Apparently you need a partial crack to run it, but that's true with many games on Linux because they usually have Windows specific CD/DVD protection that needs to be disabled (usually a no-CD file from some place like GameCopyWorld which removes or spoofs the protection checks). You can read about the legality of it there, but most people think it's legal to manually disable protection since you can legally do anything you want to your own copy.
The computer not only needs to be running Windows, but also IE according to the exploit report.
This is hardly the first virus to use that method - I've heard of similar 1-click or no-click infections using flaws in IE (specifically because it is the dominant browser - other browsers have flaws, too).
And from the initial poster, new viruses rarely have signatures right away - it usually takes several days from the initial report before they appear in a definitions file. When my wife popped a malicious e-card last year it installed 29 viruses through a downloader web site. The number of these detected by Trend Micro AV on the day of infection? 5. Fortunately no root kits with that one, and a date scan rooted out the infected files, but I still spent a couple of hours a weekend for a month cleaning the registry and fixing all the files it modified (starting with the more dangerous ones like the http address redirect and safe machines list and other backdoors and then moving to the registry keys, and since I had moved all the files into an infected.zip archive those registry keys were pretty much useless anyway). I submitted several of those viruses to Trend Micro (a few were caught before I had time to fix them but after the first day, and a few I deleted before deciding I really should submit any undiscovered ones).
Isn't $5000 a bit speculative, or are they using Canadian Dollars (which is about $1000 less than USD right now)?
Looking at component pricing and comparing to what's out there like the Asus M70VM-B1, which is about $1550 for 500GB less disk, the P8400 CPU is just slightly cheaper than the low end i7 (+800 for high end), a slightly slower GPU with 512k less RAM (my guess is this uses the 9800M GTX MXM platform - let's say +$200), 4GB more of DDR3 instead of DDR2 (about $250), no blu ray player (-?). By my estimates, the high end machine should be no more than $3000-$3500 after markup.
Even when I used barebones (whitebook) skeleton laptops I get similar numbers of about $2500 on the high end, but note that neither bare bones system laptop framework could fit 3 laptop drives and the best GPU I found in one was a 9600M GTX (though I didn't look hard - just the usual sources like pricewatch, google, and two manufacturers - ASUS and MSI).
Unfortunately, not all LED lighting is the same, and there are several ways to produce white or yellow light using blue or ultraviolet LEDs with some sort of phosphor(s). The cheapest variety is blue LEDs hitting a yellow phosphor. Next you have blue or ultraviolet LEDs hitting several phosphors that produce white light, and finally blue hitting quantum dots (commonly called QD-LEDs). A cheaper LED bulb may not produce the same amount of colors as an incandescent and thus the perception of less light.
I really don't know which is best, and I've only seen video of QD-LEDs (and read about QD-OLEDs, both of which seem to be destined more for TV use rather than lighting). I have seen demos of similar powered LED bulbs that give off vastly different light attributes and whether you get better directional or omnidirectional lighting depends on the bulb, as well.
Dialog changes are fairly rare, and usually only in RPGs and Adventure Games for the exact reason you mention - they are a pain in the rear to program. One upcoming game that is supposed to have an "emotion engine" is Heavy Rain.
I personally don't think an emotion engine is as important as emotionally attachable characters with appropriate dialog. For instance, the ancient game Below the Root is probably the earliest and best example of a game with characters that had emotional states, and in fact, some characters you could play could detect the state and know if that person meant good or ill and whether that person trusted you or not (or was afraid, etc). I was absolutely fascinated by that game in the mid 1980s - despite being aimed at children, it was entirely different than any game I'd played up until that time - largely non-violent, side scrolling, based on character interaction and puzzle solving, and had three very different protagonists (two were female, one male, which was unheard of). I think it's target market of children was wrong - I was a teen and spent more hours playing it than many other games I had.
I think it's more important how you feel about the characters in the game than how the characters feel about each other. Dogmeat is an endearing character from Fallout, despite often being reduced to a bloody pool more often than not (and forcing a reload! --- NOOOO - you stupid mutt). Other times, characters are added and designed specifically to elicit an emotional reaction, like (Pre-searing) Gwen in Guild Wars or the Little Sisters in Bioshock.
Oblivion and Fallout 3 have issues like that all over the place. It bugged the crap out of me when I walked into a necromancer lair wearing a necromancer robe and was still flagged as hostile by the cult lackeys - like they would know. Fallout 3 has the same sort of problem - if you're wearing gang armor you should not immediately be seen as hostile... I'd at least expect to get somewhat close before being identified as not an ally. And really, IMO humans should never be seen as a hostile faction to other humans unless there is some discerning factor (racism, wearing enemy armor, etc). How the heck to gangs recruit if they shoot everything that moves?
In both of these cases, other people thought the same thing and mods were released to address the problem.
Thief? Heck, the sequel to the original stealth game, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein had this - part of the gameplay was dragging bodies out of sight so the guards wouldn't see them (the first game I believe had body spotting, but not dragging). If a guard spotted a corpse they'd immediately run for the level alarm and if that happened, you'd have SS all over.
The real issue is, for sake of gameplay, the finite state machine is usually reset or else you'd be hiding for hours or days of gametime, which isn't much fun, so games often reset the "normal" state much sooner than it would be in real life. Obviously in a stealth game there are serious issues if the AI never reverts to a "normal" state, as those games aren't designed for you to take on multiple attackers head on (Thief is a wonderful example of that), and constant reloads every time you're spotted isn't much fun either.
And the clue of the beta saying "Windows 7 Ultimate" wasn't enough to realize MS was going to fragment the release again? I'm just hoping there are less options and more reasonable prices - ditch Premium and offer Basic, Business, and Home or Ultimate. The original retail price for Windows Vista Ultimate was ridiculous (something like $459). The value add was negligible over the cheaper Business edition. Premium was crippled vs XP Media Edition (and I'm specifically referring to the Disk Management utility that doesn't allow dynamic disks). Basic mostly just removed bling like Aero.
Speaking of Korea, my first thought when I read the subject was to make a joke about Korean exchange students, but once again Slashdot beat me to it: how-about-a-korean-exchange-program
It IS the unofficial national sport of South Korea (Taekwondo is the official national sport).
The controversy with XP was mostly Windows 2000 owners and they didn't like XP's activation anti-piracy measure, mostly because they were buying one copy of 2000 and running it on multiple machines.
I'm not saying activation isn't a pain in the rear (it is) and that I don't revile it (I do), just that MS went that route and we've got to deal with it until MS finds a better way.
Personally, I (mostly) LOVE Windows 7 beta (don't get me wrong - I share that LOVE with Linux and MacOS X) at least Ultimate (the beta), which uncripples disk features in Vista Home Premium (yay, Linux dual boot with RAID). All the gripes I had about Vista seem to have been addressed, like the complexity of setting up networking and sharing. My only real gripe has been windows live (e.g. email program has to be downloaded with a windows live ID, which is intrusive).
XP->Vista did seem more an incremental upgrade, but MS is probably watching Apple do just that, which is why they tied DX10 into Vista (like how Apple ties in OpenGL updates with OS releases). The problem is, MS got greedy and wanted $200 - $450 for the retail versions that actually have value add (which means not Basic and to some extent Premium - in fact, Premium is somewhat a downgrade from XP Media Edition because there is some functionality crippling if you don't do an upgrade - see dynamic disks).
They're using CL4 DDR2 memory - hardly top of the line. This stuff is like $25 after rebate from Newegg if I remember correctly (I ended up going with much more expensive DDR3 because the Mobo I wanted used DDR3 and getting CAS latencies down to 7 or lower for comparable overall speed to DDR2 meant paying an extra $40). Looking at CAS latencies, that is about in line with other RAM at the same price. Some of them like Kingston Extreme don't require a rebate and were about the same price.
I don't know what the 5000 black CPU runs for, but the 5400 was about $70. With 9800 GTs running for about $130, I'd guess an 8800 GT could be had for under $100 - it wouldn't surprise me if a headless (monitor less) system with these specs could be built for $400 or less, even with OCZ memory.
true, optimally it requires static geometry for the scene mesh, and that actually is why they're using bump mapping for the water rather than a surface mesh. One flaw to this is that the edges of the water will not rise or fall, so you need to fake it with texturing or particle systems.
Ironically, bump mapping is largely being replaced in rasterizers by pseudo raytracing techniques that use the normal map and a height to project the actual geometry from the subsurface (however, most are still mapped to a surface, so they are most effective with bumps deeper inside the plane). The only technique I've seen that actually alters the geometry is curved surface relief texture mapping, but that has other issues (aliases more easily than certain planar techniques, for instance, and only implements 4 quadratics [and there are either 16 or 17, I forget], so has a potential for error if the wrong quadratic is needed).
The article states lighting with soft shadows is still an issue, but if they just want approximate lighting they could use photon mapping, which is scalable and gains accuracy by just adding more photons.
I still have yet to see an analysis of memory bandwidth requirements for Larrabee, which I would expect to be very high. My guess is each CPU will prefetch a section of scene to calculate to reduce memory accesses, but the larger the scene gets, the more memory access will get taxed.
For another rasterization blast from the past, memory size and access was an issue with certain environment mapping techniques like environment bump mapping and hardware ROAM terrain rendering (which is returning as of late now that memory is greater and hardware can do the mesh optimization).
True, from what I remember, the film industry is mostly using REYES now, which I believe essentially breaks a scene down into micropolygons (didn't reread the wiki page, going by memory), but some studios still use a hybrid approach such as rasterization for modeling and scene building, then render the final scene using advanced techniques such as ray tracing with global illumination.
Both Ray Tracing and REYES need access to the entire scene, meaning the scene needs to be contained in memory (which can be virtual). Since GPUs don't have enough memory to access the entire scene and no concept of virtual memory, it probably isn't practical to use them for ray tracing. The dedicated hardware you list is essentially a bunch of parallel processors. At some point memory bandwidth will be as important or more important than raw processing power.
Wouldn't you say the piano playing robot is trying to do both? It tricks its audience into thinking it is real, but music is not purely mechanical - dynamics, tone, and style can be subtle things a human can detect. Piano is an easier instrument to fake than, say, cello. I can tell a good cellist from a bad just by asking them to play anything for a few seconds (even a single note), and not from the tangibles like vibrato and mechanical prowess - by the intangibles like attack, bow movement, and phrasing (which can dynamically vary, making it difficult to mechanically nail down).
and running a Turing test based entirely on rote intelligence is the mistake of AI, in my opinion. Too many machine AIs are easy to trap this way - you need to add a "state of mind" for the AI, complete with opinions on subjects, so if I say "What did you think of the American Elections?" and the AI says "I think they're great!" I know immediately it's a bot. If the response is "I <3 Obama, I'm so happy!" or "God, in 4 years and the government will be so far in the toilet I might as well move to China now" I would have a lot more doubt.
btw, James Cameron is trying to pass the visual Turing test with his next movie, Avatar (also see here) we'll see when December comes...
Don't get "the government" mixed up with government jobs - they are not the same.
"The government" is about management - how well the administration is doing, how efficiently it works, etc. How long did you wait for a passport or at the DMV, for instance, are measurements of government management performance.
Government jobs are about employment conditions - in many cases, 8 hour mandated days (there are exceptions such as teachers), pensions, bonuses, lots of holidays, and few layoffs. My grandpa had the one of the two jobs in his small town during the great depression - he was Postmaster and mail carrier. The other job? Bar/hardware store (yes, in the same building - population was under 100).
Vista Home Premium does not support dynamic partitions, Media Center Edition did (I've been struggling with that, so it pops in my head first).
Because of this and other crippled or removed features, I don't see Premium as comparable to MCE. It's really XP Home + a few MCE features.
The sad thing is, Vista Home Premium downgrades to XP Pro, which I vastly prefer (due to the above and tons of driver issues - in fact Win 7 beta seems to have better drivers and it uses the same driver model and is a beta...).
I can't agree with you more. I have Windows Vista Premium, which I thought would give me about the same set of features as XP Professional - in fact, one downgrade option is to go to XP Professional according to the license, but I went to Windows 7 beta instead (which is Ultimate).
The first problem I had was I wanted (partial software) RAID and a dual boot Windows/Linux system. To make a long story short, what I really needed was dynamic disks and Vista Premium cripples that feature (but a legal downgrade to XP Pro allows it!). I'm still working on this setup, but currently with Windows 7 (which is Ultimate and allows it).
The final straw for me was when two releases in a row of nVidia's GTX 260 x64 drivers caused rampant crashing. This isn't Microsoft's fault, it's nVidia's, but the headache above was only the tip of the iceberg for problems I had been having with Vista as of late, so I decided if I wanted to run a system that was as buggy as a beta, I might as well run a beta.
So far my impressions of Win 7 have been favorable. I had problems with the latest Broadcom ethernet not being able to connect to the internet and had to back it out, and if you alt-tab out of a game you can never get back to it, however, I've had no crashes in Fallout 3 or Unreal Tournament 3 with the latest nVidia drivers and the Vista drivers crashed repeatedly. I'm also getting better framerates. Most of the problems I've had are avoidable. It seems less intrusive. The usability also seems much better and the default theme is aero (default for Vista Home Premium System Builders disk was basic, requiring some work to get it to Aero).
I still have a few things to check, especially OpenGL performance (fullscreen and window, the latter I expect to be slower due to context switching, but hopefully not 70% slower like I was seeing on my laptop - it should be no more than 15-20%). I just got my dev environment set up on it last night, so I plan to start building and testing my project tonight.
That said, Windows is using the same security model as Apple, which is less secure than Linux, but more secure than a typical installation of Windows XP and before. In UNIX terms, the user has sudo privileges. The 'click to install' actually does have meaning, it is like starting an app with 'sudo install' and therefore does provide some security because it is more difficult to automate an attack like this.
The one flaw I've seen in these 'sudo' schemes is that they can be attacked using automation tools. For instance, on mac you could run a non-admin Applescript that signals to click in the dialog box and automate your attack that way. I'm not sure if Apple has any security in place to block such an attack.
Still, the likelihood of such an attack is lessened because it requires getting the malicious code on the system and executing it. Most users that run with 'sudo' privileges own the machine and in multi-user environments, users are given user level privileges on the machines, not admin privileges.
No reviews of it on IMDB and I can't find reviews on Net Flicks (probably because I'm not a member).
Terminator:Salvation has to be nearly complete due to manufacturing and distribution timelines, which I believe still takes a couple of months. It is likely in final editing and most certainly has had a screened rough at this time (but since those are nearly always under some sort of NDA, it is unlikely that any reviews are legit).
you use Debian for security?!? Bad choice, IMO, unless you dig into unstable a lot. Debian would be my LAST choice for security - it would be my first for stability, however.
It isn't a bad thing that Debian is built for stability - Debian is fantastic behind a firewall as a file and backup server, for instance. My Debian box backup server has an uptime of well over a year now because I rarely patch it. When I ran Debian on my web server, however, I had to have a firm hand in the unstable branch (which was usually very stable) just to keep up with web server and app server patches (and ssh, and python, and a few others), and I had to reboot every couple of months. I'd trust Ubuntu more for a web server than Debian, just because it's updated more often...
Fedora/RedHat or SuSE (or GenToo if you feel zealous) are patched for security more often than Debian, so are better options for handling internet connections.
Ubuntu is a nice starter Linux, and perfect as a low maintenance Linux, as well. It reminds me of my first Mandrake experience. On the opposite end was Slackware and GenToo, but I should note I was an early adopter of Slackware in the early 1990s and haven't used it since, so I'm only going by that experience.
The PSU requirement is apparently 550 Watts, and you can usually save a lot of money when you drop from 700 Watts to 550-600, however, I remember seeing a 700 Watt PSU at NewEgg for $50 after rebate, which is about what I paid for my 500 Watt at Christmas (after rebate - I'd planned for 600+, but PSU and a few other things fell to budget axe).
If you're building a system from scratch you may be able to save additional money with a lower power draw card. Also, waste heat from the PSU is lower with smaller PSUs.
To be honest, I doubt it's difficult to write a proprietary shader without a GPU programming language for this since the GPU really only can be used to offload the hash computation (using the PSK and passphrase). The real trick is packing and passing data (say passwords) to that shader for processing efficiently, and that could be done in a variety of ways (e.g. stuffing them in a texture or a vertex buffer object).
The real limitation is probably the network interface once you have an efficient way of generating keys.
Offtopic (see below for on topic), Originally the Dogcow was used for the Cairo font, and later it was printing alignment (amongst other places).
Claris likely got its name from Clarus.
On topic, My wife had a 9/80 workweek during the summers for several years and loved it. My workweek is more like 10/130 (10/120 if you subtract slashdot:D - and that's regular hours, not crunch, which has hit the upper 120s in a week without any slashdot breaks)
Slashdot Mirror
you mean this simcity 4?
Apparently you need a partial crack to run it, but that's true with many games on Linux because they usually have Windows specific CD/DVD protection that needs to be disabled (usually a no-CD file from some place like GameCopyWorld which removes or spoofs the protection checks). You can read about the legality of it there, but most people think it's legal to manually disable protection since you can legally do anything you want to your own copy.
The computer not only needs to be running Windows, but also IE according to the exploit report.
This is hardly the first virus to use that method - I've heard of similar 1-click or no-click infections using flaws in IE (specifically because it is the dominant browser - other browsers have flaws, too).
And from the initial poster, new viruses rarely have signatures right away - it usually takes several days from the initial report before they appear in a definitions file. When my wife popped a malicious e-card last year it installed 29 viruses through a downloader web site. The number of these detected by Trend Micro AV on the day of infection? 5. Fortunately no root kits with that one, and a date scan rooted out the infected files, but I still spent a couple of hours a weekend for a month cleaning the registry and fixing all the files it modified (starting with the more dangerous ones like the http address redirect and safe machines list and other backdoors and then moving to the registry keys, and since I had moved all the files into an infected.zip archive those registry keys were pretty much useless anyway). I submitted several of those viruses to Trend Micro (a few were caught before I had time to fix them but after the first day, and a few I deleted before deciding I really should submit any undiscovered ones).
Isn't $5000 a bit speculative, or are they using Canadian Dollars (which is about $1000 less than USD right now)?
Looking at component pricing and comparing to what's out there like the Asus M70VM-B1, which is about $1550 for 500GB less disk, the P8400 CPU is just slightly cheaper than the low end i7 (+800 for high end), a slightly slower GPU with 512k less RAM (my guess is this uses the 9800M GTX MXM platform - let's say +$200), 4GB more of DDR3 instead of DDR2 (about $250), no blu ray player (-?). By my estimates, the high end machine should be no more than $3000-$3500 after markup.
Even when I used barebones (whitebook) skeleton laptops I get similar numbers of about $2500 on the high end, but note that neither bare bones system laptop framework could fit 3 laptop drives and the best GPU I found in one was a 9600M GTX (though I didn't look hard - just the usual sources like pricewatch, google, and two manufacturers - ASUS and MSI).
Unfortunately, not all LED lighting is the same, and there are several ways to produce white or yellow light using blue or ultraviolet LEDs with some sort of phosphor(s). The cheapest variety is blue LEDs hitting a yellow phosphor. Next you have blue or ultraviolet LEDs hitting several phosphors that produce white light, and finally blue hitting quantum dots (commonly called QD-LEDs). A cheaper LED bulb may not produce the same amount of colors as an incandescent and thus the perception of less light.
I really don't know which is best, and I've only seen video of QD-LEDs (and read about QD-OLEDs, both of which seem to be destined more for TV use rather than lighting). I have seen demos of similar powered LED bulbs that give off vastly different light attributes and whether you get better directional or omnidirectional lighting depends on the bulb, as well.
Dialog changes are fairly rare, and usually only in RPGs and Adventure Games for the exact reason you mention - they are a pain in the rear to program. One upcoming game that is supposed to have an "emotion engine" is Heavy Rain.
I personally don't think an emotion engine is as important as emotionally attachable characters with appropriate dialog. For instance, the ancient game Below the Root is probably the earliest and best example of a game with characters that had emotional states, and in fact, some characters you could play could detect the state and know if that person meant good or ill and whether that person trusted you or not (or was afraid, etc). I was absolutely fascinated by that game in the mid 1980s - despite being aimed at children, it was entirely different than any game I'd played up until that time - largely non-violent, side scrolling, based on character interaction and puzzle solving, and had three very different protagonists (two were female, one male, which was unheard of). I think it's target market of children was wrong - I was a teen and spent more hours playing it than many other games I had.
I think it's more important how you feel about the characters in the game than how the characters feel about each other. Dogmeat is an endearing character from Fallout, despite often being reduced to a bloody pool more often than not (and forcing a reload! --- NOOOO - you stupid mutt). Other times, characters are added and designed specifically to elicit an emotional reaction, like (Pre-searing) Gwen in Guild Wars or the Little Sisters in Bioshock.
Oblivion and Fallout 3 have issues like that all over the place. It bugged the crap out of me when I walked into a necromancer lair wearing a necromancer robe and was still flagged as hostile by the cult lackeys - like they would know. Fallout 3 has the same sort of problem - if you're wearing gang armor you should not immediately be seen as hostile... I'd at least expect to get somewhat close before being identified as not an ally. And really, IMO humans should never be seen as a hostile faction to other humans unless there is some discerning factor (racism, wearing enemy armor, etc). How the heck to gangs recruit if they shoot everything that moves?
In both of these cases, other people thought the same thing and mods were released to address the problem.
Thief? Heck, the sequel to the original stealth game, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein had this - part of the gameplay was dragging bodies out of sight so the guards wouldn't see them (the first game I believe had body spotting, but not dragging). If a guard spotted a corpse they'd immediately run for the level alarm and if that happened, you'd have SS all over.
The real issue is, for sake of gameplay, the finite state machine is usually reset or else you'd be hiding for hours or days of gametime, which isn't much fun, so games often reset the "normal" state much sooner than it would be in real life. Obviously in a stealth game there are serious issues if the AI never reverts to a "normal" state, as those games aren't designed for you to take on multiple attackers head on (Thief is a wonderful example of that), and constant reloads every time you're spotted isn't much fun either.
And the clue of the beta saying "Windows 7 Ultimate" wasn't enough to realize MS was going to fragment the release again? I'm just hoping there are less options and more reasonable prices - ditch Premium and offer Basic, Business, and Home or Ultimate. The original retail price for Windows Vista Ultimate was ridiculous (something like $459). The value add was negligible over the cheaper Business edition. Premium was crippled vs XP Media Edition (and I'm specifically referring to the Disk Management utility that doesn't allow dynamic disks). Basic mostly just removed bling like Aero.
You mean the patent the filed at Christmas? Here's an article on it with a link to the patent.
Incidentally, they've been planning it since the Longhorn days (2002ish), at least with some applications like Office.
I probably missed any Slashdot article while I was away for Christmas break (and failed a search, so not sure what the title was).
Speaking of Korea, my first thought when I read the subject was to make a joke about Korean exchange students, but once again Slashdot beat me to it: how-about-a-korean-exchange-program
It IS the unofficial national sport of South Korea (Taekwondo is the official national sport).
The controversy with XP was mostly Windows 2000 owners and they didn't like XP's activation anti-piracy measure, mostly because they were buying one copy of 2000 and running it on multiple machines.
I'm not saying activation isn't a pain in the rear (it is) and that I don't revile it (I do), just that MS went that route and we've got to deal with it until MS finds a better way.
Personally, I (mostly) LOVE Windows 7 beta (don't get me wrong - I share that LOVE with Linux and MacOS X) at least Ultimate (the beta), which uncripples disk features in Vista Home Premium (yay, Linux dual boot with RAID). All the gripes I had about Vista seem to have been addressed, like the complexity of setting up networking and sharing. My only real gripe has been windows live (e.g. email program has to be downloaded with a windows live ID, which is intrusive).
XP->Vista did seem more an incremental upgrade, but MS is probably watching Apple do just that, which is why they tied DX10 into Vista (like how Apple ties in OpenGL updates with OS releases). The problem is, MS got greedy and wanted $200 - $450 for the retail versions that actually have value add (which means not Basic and to some extent Premium - in fact, Premium is somewhat a downgrade from XP Media Edition because there is some functionality crippling if you don't do an upgrade - see dynamic disks).
They're using CL4 DDR2 memory - hardly top of the line. This stuff is like $25 after rebate from Newegg if I remember correctly (I ended up going with much more expensive DDR3 because the Mobo I wanted used DDR3 and getting CAS latencies down to 7 or lower for comparable overall speed to DDR2 meant paying an extra $40). Looking at CAS latencies, that is about in line with other RAM at the same price. Some of them like Kingston Extreme don't require a rebate and were about the same price.
I don't know what the 5000 black CPU runs for, but the 5400 was about $70. With 9800 GTs running for about $130, I'd guess an 8800 GT could be had for under $100 - it wouldn't surprise me if a headless (monitor less) system with these specs could be built for $400 or less, even with OCZ memory.
true, optimally it requires static geometry for the scene mesh, and that actually is why they're using bump mapping for the water rather than a surface mesh. One flaw to this is that the edges of the water will not rise or fall, so you need to fake it with texturing or particle systems.
Ironically, bump mapping is largely being replaced in rasterizers by pseudo raytracing techniques that use the normal map and a height to project the actual geometry from the subsurface (however, most are still mapped to a surface, so they are most effective with bumps deeper inside the plane). The only technique I've seen that actually alters the geometry is curved surface relief texture mapping, but that has other issues (aliases more easily than certain planar techniques, for instance, and only implements 4 quadratics [and there are either 16 or 17, I forget], so has a potential for error if the wrong quadratic is needed).
The article states lighting with soft shadows is still an issue, but if they just want approximate lighting they could use photon mapping, which is scalable and gains accuracy by just adding more photons.
I still have yet to see an analysis of memory bandwidth requirements for Larrabee, which I would expect to be very high. My guess is each CPU will prefetch a section of scene to calculate to reduce memory accesses, but the larger the scene gets, the more memory access will get taxed.
For another rasterization blast from the past, memory size and access was an issue with certain environment mapping techniques like environment bump mapping and hardware ROAM terrain rendering (which is returning as of late now that memory is greater and hardware can do the mesh optimization).
True, from what I remember, the film industry is mostly using REYES now, which I believe essentially breaks a scene down into micropolygons (didn't reread the wiki page, going by memory), but some studios still use a hybrid approach such as rasterization for modeling and scene building, then render the final scene using advanced techniques such as ray tracing with global illumination.
Both Ray Tracing and REYES need access to the entire scene, meaning the scene needs to be contained in memory (which can be virtual). Since GPUs don't have enough memory to access the entire scene and no concept of virtual memory, it probably isn't practical to use them for ray tracing. The dedicated hardware you list is essentially a bunch of parallel processors. At some point memory bandwidth will be as important or more important than raw processing power.
Well said! We should provide a translation for the kids, though, due to the drop in literacy - I'll do my best:
IMO, l337 5ki11z = literaSy yestrdae, d00d. We haz 5ki11z lam3rs haz no 5ki11z. Lam3rs haz no 'puter, no $, and no stuff.
Oldies and trash haz no 5ki11z and iz lam3rs. Lam3rs never 1337.
Kiddies n wifi l33ches R other 1/3 n b33ten by R l33tness.
Wouldn't you say the piano playing robot is trying to do both? It tricks its audience into thinking it is real, but music is not purely mechanical - dynamics, tone, and style can be subtle things a human can detect. Piano is an easier instrument to fake than, say, cello. I can tell a good cellist from a bad just by asking them to play anything for a few seconds (even a single note), and not from the tangibles like vibrato and mechanical prowess - by the intangibles like attack, bow movement, and phrasing (which can dynamically vary, making it difficult to mechanically nail down).
and running a Turing test based entirely on rote intelligence is the mistake of AI, in my opinion. Too many machine AIs are easy to trap this way - you need to add a "state of mind" for the AI, complete with opinions on subjects, so if I say "What did you think of the American Elections?" and the AI says "I think they're great!" I know immediately it's a bot. If the response is "I <3 Obama, I'm so happy!" or "God, in 4 years and the government will be so far in the toilet I might as well move to China now" I would have a lot more doubt.
btw, James Cameron is trying to pass the visual Turing test with his next movie, Avatar (also see here) we'll see when December comes...
Don't get "the government" mixed up with government jobs - they are not the same.
"The government" is about management - how well the administration is doing, how efficiently it works, etc. How long did you wait for a passport or at the DMV, for instance, are measurements of government management performance.
Government jobs are about employment conditions - in many cases, 8 hour mandated days (there are exceptions such as teachers), pensions, bonuses, lots of holidays, and few layoffs. My grandpa had the one of the two jobs in his small town during the great depression - he was Postmaster and mail carrier. The other job? Bar/hardware store (yes, in the same building - population was under 100).
Vista Home Premium does not support dynamic partitions, Media Center Edition did (I've been struggling with that, so it pops in my head first).
Because of this and other crippled or removed features, I don't see Premium as comparable to MCE. It's really XP Home + a few MCE features.
The sad thing is, Vista Home Premium downgrades to XP Pro, which I vastly prefer (due to the above and tons of driver issues - in fact Win 7 beta seems to have better drivers and it uses the same driver model and is a beta...).
I can't agree with you more. I have Windows Vista Premium, which I thought would give me about the same set of features as XP Professional - in fact, one downgrade option is to go to XP Professional according to the license, but I went to Windows 7 beta instead (which is Ultimate).
The first problem I had was I wanted (partial software) RAID and a dual boot Windows/Linux system. To make a long story short, what I really needed was dynamic disks and Vista Premium cripples that feature (but a legal downgrade to XP Pro allows it!). I'm still working on this setup, but currently with Windows 7 (which is Ultimate and allows it).
The final straw for me was when two releases in a row of nVidia's GTX 260 x64 drivers caused rampant crashing. This isn't Microsoft's fault, it's nVidia's, but the headache above was only the tip of the iceberg for problems I had been having with Vista as of late, so I decided if I wanted to run a system that was as buggy as a beta, I might as well run a beta.
So far my impressions of Win 7 have been favorable. I had problems with the latest Broadcom ethernet not being able to connect to the internet and had to back it out, and if you alt-tab out of a game you can never get back to it, however, I've had no crashes in Fallout 3 or Unreal Tournament 3 with the latest nVidia drivers and the Vista drivers crashed repeatedly. I'm also getting better framerates. Most of the problems I've had are avoidable. It seems less intrusive. The usability also seems much better and the default theme is aero (default for Vista Home Premium System Builders disk was basic, requiring some work to get it to Aero).
I still have a few things to check, especially OpenGL performance (fullscreen and window, the latter I expect to be slower due to context switching, but hopefully not 70% slower like I was seeing on my laptop - it should be no more than 15-20%). I just got my dev environment set up on it last night, so I plan to start building and testing my project tonight.
I was going to say the same.
That said, Windows is using the same security model as Apple, which is less secure than Linux, but more secure than a typical installation of Windows XP and before. In UNIX terms, the user has sudo privileges. The 'click to install' actually does have meaning, it is like starting an app with 'sudo install' and therefore does provide some security because it is more difficult to automate an attack like this.
The one flaw I've seen in these 'sudo' schemes is that they can be attacked using automation tools. For instance, on mac you could run a non-admin Applescript that signals to click in the dialog box and automate your attack that way. I'm not sure if Apple has any security in place to block such an attack.
Still, the likelihood of such an attack is lessened because it requires getting the malicious code on the system and executing it. Most users that run with 'sudo' privileges own the machine and in multi-user environments, users are given user level privileges on the machines, not admin privileges.
No reviews of it on IMDB and I can't find reviews on Net Flicks (probably because I'm not a member).
Terminator:Salvation has to be nearly complete due to manufacturing and distribution timelines, which I believe still takes a couple of months. It is likely in final editing and most certainly has had a screened rough at this time (but since those are nearly always under some sort of NDA, it is unlikely that any reviews are legit).
you use Debian for security?!? Bad choice, IMO, unless you dig into unstable a lot. Debian would be my LAST choice for security - it would be my first for stability, however.
It isn't a bad thing that Debian is built for stability - Debian is fantastic behind a firewall as a file and backup server, for instance. My Debian box backup server has an uptime of well over a year now because I rarely patch it. When I ran Debian on my web server, however, I had to have a firm hand in the unstable branch (which was usually very stable) just to keep up with web server and app server patches (and ssh, and python, and a few others), and I had to reboot every couple of months. I'd trust Ubuntu more for a web server than Debian, just because it's updated more often...
Fedora/RedHat or SuSE (or GenToo if you feel zealous) are patched for security more often than Debian, so are better options for handling internet connections.
Ubuntu is a nice starter Linux, and perfect as a low maintenance Linux, as well. It reminds me of my first Mandrake experience. On the opposite end was Slackware and GenToo, but I should note I was an early adopter of Slackware in the early 1990s and haven't used it since, so I'm only going by that experience.
The PSU requirement is apparently 550 Watts, and you can usually save a lot of money when you drop from 700 Watts to 550-600, however, I remember seeing a 700 Watt PSU at NewEgg for $50 after rebate, which is about what I paid for my 500 Watt at Christmas (after rebate - I'd planned for 600+, but PSU and a few other things fell to budget axe).
If you're building a system from scratch you may be able to save additional money with a lower power draw card. Also, waste heat from the PSU is lower with smaller PSUs.
To be honest, I doubt it's difficult to write a proprietary shader without a GPU programming language for this since the GPU really only can be used to offload the hash computation (using the PSK and passphrase). The real trick is packing and passing data (say passwords) to that shader for processing efficiently, and that could be done in a variety of ways (e.g. stuffing them in a texture or a vertex buffer object).
The real limitation is probably the network interface once you have an efficient way of generating keys.
Offtopic (see below for on topic),
Originally the Dogcow was used for the Cairo font, and later it was printing alignment (amongst other places).
Claris likely got its name from Clarus.
On topic, :D - and that's regular hours, not crunch, which has hit the upper 120s in a week without any slashdot breaks)
My wife had a 9/80 workweek during the summers for several years and loved it. My workweek is more like 10/130 (10/120 if you subtract slashdot