, and it'll be interesting to see how they go on in the "post iceberg" state.
So, do you want Google keeping track of who your former roommates...
Are you not on facebook, myspace, Google+, Linked In, or any other social networks? Do you use any of Googles document sharing services? Do you follow any blogs/rss feeds? Do you freequent one specific site?
Google is already tracking this, it's just a matter of mashing all that data up.
and that the specific bit of SQL was written not only by someone with the same name
Maybe the SQL isn't even from your friend. Maybe it's a site they freequent. Maybe it's a friend of a friend. Who knows, but social weighting on search results is the next logical step as social networking data is built.
I could see some interesting shake ups in searching as we build more social indexing.
I mean, imagine if you could adjust search results based on the results' authors relationship to you?
Looking for a bit of SQL? There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up. Trying to find a good place to eat? Local reviews are handy, but reviews from friends, who you may have a better idea of their expectations and tastes could be significantly MORE valuagle.
etc..
As more data gets out there, more search options open.
-Rick
PS: If this concept has not been patented (unlikely!), please conside this prior art that I have not intent on patenting
You're on more crack than the author. You can run.Net apps on any machine with the same version of the.Net client installed, XP, 2k3, Vista, 2k8, 7, even Apple, and although it lags a little behind Mono gets us running on Linux.
Sure, it's not quite as "runs on anything" as Java, but have you ever compared any of the Java IDEs with VS? Lets face it, if MS hosed up every other thing its ever done, Visual Studio is bar none the best coding IDE..Net, like Java, are high level object orriented managed code languages. Yeah, if you try to write an OS in them, it would be rediculous. If you are trying to push the latest greatest graphics systems through them, you'll be disipointed. But if you're trying to develop desktop apps, web services, rapid software prototypes, etc... they are both great languages.
Use the right tool for the job..Net and Java are not the right tool for every job. But for those that they are designed to fulfill, they work wonderfully.
Dude, there ain't a whole lot of Vitamin A rich vegies that can grow in the target climate. Rice on the other hand, grows exceptionally well and there is already a significant infrastructure, semi-skills labor, and knowledge about it's cultivation in the area. Monsanto is for all intents and purposes, evil, but giving away golden rice, for free, has dramatically improved the health of the region.
I'm not going to get up and defend Monsanto's abhorrent business practices, their devestating litigative front, and their profiteering on the backs of common farmers. But really, most of the scientists who work there are good people who really are trying to help feed the world. It just gets gummed up by investors and lawyers.
That's actually not necesarily GM work. Lots of crops work based on a breeding stock, and a yield stock. You need to grow enough of the breeding stock to get seeds to plant for the yield stock, but due to the selective breeding, the yield stock is often sterile.
Not that Monsanto isn't 95% evil or anything (I gotta give 'em some credit for Golden Rice), but sterile yield crops isn't necessarily due to them.
And you realise that IF the perform such contact via an environment like Facebook, that logs and indexes every interaction, that proving the communications would be trivial and likely pose as significant evidence in court.
It's just like many other attempts to reduce a specific behavior. The law won't change the behavior, it will just push it to less monitored channels.
Again, I'd say that they have a HUGE advantage over traditional anti-aliasing. Instead of having to do edge detection along polygons, or per-pixel antialiasing that blurs non-edge lines, they can get the performance of per-pixel antialiasing with the strength of polygon pixel shading.
Think about projecting and shrinking extruding square through space, each point that square passes can be considered for transparency and antialiasing, especially if you oversize the square slightly for the pixel to pick up neighboring particles for cross-pixel antialiasing. And at that point you're talking about blending a handful of points, that you would already have to do to account for partial pixel covering by points.
Effectively, a single pass anti-alias must be part of the basic engine. Beefing it up to a multipass anti-alias engine would increase the workload, but depending on how they search/load/cache results, it might not be all that significant. In any case, it's very likely to not be as intense of process as current polygon, or edge antialiasing, and it should produce a more accurate blend than screen antialiasing.
Think of it this way, a model is made up of a whole lot of points, billions of them even. This engine takes on pixel of the output and searches for which points will fill it. Imagine the whole world as points (not polygons) in a giant cube. The pixel is actually 1 point with an contracting square extrude coming out of it. The engine starts close and works further and further away until the entire pixel is filled with points. The resulting image is then compressed back down to 1 pixel and sent for output as the next pixel search fires.
By it's very nature, the further away something is, the less points it will have in the pixel box, the closer, the more points. It isn't a mater of switching data sets or LOD models, it's just a natural result of how the search engine works.
Remember, they only need to search a point cloud once for each pixel on the screen. The volume of points in the cloud has a much lesser effect on their performance than the number of pixels on the screen. So they can probably run a 640x480 output on a fairly low end machine. Yeah, running a 3-1040p monitor set up would probably require some amazing hardware, but for us mere mortals, I don't think that's quite as much of a concern.
AMD would be nice, but honestly, Google would be the best to have a hack at it. The entire engine is based on a search engine on a massive library of points. If any company has expertise in managed huge volumes of data, and searching it at blistering speeds, it's Google.
You should look into the underlying engine. The reason that they call it 'unlimited' is because the performance is based on a search engine that only has to be executed once per pixel instead of the more traditional for each poligon. With traditional engines, the more poligons, the more performance suffers, with the Unlimited engine, adding more points has a negligable effect on performance, adding higher resolution on the other hand, has a significant impact.
Except that this isn't Voxel. Euclideon is marketing for Unlimited Tech now. Go do a search for Unlimited graphics engine, they've been showing off their work for the last 2 years. The only thing new here is their marketing partner.
There are lots of people running profitable private schools, that cost a lot less to run and of a far better job than the federal government. But the government at every opportunity tries to crush such solutions.
Correct, it is entirely possible to perform well, and at a profit, for organizations the allow selective enrollment at a price point significantly higher than that of public education. And I see no reason to stop that. But that solution only works for segments of the population who A) View education as a worthwhile investment and B) Have the funds to invest. It is the governments duty to pick up the slack for everyone else as there isn't a profit driven model which is capable of servicing every youth in the country at an acceptable level.
There was a great program in DC where underprivileged kids were give vouchers to attend a decent private school, which treated them much better and educated them better too.
Milwaukee, WI has been on the cutting edge of the voucher program for almost a decade now. And what we've found is that the voucher program has two measurable results: 1) The schools that students voucher out of recieve less funding, and 2) The students that voucher out perform worse at private schools than their regional public school equivilant on standardized tests. On average, most of the voucher students would have done better just staying in their local public school.
You can bet the Democrats put a stop to that when they were in power!
Actually the Dems have long been backers of INCREASING education funding, including subsidies for private schools. There has been a lot of pushback on voucher programs though, as even if it worked exactly as intended, it would only improve the education of a handful of students while driving down the quality of education for everyone else. The goal of education reform isn't bandaids and shuffling kids around, it's to fix the schools that are poor performing and ensure the students get the best education that we can efficiently manage.
-Rick
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Lol, by that measure Reagan never cut taxes either. And neither Bush ever started a war. Because clearly the power to start a war is limited to congress as well.
Only if the company asserted ownership at the time of creation. At my current employer, they were very specific during the hiring process that they do not assert ownership of any code we generate, but they do assert total ownership of all data our code touches. So that if we want to take our frameworks opensource, we can, but we obviously can't push data, even if it's just config data.
Every other location I've worked at though has had a contract in place for declaring ownership of everything we touch while on the clock, on the network, or on their hardware.
No contract, no ownership. If he signed ownership of his work over, it's their code, not his. If he didn't, it's still his. At that point though, you'll need a lawyer to prove it as the strength of your copyright/patent/trademark is only as strong as the court finds it.
-Rick
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 5, Interesting
After Reagan's huge tax cut he proceeded to raise taxes almost a dozen times to make up for it and STILL ran the government at such a bloated rate of growth he blew every dime of the economy growth for generations to come. Reagan was an interesting president for sure, and there's lots we can learn from him, but really, there is a lot of revisionist history about what he did in his two terms.
No, I'm saying that it is illogical for the government to partake in business that generates significant revenue on its own. The government is funded by the tax payers, not by profit. And if the government were to become a profit driven entity, we would see the same shortcomings in it that we see in the free market. It isn't profitable to feed the poor. The government deals with future demands of a larger populace through taxation. Taxes are revenue though, not profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure about racism in Rand's books, it's been a while since I've stuck my head far enough up my own ass to get through them.
But the GGP starts off his post with a racist statement: "On the other hand black athletes do overwhelmingly better than white ones."
He is qualifying performance based no nothing more than his opinion and race. It may not be the most vile of racist remarks, but it is a continuation of a steriotype and is a judgement based on nothing more than race.
-Rick
Think of it this way: Genetics defines caps and predispositions, Society defines development and outcomes.
Meaning, no matter what society wants, if your genes say you're going to be 6' tall, you're going to be 6' tall. And while genetics may give you a bone structure and hormones to be physically active, if society pushes you to spend your whole life in a library, you aren't going to be a great football player.
-Rick
He basically said that in the past there was racism. That racism was so widespread and consistent it became part of the social and educational structure. Black people couldn't be educated, so they couldn't go to college, so they couldn't get good jobs, and after generations and generations of such treatment, it becomes a structural problem. The person at the admissions post today may be completely unbiased, but because of the social structure, far less black people will make it to admissions and those that do will likely be of lesser education.
Which leads to his point that by being "colorblind", all we do is maintain the status quo. By ignoring race, we effectively continue a form of structured racism.
Although I think I would disagree with him on the need to target impacts on the older community (ie: EEO). While I think it is a novel approach, it isn't appearing to have the direct rammifications of breaking the racial structures we were hoping for. What I think a better approach would be is to target the youth. Sink more into education, especially those schools in minority/inner city districts that have the most to gain from modest improvements. Yeah, it'll take time, generations even, to break the structural issues, but IMO creating a better educated youth seems like a much more positive way to influence racial structures than by forcing the issue though EEO.
But then again, I think more education is the solution to almost all of our current problems.
-Rick
Individuals like you give me hope for the future of our species and a strong desire for mod points.
-Rick
Chrome moldings are the first give away that even the newest of them were from the early 90's. And most of them still had the old flat dashes. Some of them were quite likely the 88-95 Mexico models. But there were a bunch of the old beaters still cruising around.
-Rick
Interestingly, most studies show the opposite. Having tight tree lines, curves, and non-straight roads forces drivers to be more attentive and result in less crashes.
That's not to say that everything should be a twisty-turny nightmare, but try driving in another country some time. Heck, Brazil driving is crazy. The paint on the roads is completely ignored, lanes only exist in a temporary state based on how many cars and motor cycles can squeeze side by side down the road. And for as agressive as they drive, there are surprizingly few accidents. Because every second of driving is filled with near calls, pot holes big enough to hide a house in, and other crazy drivers bouncing through lanes and there isn't a single large SUV to be found (I was actually surprized by the number of late 60's VW Bugs on the road).
All these folks in high efficiency death traps (many with out anti-lock breaks or air bags), and they all survive thanks to highly defensive, and aggresive driving styles. None of this applying make-up while driving arround in a 3-ton SUV or inattentive chattering on a cell phone while bumbling through lanes in a pickup truck.
Ireland is also insane. In cities like Dublin, it's a free for all with Bus drivers that have long since stopped caring if they run someone off the road and coked up taxi drivers popping up on the curbs when needed to clear traffic. Again, the hyper aggressive/defensive driving style demand constant attention. And the fact that when vehicle-to-vehicle collisions occur, we're talking about less than 4 tons coliding as opposed to 6-8 tons of American SUVs raming into eachother. If you're one guy in a little car, you're screwed. But if everyone is driving little cars, it's not nearly as bad.
And I have near-zero pitty for most single-car accidents. Drunk, high, innatentive, yeah, sucks when people wrap their Civic hatch back around a street light, but unless there was some sort of equipment or road failure, it's on them.
-Rick
I am on some of them, but none of them have the information about who my former roommates are.
Specific knowledge of your living history isn't necesary. All that is need is the knowledge that you have previously communicated with this person, and possibly the extent that you did so. The "former roomate" was just a hypothetical to set up a scenario where someone that you had/have a social relationship with could be used to alter search result orders.
that would not allow them to know that a name that is associated with a google-saved bit of SQL code is the same person as my ex-roommate.
Unless they used the same user name, or posted it on a social media site that links their post to their google login, or if they include a contact email... Really, there are many ways to come up with this linking. Sure, it might not be 100%, but for the vast majority of the time, given sufficient data points, such links are relatively easy to create.
Then we'd have to get around the tiny detail that Google would somehow have to get that information from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, without my permission, to be able to use it.
Or they'd have to create their own social network? Or pay other social networks for such information. We already know Facebook sells their data, do you really think it would be that hard for Google to get intermittent updates of it?
I was unaware that using an RSS feed (such as /.'s) required listing with the provider anything about ex-roommates or their current web posting habits.
Are you using iGoogle as your RSS reader? Yeah, Google knows who's blogs you are following. Do you, and the author of any of those blogs use GMail, Google+, or sign into Google for search preferences? Yeah, Google knows who you are, what you are interested in, and who you socialize with. They might not know that Jim was your room mate in college, but they know that for a 2 year period you guys exchanged emails constantly.
I'm sorry, I thought the person I replied to said: "There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up." I assumed "written by your former room mate" meant it was from your former roommate.
I'm sorry, I thought you could follow along with a variety of hypothetical situations. If the task of following multiple possible scenarios in a system such as this is too great of a mental exercise, it's okay to sit this one out.
So, LIKE I SAID, you appear to want Google
Wooooh now. I never said anything about what I want. I just said that this is the next logical step in search results. It doesn't take me submitting anything to work either. Once they have a data index and a social index, as they increase the links between the two this is the logical outcome.
For instance, I have a lot of friends in the IT industry. I'm sure plenty of them frequent StackOverflow. But I know that some also freequent lesser known sites like LessThanDot.com. If one of my friends, not familiar with LTD is searching for something that is tech related, and Google finds a result on LTD, under the current system, since LTD is lighter on traffic/links/etc it would come in lower. But if the social weighting was included, my friends search would be more likely to display the LTD result higher as the search match, my relationship to them, and my activity their combine to bring it up.
Like it, hate it, who cares? It's the next logical step in search result ordering. And they are already doing it.
-Rick
Microsoft iceberg aside, the Nokia leadership managed to keep Nokia as the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. They're not looking so hot right now, but they still push more phones into the market than any other company. Just saying, they've been exceptionally successful thus far, and it'll be interesting to see how they go on in the "post iceberg" state.
-Rick
Right click, goto definition. I think the default shortcut is ctrl-F2 or something.
-Rick
So, do you want Google keeping track of who your former roommates...
Are you not on facebook, myspace, Google+, Linked In, or any other social networks? Do you use any of Googles document sharing services? Do you follow any blogs/rss feeds? Do you freequent one specific site?
Google is already tracking this, it's just a matter of mashing all that data up.
and that the specific bit of SQL was written not only by someone with the same name
Maybe the SQL isn't even from your friend. Maybe it's a site they freequent. Maybe it's a friend of a friend. Who knows, but social weighting on search results is the next logical step as social networking data is built.
-Rick
I could see some interesting shake ups in searching as we build more social indexing.
I mean, imagine if you could adjust search results based on the results' authors relationship to you?
Looking for a bit of SQL? There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up. Trying to find a good place to eat? Local reviews are handy, but reviews from friends, who you may have a better idea of their expectations and tastes could be significantly MORE valuagle.
etc..
As more data gets out there, more search options open.
-Rick
PS: If this concept has not been patented (unlikely!), please conside this prior art that I have not intent on patenting
You're on more crack than the author. You can run .Net apps on any machine with the same version of the .Net client installed, XP, 2k3, Vista, 2k8, 7, even Apple, and although it lags a little behind Mono gets us running on Linux.
Sure, it's not quite as "runs on anything" as Java, but have you ever compared any of the Java IDEs with VS? Lets face it, if MS hosed up every other thing its ever done, Visual Studio is bar none the best coding IDE. .Net, like Java, are high level object orriented managed code languages. Yeah, if you try to write an OS in them, it would be rediculous. If you are trying to push the latest greatest graphics systems through them, you'll be disipointed. But if you're trying to develop desktop apps, web services, rapid software prototypes, etc... they are both great languages.
Use the right tool for the job. .Net and Java are not the right tool for every job. But for those that they are designed to fulfill, they work wonderfully.
-Rick
Dude, there ain't a whole lot of Vitamin A rich vegies that can grow in the target climate. Rice on the other hand, grows exceptionally well and there is already a significant infrastructure, semi-skills labor, and knowledge about it's cultivation in the area. Monsanto is for all intents and purposes, evil, but giving away golden rice, for free, has dramatically improved the health of the region.
I'm not going to get up and defend Monsanto's abhorrent business practices, their devestating litigative front, and their profiteering on the backs of common farmers. But really, most of the scientists who work there are good people who really are trying to help feed the world. It just gets gummed up by investors and lawyers.
-Rick
That's actually not necesarily GM work. Lots of crops work based on a breeding stock, and a yield stock. You need to grow enough of the breeding stock to get seeds to plant for the yield stock, but due to the selective breeding, the yield stock is often sterile.
Not that Monsanto isn't 95% evil or anything (I gotta give 'em some credit for Golden Rice), but sterile yield crops isn't necessarily due to them.
-Rick
And you realise that IF the perform such contact via an environment like Facebook, that logs and indexes every interaction, that proving the communications would be trivial and likely pose as significant evidence in court.
It's just like many other attempts to reduce a specific behavior. The law won't change the behavior, it will just push it to less monitored channels.
-Rick
Again, I'd say that they have a HUGE advantage over traditional anti-aliasing. Instead of having to do edge detection along polygons, or per-pixel antialiasing that blurs non-edge lines, they can get the performance of per-pixel antialiasing with the strength of polygon pixel shading.
Think about projecting and shrinking extruding square through space, each point that square passes can be considered for transparency and antialiasing, especially if you oversize the square slightly for the pixel to pick up neighboring particles for cross-pixel antialiasing. And at that point you're talking about blending a handful of points, that you would already have to do to account for partial pixel covering by points.
Effectively, a single pass anti-alias must be part of the basic engine. Beefing it up to a multipass anti-alias engine would increase the workload, but depending on how they search/load/cache results, it might not be all that significant. In any case, it's very likely to not be as intense of process as current polygon, or edge antialiasing, and it should produce a more accurate blend than screen antialiasing.
-Rick
Think of it this way, a model is made up of a whole lot of points, billions of them even. This engine takes on pixel of the output and searches for which points will fill it. Imagine the whole world as points (not polygons) in a giant cube. The pixel is actually 1 point with an contracting square extrude coming out of it. The engine starts close and works further and further away until the entire pixel is filled with points. The resulting image is then compressed back down to 1 pixel and sent for output as the next pixel search fires.
By it's very nature, the further away something is, the less points it will have in the pixel box, the closer, the more points. It isn't a mater of switching data sets or LOD models, it's just a natural result of how the search engine works.
-Rick
Remember, they only need to search a point cloud once for each pixel on the screen. The volume of points in the cloud has a much lesser effect on their performance than the number of pixels on the screen. So they can probably run a 640x480 output on a fairly low end machine. Yeah, running a 3-1040p monitor set up would probably require some amazing hardware, but for us mere mortals, I don't think that's quite as much of a concern.
AMD would be nice, but honestly, Google would be the best to have a hack at it. The entire engine is based on a search engine on a massive library of points. If any company has expertise in managed huge volumes of data, and searching it at blistering speeds, it's Google.
-Rick
You should look into the underlying engine. The reason that they call it 'unlimited' is because the performance is based on a search engine that only has to be executed once per pixel instead of the more traditional for each poligon. With traditional engines, the more poligons, the more performance suffers, with the Unlimited engine, adding more points has a negligable effect on performance, adding higher resolution on the other hand, has a significant impact.
-Rick
Except that this isn't Voxel. Euclideon is marketing for Unlimited Tech now. Go do a search for Unlimited graphics engine, they've been showing off their work for the last 2 years. The only thing new here is their marketing partner.
-Rick
There are lots of people running profitable private schools, that cost a lot less to run and of a far better job than the federal government. But the government at every opportunity tries to crush such solutions.
Correct, it is entirely possible to perform well, and at a profit, for organizations the allow selective enrollment at a price point significantly higher than that of public education. And I see no reason to stop that. But that solution only works for segments of the population who A) View education as a worthwhile investment and B) Have the funds to invest. It is the governments duty to pick up the slack for everyone else as there isn't a profit driven model which is capable of servicing every youth in the country at an acceptable level.
There was a great program in DC where underprivileged kids were give vouchers to attend a decent private school, which treated them much better and educated them better too.
Milwaukee, WI has been on the cutting edge of the voucher program for almost a decade now. And what we've found is that the voucher program has two measurable results: 1) The schools that students voucher out of recieve less funding, and 2) The students that voucher out perform worse at private schools than their regional public school equivilant on standardized tests. On average, most of the voucher students would have done better just staying in their local public school.
You can bet the Democrats put a stop to that when they were in power!
Actually the Dems have long been backers of INCREASING education funding, including subsidies for private schools. There has been a lot of pushback on voucher programs though, as even if it worked exactly as intended, it would only improve the education of a handful of students while driving down the quality of education for everyone else. The goal of education reform isn't bandaids and shuffling kids around, it's to fix the schools that are poor performing and ensure the students get the best education that we can efficiently manage.
-Rick
Lol, by that measure Reagan never cut taxes either. And neither Bush ever started a war. Because clearly the power to start a war is limited to congress as well.
-Rick
Only if the company asserted ownership at the time of creation. At my current employer, they were very specific during the hiring process that they do not assert ownership of any code we generate, but they do assert total ownership of all data our code touches. So that if we want to take our frameworks opensource, we can, but we obviously can't push data, even if it's just config data.
Every other location I've worked at though has had a contract in place for declaring ownership of everything we touch while on the clock, on the network, or on their hardware.
No contract, no ownership. If he signed ownership of his work over, it's their code, not his. If he didn't, it's still his. At that point though, you'll need a lawyer to prove it as the strength of your copyright/patent/trademark is only as strong as the court finds it.
-Rick
After Reagan's huge tax cut he proceeded to raise taxes almost a dozen times to make up for it and STILL ran the government at such a bloated rate of growth he blew every dime of the economy growth for generations to come. Reagan was an interesting president for sure, and there's lots we can learn from him, but really, there is a lot of revisionist history about what he did in his two terms.
-Rick
No, I'm saying that it is illogical for the government to partake in business that generates significant revenue on its own. The government is funded by the tax payers, not by profit. And if the government were to become a profit driven entity, we would see the same shortcomings in it that we see in the free market. It isn't profitable to feed the poor. The government deals with future demands of a larger populace through taxation. Taxes are revenue though, not profit.
-Rick