I agree with you on Reiser - even before he killed his wife his name was well known in the programming world. I certainly would have recognized his name before someone like Les Earnest (creator of the finger program).
Then there are others that were considered gods as programmers before becoming even more famous as Designers - Sid Meier or Peter Molyneux anyone? I can name others that are a bit more obscure but incredibly influential during a time like Silas Warner (creator of Castle Wolfenstein, the game that defined the stealth genre and one of the first computer games to include digitized voices) and Bill Budge (probably most famous for Pinball Construction Set, but his Apple ][ work was well known).
As for Woz, he was (is?) both a great programmer and engineer - he wrote the boot loader for the Apple machines, Integer BASIC (one of my favorite Woz quotes - "Regrets about my own life? Yes, I wish I would have put floating point in Basic, but I wanted to get it done quick"), Apple DOS (with Randy Wigginton), SWEET 16 (virtual 16 bit OS), software Breakout, and certainly more from his jobs at companies like HP.
Yeah, right - the whole thing is cut and dry - lets look at it in highlights:
Iraq uses chemical weapons in a genocidal attack on both Iran and the kurds of Iraq. US looks aside since Iran is the real enemy. UN fails to act for both genocide and banned weapons.
Iraq attacks US Ally Kuwait US invades Iraq (partially) and retakes Kuwait. US later fully invades Iraq claiming WMD that no longer exist (real reason - his regime didn't collapse).
US funds Afghanistan Taliban in fight against Russia Russia leaves in defeat. Taliban support terrorists that destroy the world trade center US invades Afghanistan
US deregulates certain bank borrowing under Carter S&L collapses under Reagan Mortgage crisis under Bush (who's at fault? everyone)
Yes, installed governments and spheres of influence take part, but calling the US a paper tiger is silly. Even the former superpower of the soviet union has a lot of teeth, as they proved by overrunning Georgia. The US is also still a huge economic power despite the current crisis. China is an emerging economic power, so the US isn't alone in the economic influence sphere.
This all sounds frighteningly familiar to me, and the case I recall used a threatened lawsuit as leverage.
At my college job in a computer lab, I created a web page mocking this guy nobody liked who always claimed to be working 80+ hour weeks and yet he never seemed to get anything done (in fact, part of the mockery was the fact that many fellow labbies were doing his job for him). I hid the page and showed a select few people, but the thing went viral (because if you knew the guy it was dead on parody and hilarious) and several people made similar pages with the same guy as a target. A large portion was dedicated to how he treated us and anyone else that didn't subscribe to his narrow point of view, which was basically Windows is the be-all end-all of computing and Mac/Linux/Unix should be ditched in favor of PC hardware running Windows (not to mention I quoted him extensively and poked fun at his words). Two years after I graduated he got his hardware wish (standardization on PC hardware), but they also abandoned Windows and Office in favor of Linux based solutions - I'm sure he wasn't happy.
Anyhow, back to my story - at some point, one of these pages owned by another labbie and hosted offsite was seen by the guy being mocked and all fury broke loose. He brought the labbie down to our boss (also his good friend), called the police, and then had a long chat - fortunately, the labbie didn't turn any of the rest of us in (I think there were 5 or 6 other pages by then, some humorous, like mine, others that were a bit more malicious than funny). Apparently, the guy being mocked took the page as a serious, defamatory and personal threat and filed several charges against the labbie (defamation, slander, threat of personal harm and some others). They eventually settled with him getting fired, agreeing to leave school, and possibly paying some fine (he was not at liberty to talk about any of it, but an eavesdropper leaked some info) in exchange for charges being dropped.
And while he has power over the executive which includes the justice department, congress has the power to dissolve it, cancel funding, impeach and or remove any officer in it and so on.
Yes, but the real scary thing is executive orders issued as national security edicts - these don't have to be disclosed to anyone, even Congress, though the judicial system does have the right to request and review them (if they're aware of them). For instance, we know FEMA was created by a series of executive orders, but we don't know if FEMA has the power to declare martial law without congress's consent (it is suspected that if congress is unable to act, FEMA has this power, but the constitution says only congress is allowed to declare martial law) because some of the executive orders that created that organization are secret.
The problem is, the US government thinks it should protect its citizens from themselves, and thus the anti-drug laws. This is a touchy subject because some people can't control themselves and the drugs destroy them, giving the government more fodder for preventing use by all, and then you've got neo-prohibitionists that lobby hard for stricter laws (what MADD is now, for instance). It probably doesn't help that the current President was a coke and booze addict and is now a teetotaler, and the on-deck Democrat candidate used coke and weed and neither he or the Republican candidate is for changing that legislation.
Still, legalization probably creates as many problems as it solves from a law enforcement or even financial standpoint - sure it no longer is illegal to possess and the government profits by taxing, but suddenly you have a much bigger "under the influence" category to enforce, whether that be driving under the influence, stealing to support a habit, rehab, crimes committed under the influence, or some other category. And while pot may not be the best example, there are plenty of other drugs that are. A friend of mine has a cousin that routinely dropped 4-5 hits of acid before driving because it was "cool" - often he would stop back at our place (I was living in a house with four friends at the time) because he was tripping too much to go home (mom woulda known). If he were my cousin I would have called the cops on him if he left, but my friend always let him go (probably because that cousin was his dealer). On the plus side, that guy realized his life was going down the toilet, quit drugs, went to college, and now has some kind of engineering job.
Personally, I am for legalization, but any money earned from legal sales and cultivation needs to go to education and users should be monitored for addiction. Why education? Because I watched a heroin addict go through kicking the habit (bandmate a long time ago) and later lived in a house with 3 reformed heroin addicts (6 renters there - big old house - the owner and two tenants met in rehab) and after hearing their stories, I can tell you heroin scares the shit out of me. After watching a tenant at my wife's rental property self destruct on meth losing her job, kids, and getting evicted from our property, then choosing to live on the street vs rehab (her mom was going to help if she sought treatment), I can tell you meth scares the shit out of me. Education on the effects and how to resist the peer pressure is more useful than enforcement, in my opinion.
Mesa3D was open because it is not OpenGL - it is an OpenGL API compatible library, and therefore not subject to any licensing fees charged by SGI (OpenGL brand usage and licensing is usually paid for by hardware vendors). WINE is similar - it's a Windows and DirectX compatible library for Linux (i.e. it is not Windows or a Windows emulator).
It looks like SGI is OK with releasing the API and associated royalties, but in a way that makes sense because they are really no longer involved with it (and I'm not even sure if they've collected royalties lately - in the 1990s I recall it was around $20000/vendor).
Hmm... if I go by the people I know that play WoW (sorry, I don't know any EQ2 players - Guild Wars yes, Conan yes, but the majority I know play WoW), most I know are in better-than-average physical shape. In fact, I know only two overweight people that play WoW, but I know many more overweight people that do not.
As for depression, I can see that - I think many adult MMORPG players that stick with it are stretched to the limits by daily stress (whether it be work, kids, schedule, or whatever) and use it as a release, but by doing so, they are sacrificing sleep and that results in more depression. The other problem is the game itself can make you unable to relax, so getting to sleep itself is a problem (thus probably more substance abuse like drinking or smoking pot in order to sleep, which leads to bad sleep).
I had problems like that both as a musician and a MMORPG player, and in both cases I had to quit drinking (I never did other drugs except smoked cigs/cigars, but I quit that early - food was more important than a bad habit). I feel best if I set a fixed quitting time, which for me is 10PM, and give myself 1/2-1 hour to wind down before sleep (with a 6AM no snooze wake-up). Unfortunately for me, that means having to be away from games entirely for some periods of time - I'm salaried and work to a schedule, so if it's after 10PM when I get home, I don't play games or work on my OSS project - and yes, I tentatively schedule time for both (not to mention "hang out with my wife time," but her need for 10 hours of sleep always gives me some evening time).
yes, there is an improvement, but unless you have money to burn, the value of replacing a laptop that is only a year old to get that performance probably isn't worth it - the 8600M GT was in $1800 laptops a year ago, the 8800M GTX is in $1800 laptops today.
I don't know of any 8800M MXM cards yet, but ACER has 8600M cards on the market to replace older 8400M cards, and ASUS has cards for the C90, so a market is emerging... slowly.
Well, he also guessed GPU and CPU convergence by 2006 and 2007, and in my 1996 computer graphics class I predicted ray tracing would be viable by 2011-12 and surpass rasterization by 2017 (yes, I wrote a paper - buried somewhere in college stuff, but 2011 is pretty close to the late 2009-early 2010 target for Larrabee), so I could say I was prophetic as well. Of course, I have to ignore all the things I was wrong about, such as display size (resolutions greater than 1024x768? - who needs that?), single CPU (parallelism? what's that?), no vector processing, etc. I did my prediction entirely based on math - pixels, CPU doubling and ray tracing vs rasterization in Big-Oh analysis.
I guess computer graphics and science fiction share the fact that you can predict some parts of the future with some degree of accuracy, but you will always have some error, either with timeline or technology, no matter how much you base your analysis on real world metrics.
Voxel based rendering is making a comeback mainly because Volume Ray Casting can be done in parallel which makes it very suitable for either a vector unit or any other general purpose GPU (like DX10-generation graphics cards). I wouldn't say it's a be-all end-all rendering technique, but yes there are some good uses (nuking terrain, for instance).
I think his point for the lack of an API was not suggesting everything will be written from scratch by AAA game devs - he meant techniques can be patched into the code without the restrictions imposed by fixed functional hardware or even fixed functional hardware mixed with shaders.
Let's use a "for example" case - say you are using ray tracing and want to add soft shadows. Ray tracing by itself assumes point lighting, and if this ray tracer were built into, say, a fixed hardware pipeline, you would be force to use hard shadows or some vendor defined extension that gives you a specific type of soft shadows. If you used a "shader" to do soft shadows, you would have to rewrite any fixed functionality used in the ray tracer since the shader replaces any fixed function code. If this were entirely in software, however, you would have the flexibility to keep the "fixed" code and tack on new code without restrictions, so if you wanted soft shadows in your ray tracer you might write a photon mapping implementation to get it and you don't have to rewrite other code.
You're on the wrong track - Fixed function features are actually features that do not use shaders at all. For example, you may have a new fixed function for hardware particles (that's an older one, but the one that popped into my head) - you pass the arguments to it and run it, but you don't actually program it (there is no script like there is for shaders).
Shaders REPLACE the fixed function pipeline, so if you use them, you actually need to rewrite any fixed function feature you want for the object/polygon being rendered. Many commonly used features have shading language definitions, such as fog and lighting, but you are also free to write your own. This is why he later goes on to say that CUDA may be able to do something similar - general purpose shaders are essentially a set of programmable vector units.
The simplest explanation of Geometry Shaders is that they sit between the Vertex Shaders and Pixel shaders and can move or generate vertices in hardware. There are a few uses for this, such as instantiation (creating copies of a model), tessellation (converting a primitive such as a sphere into polygons), and single pass Cube Mapping (a texture mapping technique often used for scene geometries difficult to render in polygons), but in general, the usage is fairly limited (first generation hardware had a 1024 vertex emission limit and runs slower the more vertices that can potentially be emitted).
Part of the issue is that if the GPU and CPU are merged, they would also attempt to keep the same die-shrink, while traditionally are a generation behind in GPUs (though this gap has been shrinking). By keeping one generation behind there is a significant expense savings, which is why integrated CPU/GPUs are usually 2-3 generations behind (since that is the "value" segment of the market and usually production issues are worked out by then).
The grandparent is correct that the more you stuff on a single piece of silicon, the more bad chips you get, but you (parent) are also correct that the more you jam on a piece of silicon, the cheaper the overall costs if you can effectively build them in volume. And while dual core is cheaper than dual chip (due to the extra wires, socket connectors, and infrastructure such as controllers), jamming more on the chip is not always the answer - Intel quad-core chips are two dual-core chips in a single package (saving money by avoiding requiring extra stuff like socket connectors as well as benefiting from a larger volume of dual core processors). Intel has no intention to build a true quad that I know of - they rolled out a 6 core die yesterday, so I expect the next step to be 12.
The goals of SoCs are different than those of typical PC parts - the main motivators there are reduced power consumption and a smaller package. That means they're willing to trade performance for size.
well, there isn't too much better than a 8600M GT as of yet, at least performance-wise, but that card is one generation behind. The best nVidia you can get is still a 9800M GTX, and those are just a die-shrink of the 8xxx line (the GTX 200s don't have a mobile platform yet).
If you always want the latest-and-greatest graphics in a laptop, you should maybe look for something upgradable - nVidia standardized their mobile graphics on the MXM platform and, although ATI has a competing standard (AXIOM), it has so far been losing badly and it is now fairly common to find ATI cards that use MXM.
The real problem comes with MXM systems that are upgradable - the ASUS C90 is, and I've read MXM Acer laptops are, but after that it's anyone's guess - some MXM computers like the 24" iMac are not. There are also 4 separate sized slots - MXM I, MXM II, MXM III, and MXM HE and larger slots can take the smaller GPUs, but not vice versa (most laptops I've seen that have them are MXM II). Sometimes you also need to buy the notebook manufacturer's branded card, as well. Also note that there is now at least one desktop card that uses MXM - the ASUS Trinity. Basically, it has 3 MXM modules on a regular PCI-E card, and when the graphics card needs updating, you replace the MXM modules, not the card, supposedly saving you some expense.
well, there are worse things to worry about - I mean, Obama-Biden is awfully close to OsAMA BIn laDEN, so obviously there must be a tie-in (incidentally, the human-dinosaur thing with Palin was fake, too).
Personally, I'd prefer if neither would win (I have serious issues with both), but at this point the chances of a third party coming out of nowhere to take the election (much less one I agree with) is about nil, so we either get the first black President or the first female VP. I guess I make do, as always, and waste my vote again in another 4 years.
When the Federal government gets involved in a market, it often takes over the market inefficiently. See: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I thought for only being involved for a couple of weeks they had a better plan than the management of those two companies had, which includes ditching that management as well as the high risk loans that had destroyed the businesses and institute a business plan for solvency. The real issue is whether the government should have been managing and monitoring the loans they help finance in these government backed private companies in the first place.
I think 'ginger' as a hue is primarily British - in the US they're usually called strawberry blond or light brunette in the US. I also have heard Brits use it derogatorily (basically meaning a pansy).
I have no doubt hair racism exists - I even have a friend that confessed he would only date natural blondes (and eventually married one).
Technically EVERY organized religion is a cult (which in latin meant to care for or adore, in English usually means a set of beliefs or worship). I assume you mean the commonly used variant of the term that means an unorthodox variety, since you're using it in a derogatory way.
so to answer your question,
hasn't scientology been exposed as a cult already?
answer a) by definition, yes, all religions are cults. Heck, some persons are cults (cult of personality is a person that is adored or worshiped, often referred to as hero worship).
answer b) in some countries such as Germany, Yes. In the United States it is still recognized as an organized religion, so sadly, no.
Not to mention satire, no matter how poor taste it may be - is protected. That gives us the right to mock Xenu and Scientology as much as we want - or heck, why stop there? How about that white Jesus shown in every church I've ever been to? I imagine the dude looked a lot more like Osama bin Laden than any white guy. I think the conversation with Bush would be hilarious -
Jesus: I am not a terrorist! Bush: with a name like Jesus bin Nazareth, you are obviously a terrorist. All you 'bin' guys are terrorists. Jesus: bin means 'from' you idiot! Bush: tell that to Allah you turbanhead Jesus: but I'm Christian you moron! Bush: you guys would say anything - I am the DECIDER, and I decide you go to Guantanamo bay - take him away boys! (feds drag Jesus off)
I agree - the US government does intervene on pyramid schemes masquerading as religions as well as groups that brainwash members, both of which are illegal. They also sometimes intervene on groups that they consider dangerous without proof of illegal activity, which I believe the Branch Davidians (Waco) fell into.
I'd guess I started somewhere in 1999 as well, but possibly 1998 - a guy I'd worked with in college showed it to me and the fact that it had indexed both my college website and my first html, which had somehow gotten nested into a server and never deleted (and was circa 1992 - that is pre-mosaic - I wrote it I believe for WorldWideWeb (it was on NeXT, so logical) and then wrote a different page for another pre-1993 browser (no idea which, but it was text - I don't know if lynx was around yet or not - all I know is my page was all text), but then decided it had no future and Gopher was the future - man, was I ever wrong.
Google's future I could immediately see - easy to remember and a very simple page with fast search and a huge index. Also having come from AltaVista and to a lesser extent, Netscape and Yahoo portals, the lack of massive amounts of advertising was refreshing (and the lack of those newfangled popup ads was cool, too).
I should say Torment feels a bit dated today - there is a lot of dialog. When I first played it, long text dialogs were the norm, while today it is not (some modern games like Oblivion still have a lot of these - specifically the books - but once you learn that they don't really contain anything important you usually do a click-through.
Arcanum came a few years later - I agree with you - I had high hopes for the game, but found it mediocre (I didn't hate it, but didn't love it, either). Around that time I also bought Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, which I believe was the last PC game released under the Black Isle Studios moniker (there was a Baldur's Gate based PS2 game a few months later). I enjoyed the first 1/2 of that game, but the last part was obviously rushed and was a serious letdown.
I should have said Max Payne 2 - I only played a tiny bit of 1, but enjoyed 2 a lot. I admit, though, the game really wasn't that hard on its initial setting and I played through it once in about 12 hours and didn't bother replaying on harder difficulties. I liked the plot and characters of MP2, and didn't mind that the game was short (something many people hated).
There is only one game I've ever played where I despised the main character - the English translation of the Russian adventure game Midnight Nowhere. There are many with bad voice acting, but that is the only one where I disliked the main character.
Deus Ex was the first game that made me puke (literally - I got so violently ill from motion sickness I threw up), so I can't say I have fond memories of it. It was not the first game I got motion sickness from, but it was the fastest - I had maybe 20 seconds of gametime before it happened (Nukem 3D and Marathon were about 1/2 hour before I started to get ill, and Half Life about 20 minutes - but some games like Battlefield and Unreal Tournament never bothered me, so it's hit and miss).
Star Control 2, TLJ, Syndicate and Monkey Island were indeed memorable. I wasn't so thrilled with Mechwarrior 2 - it's not that it was bad, but rather that I think games like Max Payne 1/2, Fallout, Grim Fandango and Planescape: Torment were much better. I have nothing to say about Street Fighter 2 - I played the game exactly once, got completely asswhupped, and never played it again. If I had to list a favorite plotted videogame, I'd have to say Shinobi, Rolling Thunder or maybe one of the videodisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, or Cliff Hanger (a personal favorite - I liked the Lupin Anime series it was based on, as well). For ancient computer games, I remember getting a huge kick out of Captain Goodnight and the Island of Fear (because it spoofed a number of games) and loved games like Bruce Lee, Elite, Conan: Halls of Volta, Karateka, Prince of Persia and probably 100 I can't think of.
I missed Thief: The Dark Project (it was never a priority game) and Anachronox (I had no working computer the year it was released).
please don't talk about Vista today - I spent 7 hours with MS tech support last night trying to get SP1 installed on my laptop (taking away time from my virus fight on an XP machine). According to MS support, my registry is corrupt, which is awfully fast, seeing that I just got it back from the repair shop a week ago and they had to wipe my C drive clean and restore to image (suggesting to me that their drive image is corrupt - the repair was for an 8600M graphics card failure). The drive itself reports no errors.
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I agree with you on Reiser - even before he killed his wife his name was well known in the programming world. I certainly would have recognized his name before someone like Les Earnest (creator of the finger program).
Then there are others that were considered gods as programmers before becoming even more famous as Designers - Sid Meier or Peter Molyneux anyone? I can name others that are a bit more obscure but incredibly influential during a time like Silas Warner (creator of Castle Wolfenstein, the game that defined the stealth genre and one of the first computer games to include digitized voices) and Bill Budge (probably most famous for Pinball Construction Set, but his Apple ][ work was well known).
As for Woz, he was (is?) both a great programmer and engineer - he wrote the boot loader for the Apple machines, Integer BASIC (one of my favorite Woz quotes - "Regrets about my own life? Yes, I wish I would have put floating point in Basic, but I wanted to get it done quick"), Apple DOS (with Randy Wigginton), SWEET 16 (virtual 16 bit OS), software Breakout, and certainly more from his jobs at companies like HP.
Yeah, right - the whole thing is cut and dry - lets look at it in highlights:
Iraq uses chemical weapons in a genocidal attack on both Iran and the kurds of Iraq.
US looks aside since Iran is the real enemy.
UN fails to act for both genocide and banned weapons.
Iraq attacks US Ally Kuwait
US invades Iraq (partially) and retakes Kuwait.
US later fully invades Iraq claiming WMD that no longer exist (real reason - his regime didn't collapse).
US funds Afghanistan Taliban in fight against Russia
Russia leaves in defeat.
Taliban support terrorists that destroy the world trade center
US invades Afghanistan
US deregulates certain bank borrowing under Carter
S&L collapses under Reagan
Mortgage crisis under Bush (who's at fault? everyone)
Yes, installed governments and spheres of influence take part, but calling the US a paper tiger is silly. Even the former superpower of the soviet union has a lot of teeth, as they proved by overrunning Georgia. The US is also still a huge economic power despite the current crisis. China is an emerging economic power, so the US isn't alone in the economic influence sphere.
This all sounds frighteningly familiar to me, and the case I recall used a threatened lawsuit as leverage.
At my college job in a computer lab, I created a web page mocking this guy nobody liked who always claimed to be working 80+ hour weeks and yet he never seemed to get anything done (in fact, part of the mockery was the fact that many fellow labbies were doing his job for him). I hid the page and showed a select few people, but the thing went viral (because if you knew the guy it was dead on parody and hilarious) and several people made similar pages with the same guy as a target. A large portion was dedicated to how he treated us and anyone else that didn't subscribe to his narrow point of view, which was basically Windows is the be-all end-all of computing and Mac/Linux/Unix should be ditched in favor of PC hardware running Windows (not to mention I quoted him extensively and poked fun at his words). Two years after I graduated he got his hardware wish (standardization on PC hardware), but they also abandoned Windows and Office in favor of Linux based solutions - I'm sure he wasn't happy.
Anyhow, back to my story - at some point, one of these pages owned by another labbie and hosted offsite was seen by the guy being mocked and all fury broke loose. He brought the labbie down to our boss (also his good friend), called the police, and then had a long chat - fortunately, the labbie didn't turn any of the rest of us in (I think there were 5 or 6 other pages by then, some humorous, like mine, others that were a bit more malicious than funny). Apparently, the guy being mocked took the page as a serious, defamatory and personal threat and filed several charges against the labbie (defamation, slander, threat of personal harm and some others). They eventually settled with him getting fired, agreeing to leave school, and possibly paying some fine (he was not at liberty to talk about any of it, but an eavesdropper leaked some info) in exchange for charges being dropped.
Yes, but the real scary thing is executive orders issued as national security edicts - these don't have to be disclosed to anyone, even Congress, though the judicial system does have the right to request and review them (if they're aware of them). For instance, we know FEMA was created by a series of executive orders, but we don't know if FEMA has the power to declare martial law without congress's consent (it is suspected that if congress is unable to act, FEMA has this power, but the constitution says only congress is allowed to declare martial law) because some of the executive orders that created that organization are secret.
The problem is, the US government thinks it should protect its citizens from themselves, and thus the anti-drug laws. This is a touchy subject because some people can't control themselves and the drugs destroy them, giving the government more fodder for preventing use by all, and then you've got neo-prohibitionists that lobby hard for stricter laws (what MADD is now, for instance). It probably doesn't help that the current President was a coke and booze addict and is now a teetotaler, and the on-deck Democrat candidate used coke and weed and neither he or the Republican candidate is for changing that legislation.
Still, legalization probably creates as many problems as it solves from a law enforcement or even financial standpoint - sure it no longer is illegal to possess and the government profits by taxing, but suddenly you have a much bigger "under the influence" category to enforce, whether that be driving under the influence, stealing to support a habit, rehab, crimes committed under the influence, or some other category. And while pot may not be the best example, there are plenty of other drugs that are. A friend of mine has a cousin that routinely dropped 4-5 hits of acid before driving because it was "cool" - often he would stop back at our place (I was living in a house with four friends at the time) because he was tripping too much to go home (mom woulda known). If he were my cousin I would have called the cops on him if he left, but my friend always let him go (probably because that cousin was his dealer). On the plus side, that guy realized his life was going down the toilet, quit drugs, went to college, and now has some kind of engineering job.
Personally, I am for legalization, but any money earned from legal sales and cultivation needs to go to education and users should be monitored for addiction. Why education? Because I watched a heroin addict go through kicking the habit (bandmate a long time ago) and later lived in a house with 3 reformed heroin addicts (6 renters there - big old house - the owner and two tenants met in rehab) and after hearing their stories, I can tell you heroin scares the shit out of me. After watching a tenant at my wife's rental property self destruct on meth losing her job, kids, and getting evicted from our property, then choosing to live on the street vs rehab (her mom was going to help if she sought treatment), I can tell you meth scares the shit out of me. Education on the effects and how to resist the peer pressure is more useful than enforcement, in my opinion.
GLUT is just a bunch of convenience methods, and is decade old abandonware, anyway - use freeglut instead.
Mesa3D was open because it is not OpenGL - it is an OpenGL API compatible library, and therefore not subject to any licensing fees charged by SGI (OpenGL brand usage and licensing is usually paid for by hardware vendors). WINE is similar - it's a Windows and DirectX compatible library for Linux (i.e. it is not Windows or a Windows emulator).
It looks like SGI is OK with releasing the API and associated royalties, but in a way that makes sense because they are really no longer involved with it (and I'm not even sure if they've collected royalties lately - in the 1990s I recall it was around $20000/vendor).
Hmm... if I go by the people I know that play WoW (sorry, I don't know any EQ2 players - Guild Wars yes, Conan yes, but the majority I know play WoW), most I know are in better-than-average physical shape. In fact, I know only two overweight people that play WoW, but I know many more overweight people that do not.
As for depression, I can see that - I think many adult MMORPG players that stick with it are stretched to the limits by daily stress (whether it be work, kids, schedule, or whatever) and use it as a release, but by doing so, they are sacrificing sleep and that results in more depression. The other problem is the game itself can make you unable to relax, so getting to sleep itself is a problem (thus probably more substance abuse like drinking or smoking pot in order to sleep, which leads to bad sleep).
I had problems like that both as a musician and a MMORPG player, and in both cases I had to quit drinking (I never did other drugs except smoked cigs/cigars, but I quit that early - food was more important than a bad habit). I feel best if I set a fixed quitting time, which for me is 10PM, and give myself 1/2-1 hour to wind down before sleep (with a 6AM no snooze wake-up). Unfortunately for me, that means having to be away from games entirely for some periods of time - I'm salaried and work to a schedule, so if it's after 10PM when I get home, I don't play games or work on my OSS project - and yes, I tentatively schedule time for both (not to mention "hang out with my wife time," but her need for 10 hours of sleep always gives me some evening time).
yes, there is an improvement, but unless you have money to burn, the value of replacing a laptop that is only a year old to get that performance probably isn't worth it - the 8600M GT was in $1800 laptops a year ago, the 8800M GTX is in $1800 laptops today.
I don't know of any 8800M MXM cards yet, but ACER has 8600M cards on the market to replace older 8400M cards, and ASUS has cards for the C90, so a market is emerging... slowly.
Well, he also guessed GPU and CPU convergence by 2006 and 2007, and in my 1996 computer graphics class I predicted ray tracing would be viable by 2011-12 and surpass rasterization by 2017 (yes, I wrote a paper - buried somewhere in college stuff, but 2011 is pretty close to the late 2009-early 2010 target for Larrabee), so I could say I was prophetic as well. Of course, I have to ignore all the things I was wrong about, such as display size (resolutions greater than 1024x768? - who needs that?), single CPU (parallelism? what's that?), no vector processing, etc. I did my prediction entirely based on math - pixels, CPU doubling and ray tracing vs rasterization in Big-Oh analysis.
I guess computer graphics and science fiction share the fact that you can predict some parts of the future with some degree of accuracy, but you will always have some error, either with timeline or technology, no matter how much you base your analysis on real world metrics.
Voxel based rendering is making a comeback mainly because Volume Ray Casting can be done in parallel which makes it very suitable for either a vector unit or any other general purpose GPU (like DX10-generation graphics cards). I wouldn't say it's a be-all end-all rendering technique, but yes there are some good uses (nuking terrain, for instance).
I think his point for the lack of an API was not suggesting everything will be written from scratch by AAA game devs - he meant techniques can be patched into the code without the restrictions imposed by fixed functional hardware or even fixed functional hardware mixed with shaders.
Let's use a "for example" case - say you are using ray tracing and want to add soft shadows. Ray tracing by itself assumes point lighting, and if this ray tracer were built into, say, a fixed hardware pipeline, you would be force to use hard shadows or some vendor defined extension that gives you a specific type of soft shadows. If you used a "shader" to do soft shadows, you would have to rewrite any fixed functionality used in the ray tracer since the shader replaces any fixed function code. If this were entirely in software, however, you would have the flexibility to keep the "fixed" code and tack on new code without restrictions, so if you wanted soft shadows in your ray tracer you might write a photon mapping implementation to get it and you don't have to rewrite other code.
You're on the wrong track - Fixed function features are actually features that do not use shaders at all. For example, you may have a new fixed function for hardware particles (that's an older one, but the one that popped into my head) - you pass the arguments to it and run it, but you don't actually program it (there is no script like there is for shaders).
Shaders REPLACE the fixed function pipeline, so if you use them, you actually need to rewrite any fixed function feature you want for the object/polygon being rendered. Many commonly used features have shading language definitions, such as fog and lighting, but you are also free to write your own. This is why he later goes on to say that CUDA may be able to do something similar - general purpose shaders are essentially a set of programmable vector units.
The simplest explanation of Geometry Shaders is that they sit between the Vertex Shaders and Pixel shaders and can move or generate vertices in hardware. There are a few uses for this, such as instantiation (creating copies of a model), tessellation (converting a primitive such as a sphere into polygons), and single pass Cube Mapping (a texture mapping technique often used for scene geometries difficult to render in polygons), but in general, the usage is fairly limited (first generation hardware had a 1024 vertex emission limit and runs slower the more vertices that can potentially be emitted).
Part of the issue is that if the GPU and CPU are merged, they would also attempt to keep the same die-shrink, while traditionally are a generation behind in GPUs (though this gap has been shrinking). By keeping one generation behind there is a significant expense savings, which is why integrated CPU/GPUs are usually 2-3 generations behind (since that is the "value" segment of the market and usually production issues are worked out by then).
The grandparent is correct that the more you stuff on a single piece of silicon, the more bad chips you get, but you (parent) are also correct that the more you jam on a piece of silicon, the cheaper the overall costs if you can effectively build them in volume. And while dual core is cheaper than dual chip (due to the extra wires, socket connectors, and infrastructure such as controllers), jamming more on the chip is not always the answer - Intel quad-core chips are two dual-core chips in a single package (saving money by avoiding requiring extra stuff like socket connectors as well as benefiting from a larger volume of dual core processors). Intel has no intention to build a true quad that I know of - they rolled out a 6 core die yesterday, so I expect the next step to be 12.
The goals of SoCs are different than those of typical PC parts - the main motivators there are reduced power consumption and a smaller package. That means they're willing to trade performance for size.
well, there isn't too much better than a 8600M GT as of yet, at least performance-wise, but that card is one generation behind. The best nVidia you can get is still a 9800M GTX, and those are just a die-shrink of the 8xxx line (the GTX 200s don't have a mobile platform yet).
If you always want the latest-and-greatest graphics in a laptop, you should maybe look for something upgradable - nVidia standardized their mobile graphics on the MXM platform and, although ATI has a competing standard (AXIOM), it has so far been losing badly and it is now fairly common to find ATI cards that use MXM.
The real problem comes with MXM systems that are upgradable - the ASUS C90 is, and I've read MXM Acer laptops are, but after that it's anyone's guess - some MXM computers like the 24" iMac are not. There are also 4 separate sized slots - MXM I, MXM II, MXM III, and MXM HE and larger slots can take the smaller GPUs, but not vice versa (most laptops I've seen that have them are MXM II). Sometimes you also need to buy the notebook manufacturer's branded card, as well. Also note that there is now at least one desktop card that uses MXM - the ASUS Trinity. Basically, it has 3 MXM modules on a regular PCI-E card, and when the graphics card needs updating, you replace the MXM modules, not the card, supposedly saving you some expense.
well, there are worse things to worry about - I mean, Obama-Biden is awfully close to OsAMA BIn laDEN, so obviously there must be a tie-in (incidentally, the human-dinosaur thing with Palin was fake, too).
Personally, I'd prefer if neither would win (I have serious issues with both), but at this point the chances of a third party coming out of nowhere to take the election (much less one I agree with) is about nil, so we either get the first black President or the first female VP. I guess I make do, as always, and waste my vote again in another 4 years.
I thought for only being involved for a couple of weeks they had a better plan than the management of those two companies had, which includes ditching that management as well as the high risk loans that had destroyed the businesses and institute a business plan for solvency. The real issue is whether the government should have been managing and monitoring the loans they help finance in these government backed private companies in the first place.
I think 'ginger' as a hue is primarily British - in the US they're usually called strawberry blond or light brunette in the US. I also have heard Brits use it derogatorily (basically meaning a pansy).
I have no doubt hair racism exists - I even have a friend that confessed he would only date natural blondes (and eventually married one).
No - I have a monopoly on creepy - stop stealing my thunder!
speaking of Disney, you missed the Mickey Mouse law, which effectively extends that 20 years.
Technically EVERY organized religion is a cult (which in latin meant to care for or adore, in English usually means a set of beliefs or worship). I assume you mean the commonly used variant of the term that means an unorthodox variety, since you're using it in a derogatory way.
so to answer your question,
answer a)
by definition, yes, all religions are cults. Heck, some persons are cults (cult of personality is a person that is adored or worshiped, often referred to as hero worship).
answer b)
in some countries such as Germany, Yes. In the United States it is still recognized as an organized religion, so sadly, no.
Not to mention satire, no matter how poor taste it may be - is protected. That gives us the right to mock Xenu and Scientology as much as we want - or heck, why stop there? How about that white Jesus shown in every church I've ever been to? I imagine the dude looked a lot more like Osama bin Laden than any white guy. I think the conversation with Bush would be hilarious -
Jesus: I am not a terrorist!
Bush: with a name like Jesus bin Nazareth, you are obviously a terrorist. All you 'bin' guys are terrorists.
Jesus: bin means 'from' you idiot!
Bush: tell that to Allah you turbanhead
Jesus: but I'm Christian you moron!
Bush: you guys would say anything - I am the DECIDER, and I decide you go to Guantanamo bay - take him away boys!
(feds drag Jesus off)
I agree - the US government does intervene on pyramid schemes masquerading as religions as well as groups that brainwash members, both of which are illegal. They also sometimes intervene on groups that they consider dangerous without proof of illegal activity, which I believe the Branch Davidians (Waco) fell into.
I'd guess I started somewhere in 1999 as well, but possibly 1998 - a guy I'd worked with in college showed it to me and the fact that it had indexed both my college website and my first html, which had somehow gotten nested into a server and never deleted (and was circa 1992 - that is pre-mosaic - I wrote it I believe for WorldWideWeb (it was on NeXT, so logical) and then wrote a different page for another pre-1993 browser (no idea which, but it was text - I don't know if lynx was around yet or not - all I know is my page was all text), but then decided it had no future and Gopher was the future - man, was I ever wrong.
Google's future I could immediately see - easy to remember and a very simple page with fast search and a huge index. Also having come from AltaVista and to a lesser extent, Netscape and Yahoo portals, the lack of massive amounts of advertising was refreshing (and the lack of those newfangled popup ads was cool, too).
I should say Torment feels a bit dated today - there is a lot of dialog. When I first played it, long text dialogs were the norm, while today it is not (some modern games like Oblivion still have a lot of these - specifically the books - but once you learn that they don't really contain anything important you usually do a click-through.
Arcanum came a few years later - I agree with you - I had high hopes for the game, but found it mediocre (I didn't hate it, but didn't love it, either). Around that time I also bought Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, which I believe was the last PC game released under the Black Isle Studios moniker (there was a Baldur's Gate based PS2 game a few months later). I enjoyed the first 1/2 of that game, but the last part was obviously rushed and was a serious letdown.
I should have said Max Payne 2 - I only played a tiny bit of 1, but enjoyed 2 a lot. I admit, though, the game really wasn't that hard on its initial setting and I played through it once in about 12 hours and didn't bother replaying on harder difficulties. I liked the plot and characters of MP2, and didn't mind that the game was short (something many people hated).
There is only one game I've ever played where I despised the main character - the English translation of the Russian adventure game Midnight Nowhere. There are many with bad voice acting, but that is the only one where I disliked the main character.
Deus Ex was the first game that made me puke (literally - I got so violently ill from motion sickness I threw up), so I can't say I have fond memories of it. It was not the first game I got motion sickness from, but it was the fastest - I had maybe 20 seconds of gametime before it happened (Nukem 3D and Marathon were about 1/2 hour before I started to get ill, and Half Life about 20 minutes - but some games like Battlefield and Unreal Tournament never bothered me, so it's hit and miss).
Star Control 2, TLJ, Syndicate and Monkey Island were indeed memorable. I wasn't so thrilled with Mechwarrior 2 - it's not that it was bad, but rather that I think games like Max Payne 1/2, Fallout, Grim Fandango and Planescape: Torment were much better. I have nothing to say about Street Fighter 2 - I played the game exactly once, got completely asswhupped, and never played it again. If I had to list a favorite plotted videogame, I'd have to say Shinobi, Rolling Thunder or maybe one of the videodisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, or Cliff Hanger (a personal favorite - I liked the Lupin Anime series it was based on, as well). For ancient computer games, I remember getting a huge kick out of Captain Goodnight and the Island of Fear (because it spoofed a number of games) and loved games like Bruce Lee, Elite, Conan: Halls of Volta, Karateka, Prince of Persia and probably 100 I can't think of.
I missed Thief: The Dark Project (it was never a priority game) and Anachronox (I had no working computer the year it was released).
please don't talk about Vista today - I spent 7 hours with MS tech support last night trying to get SP1 installed on my laptop (taking away time from my virus fight on an XP machine). According to MS support, my registry is corrupt, which is awfully fast, seeing that I just got it back from the repair shop a week ago and they had to wipe my C drive clean and restore to image (suggesting to me that their drive image is corrupt - the repair was for an 8600M graphics card failure). The drive itself reports no errors.