The GPL is more free because it preserves freedom. The BSD license is less free because it allows that freedom to be taken away.
So, the GPL is "more free" because it gives the licensee less freedom, and imposes more of the licensor's ideology on the licensee while the BSDL is "less free" because it gives the licensee more freedom, and imposes less of the licensor's ideology on the licensee.
No. His point seems to be that some features are not in ODF yet, so we might as well accept Microsoft's, and that way we have to support fewer different implementations of features. He's approaching this thing with a naivete that is stunning in an adult who has watched Microsoft's behavior with standards.
Unless he is, say, either directly or via mutual funds a Microsoft stockholder, in which case the faux naivete is completely non-stunning.
The catch: their claim that you don't have the right (without the EULA) to run the software, is questionable. Since 1) the purpose of the copying is noncommercial 2) the nature of the copyrighted work makes it useless unless copied to RAM, and 4) the effect of the copying has no impact on the market for the copyrighted work, it is arguably Fair Use.
Fair Use analysis is unnecessary: if you own the copy of the copyrighted computer program, you have an explicit legal right to make incidental copies when that is necessary to use the program on a computer (17 USC Sec. 117(a)(1)).
The available arguments for EULA's limiting those rights is that the EULA is a contract to which you are bound, and your acceptance of it either (1) makes it so that you never got those general rights you would have under general copyright law (if the EULA is viewed as incorporated into the purchase contract), or (2) constitutes a voluntary waiver of those rights in exchange for something of value other than the physical copy of the software (if the EULA is viewed as a somehow-valid post-sale contract).
I fully admit might be misunderstanding what they meant by that comment, but it looks like a lesser featured free version and a full featured commercial version.
Uh, no. The free version uses KDE4, which is, though "released", still incomplete in several respects. The commercially supported version uses KDE3, which is complete and stable, but not bleeding edge.
This isn't a matter of "free" = "reduced functionality", but "free" = "bleeding edge".
I've not seen the same statement for Ubuntu, which is what prompted my question. And i hope i did misunderstand their future direction.
Of course you didn't see the same statement about Ubuntu, because Ubuntu (vs. Kubuntu) doesn't use KDE, it uses Gnome. Gnome doesn't have a "released-but-incomplete" new version that lots of users might be interested in but that isn't ready to be commercially supported, that I know of, so there is no reason for the split that Kubuntu has.
the more conflict between the White House and Capitol Hill, the less the rights and incomes of the American citizenry will be eroded.
So if we mimic Russia ca. 1993, and have troops loyal to the President shelling the Capitol, we'll pretty much have obtained the ideal situation with regard to protecting the rights and incomes of the American citizenry?
I mean, that seems to pretty close to the maximum level of "conflict between the White House and Capitol Hill", and from your statement, the more we have of that, the better.
When you don't have the push-pull tug-of-war going on, whatever side is running off keeps running faster and faster until you get USSR (Left, Socialist) or Nazi Germany (Right, Fascist).
Nazi Germany didn't not come about in the absense of a push-pull political tug of war, it emerged directly from such a push-pull tug-of-war.
Similar, the totalitarianism of the USSR wasn't something that developed overtime with one original moderate party being unchallenged, it emerged directly out of the war of the revolutionaries against the Czar, and was deepened when the new regime was plunged almost immediately into civil war.
So, while I would agree that an unchallenged faction in an otherwise democratically constituted state might drive a transition from fairly moderate to increasingly extreme to outright totalitarian, neither the Nazi Germany nor the USSR (nor Iran, nor North Korea) is a particularly good example to use to illustrate that threat, as neither arose even remotely that way.
History has shown this in every sustained single-party rule case (a single, unified party is a dictator; it's one entity with one goal and one mind);
Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian from the outset, not as a result of "sustained single-party rule". The real examples of sustained single-party rule that didn't start out totalitarian from day one often don't end up anywhere near those extremes (consider, e.g., the PRM/PRI regime in Mexico, which lasted for (and at) about the same time as the Communist regime in the USSR -- certainly not an example anyone in the US should want to follow, but also not much like the USSR or Nazi Germany.)
At the risk of invoking Godwin, didn't the Nuremburg trials show once and for all that "I was ordered to do it" is not a valid defense?
They certainly showed that it wasn't when the orders came from the leadership on the losing side of a war, and the winning side is making the judgements.
The President can't pardon civil offenses, only criminal offenses, so it won't have any effect. On the criminal side, the way the applicable statutes are written, its people in the executive branch that would be most likely to be liable anyway, and its hard as if this administration is going to prosecute them in the first place, so pardons aren't likely to be necessary except on the way out the door to protect against anything the next administration might do.
Note that if the President vetos the bill (as he no doubt will), he still doesn't get the telecom immunity or other expansions of executive power he sought.
Think of the House and Senate, in this case, as Mom and Dad -- and a Mom and Dad who are a bit paranoid, so they've got a bank account where they both have to sign a check for it to be valid. Now, Junior (President Bush) has come to Mom and Dad because he's gotten in a spot of trouble with his friends, and he wants Mom and Dad to write a check to make it all go away -- and he's asked for $100. Mom responds by yelling at him, and writing a check out for $5 and handing it to Dad. Now, maybe Dad won't sign that, and maybe if he does Junior will just tear it up and complain some more, but either way, unless someone changes Mom's mind, Junior doesn't get anything like his $100.
I'm not defending it either way, but when you are debating to decide whether or not to give immunity to telecoms, why bring up congressional oversite of the President?
The kind of immunity for the telecoms sought by the Administration would have presented lawsuits against them which, because of governmental immunities, standing issues, and other problems, are pretty the most probable way, if not the only way, that any of the facts necessary to hold the executive accountable are likely to come out in practice.
It also would encourage large companies to violate the law at the behest of the executive in future cases (and not only in this particular area), by setting the example that such violations would be the subject of retroactive immunity. By encouraging lawbreaking at the behest of the President, it would, therefore, have reduced the degree to which the law served as a practical constraint on executive action.
So this law, that superficially concerning immunity for telecoms, had a serious impact on the practical accountability of the President to the law, something which Members of Congress unsurprisingly did not miss, and perhaps more surprisingly actually pointed out and acted upon.
What happens when they start getting included in major routing tables and when a backbone goes down, a lot of data's going to start moving through people's devices.. just think of slashdot, no secure login..
What's your point? The regular backbone is operated by the telecom industry, which has demonstrated willingness to open it up to the government even when that is in direct violation of existing law. Your unencrypted content isn't safe no matter who owns the network it travels over (unless you control both endpoints and all the systems in between.)
Its not that you should feel like your private data is secure traveling over a network whose backbone is made up of random mobile devices, just that you shouldn't feel that it is safe on a network whose backbone is controlled by AT&T, Qwest, Verizon, etc., either.
He's smart with a fairly rich background in applied sciences. In other words, he's a lot less likely to create or support legislature based on the perception that the internet is a bunch of tubes.
Now, if only we could get people with a background in government to post on political topics in slashdot, so that there was less of a propensity to create posts based on the perception that members of Congress make (rather than making up a) legislature. (There are several posts so far on this thread that make the mistake: a legislator is a person, a legislature is a body of legislators, and the binding acts of a legislature are legislation.)
The work continues despite fears about security and nuclear proliferation.
I think TFA misses the point entirely: the main reason for the work is to address security and nuclear proliferation fears. Packaging reactors that are not particularly useful in an arms program with a complete lifetime of fuel and making them available to developing countries is intended as a minimize both the reality and the appearance of a legitimate need for developing countries to have their own civilian (or merely "civilian") nuclear programs, which could more easily be converted to (or covers for) military programs.
Clearly, they aren't proliferation proof, but traditional reactors, especially built and developed locally (even if with outside assistance) are even less proliferation-proof, and those are spreading in the absence of any effort to provide an alternative. This is an attempt to lessen the both the actual need and the political viability of the claim of a need for those kind of independent programs.
The alternative to this program is not that the developing world gets no nuclear material and no reactors.
Think about it this way. I can use x86 assembly to write a web app, but it's far more productive to use a language that makes rapid prototyping and high-level design easier. Just because something is possible (bidirectional path tracing, the "gold standard" of photorealism last I checked) doesn't mean it's a good idea, if it takes orders of magnitude more effort to succeed.
Bidirectional path tracing doesn't take a lot more effort than simple raytracing (building the renderer from scratch takes a bit more work once, building the scenes takes pretty much exactly the same work). It just takes a lot more compute cycles and memory. Which is -- don't get me wrong -- a pretty important concern in lots of situations, especially since there's tricks you can do to avoid a lot of that resource consumption. Good enough and practical beats perfect (or nearly so) and impractical...
I'd venture that a poll of the gaming public would only put Sid Meier higher on the list of recognizable names, and only because he slaps his name all over everything because he thinks he's cooler than all the people who really make his games.
I don't think Sid did it, I think the publishers did it because his name was and is, even if he's not "cooler" than every other developer, extremely well-known in the target market of those games when they started doing it, and they wanted to emphasize the connection of those games to him. That being said, I'd bet that Will Wright would outscore even Sid, even without his name being plastered over everything he is involved in.
Then again, neither Sid Meier nor Will Wright works in the same kind of game that Carmack is known for.
Except the double-slit experiment. It's based on the fact that light has wavefront qualities, while ray tracing treats it as particles.
Good point.
I also strongly doubt that the discreet ray approach will ever produce very good global illumination, since the number of rays bouncing between surfaces quickly grows towards infinite as the desired accuracy grows.
Well, yeah, the "raytracing is ideally photorealistic" argument does rely (even ignoring the wave effects that raytracing misses), essentially, on unlimited processing power and memory, and isn't necessarily applicable in any particular practical domain. My reference to shortcut techniques to directly model particular phenomena instead of tracing all the necessary rays being a feature of even static raytracing package, and to many of the idealized advantages of raytracing not being realized in practice was based on that.
You'd need to do "wavefront racing" to fix these, and I for one have no idea how to do this - solve the quantum field equations for each particle in the scene after inventing the Grand Unified Theory ?-)
That sounds about right, probably using a quantum computer "graphics card" (QGPU?).
Give me a little credit here. I am not suggesting that everyone blindly intersects rays with a huge list of triangles. That would be absurd, and I assumed everyone understood that.
The wording in the article suggested that. I would assume, given your background, that you probably knew better than that, but as written the article seemed to be exaggerating the naivete of the alternative approaches to yours. Part of that was my misreading of what you are proposing, though (as noted below).
What you might have missed is that I'm not proposing a sparse voxel octree as some form of bounding hierarchy to reduce intersection tests against triangles, I am proposing that it REPLACE hierarchies of triangles or other primitives for some data sets, and this brings about significant improvements (data size) that you wouldn't have with even infinitely fast conventional ray tracing.
I did miss that, whether the article was unclear I just misread it, well, I'm hardly the one to judge. (Transcripts of interviews, in general, I find to be less clear than articles which are written based on interviews rather than straight transcriptions, and maybe that's part of the issue here.)
Certainly, using such a structure as a kind of special primitive is different than a bounding structure, and I can see that it would offer a greater efficiency in time and space; intuitively, I'd assume you'd need to do some kind of normal interpolation across the voxel (keeping normals at all 8 corners?) since you lose the surface normal information that you'd get from normal ray-object intersection tests (but you've got to do that with triangle-based models that are simulating curved surfaces, too, in raytracing, so that doesn't seem to be much of a downside to weigh against the benefits.)
I'm also not trying to say that this is some novel brainstorm of mine, but I have some practical experience with the direction, and I think it has promise.
And if my response to the article suggested that it did not have promise, than that was my mistake: even having misread what exactly you are proposing, I didn't mean to suggest that. I thought the article, and even moreso the summary on Slashdot, exaggerated the difference between what you were doing and what others are doing (I think, even read in terms of what you are actually proposing, the summary still does that), but not that what you seemed to be proposing (and even less what you are actually proposing) wasn't something with some promise.
He correctly claims that ray tracing is not used much by movie studios, but fails to identify one of the main reasons why this is so: ray tracing is not a memory parallel algorithm, and therefore does not perform well rendering scenes that can't fit in main memory on any one computer (citation [pixar.com]). This isn't an issue at all for games.
I think that goes too far: if the algorithm isn't memory parallel, then the multiple cores that are working on it in parallel have to access shared memory with the accompanying coordination issues. This isn't problematic in the sense that it doesn't work: it certainly works. But it does result in sublinear speedup whereas a memory parallel algorithm could conceptually see a linear speedup. So there is some reason to prefer a memory parallel algorithm (all other things being equal) if you can find one.
OTOH, Carmack himself points out in his discussion of multi-GPU systems that modern rasterization engines have enough coupling (i.e., they aren't in practice memory parallel) that they don't experience linear speedup in most real game situations with the kind of effects people have come to expect, though they can in simple, ideal cases.
It only provides realistic rendering of reflections, refractions, and shadows.
Everything light does is a combination of reflections and refractions (shadows are an artifact of those).
So, yeah, what you are in effect saying is that raytracing only provides realistic rendering of things that light actually does.
There are still many more properties of light that take different, also intensive algorithms reproduce like; color bleeding, caustics, sub-surface scattering, depth of field.
Color bleeding and caustics are effects of reflection, subsurface scattering is reflection and refraction, depth of field is refraction (through a lens between the viewpoint and the image). Now, its true, that there are shortcuts that provide tolerable approximations of those effects faster than actually tracing rays in most cases, and that even static raytracers often prefer those to what would be necessary to do those effects through raytracing alone. Its also true that some real effects, to do well with raytracing, would require shooting separate rays for different wavelengths of light, which while conceptually possible (and I think some very specialized systems have been made which do this), is probably utterly impractical for realtime systems for the forseeable future (this is a lot bigger load increase than anti-aliasing would be.)
But as for realism (but not necessarily practicality, especially in a realtime setting), I think raytracing still, ultimately, wins on all of those.
What you really mean to say is that your original comment was meant to be dismissive, probably due to your hating the fact that someone other than you is considered a primary expert on a subject.
Um, no. What I meant to say is exactly what I said. My first comment was intended to be dismissive, but not of either Carmack's position or TFA so much as the presentation in TFS. And not because someone other than me is considered a "primary expert" (whatever that phrase is supposed to mean) on this subject, which is about as remote from anything that I would claim expertise in as is possible while still being a subject where I am aware of what is going on on even a very general level.
Your second comment is you realizing you were called out, appropriately, and need to reply in some way that will backup that you were being dismissive originally (although you claim you weren't).
No, my second comment was (aside from the part directly referring to the post it responded to) the comment I probably would have posted at about the same time that I did whether or not I was "called out". Its not uncommon for me to post both short dashes on style (especially somewhat tongue-in-cheek ones) and longer pieces on substance in the same thread on Slashdot, and the latter generally take more reading, consideration, reflection than the former: consequently, they are often (though not always) posted later.
And I never claimed I wasn't being dismissive. Nor, except insofar as explaining, in this post, what it was I was being dismissive of is a "defense", have I posted anything defending that dismissiveness.
You realized that to do so you had to at least provide some cut and paste arguments to reinforce your dismissive attitude.
Please defend your assertion that any of the arguments I posted (none of which were either intended to, nor serve to, reinforce any dismissiveness) are "cut and paste".
Of course you don't come right out and say whether John's approach is better or not, you just try to "imply" it's not without really taking a stance.
You are misusing quotes here, I'm not sure what you intend by them, but none of the things for which quotes are properly used makes any sense. That aside, you are wrong in both your statemetns: I did take a stand on whether Carmack's approach was better than what he compared it to, and I did not try to imply anything beyond what I said: I said that it was quite clear that Carmack's approach is superior to what he compares it to (naive raytracing against raw triangle meshes), I also said it was questionable how relevant that was to the real alternatives in the domain of raytracing.
If you want a more detailed assessment: by Carmack's own admission, his specific approach is not designed to address or provide many of things held out as unique benefits of raytracing (shadows, multiple-bounce reflections), and it quite obviously isn't "as good" at those things than alternatives which do provide them. OTOH, what little I know of the general datastructure at the heart of his approach (sparse voxel octrees) doesn't provide any reason to think that the general approach couldn't be applied (if it really outperforms other techniques of reducing the number and complexity of ray-object intersection tests, something the TFA provides no evidence of) just as well to the full spectrum of raytracing tasks, including handling reflected rays, so, whether or not this is Carmack's particular interest or something his particular engine will be good for, the approach he is using seems likely, if it is good at all, to be good there, as well. Finally, on an even higher level, I think Carmack is likely correct in arguing (against Intel and others) that hybrid approaches that use raytracing with some other non-raytracing techniques (whether the kind of rasterization popular now, or something else) will have an import
Why not analyse his argument and judge it on it's merits rather then throw it out simply because he is working on an idea of his own?
Commenting on the fact that it is unsurprising that someone working on a different technique favors that technique over raytracing is not throwing anything out.
Its not a comment either way on the merits.
Were I to comment on the merits, I would point out that his position is both fairly obviously correct (in that sparse voxel octrees or something quite like them is almost beyond question the key to raytracing that's useful for reasonable quality in realtime), and entirely incorrect in his characterization of what everyone else is pushing: he pretends that "everyone" is pushing the most naive, brute force approach to raytracing, in which you don't use any kind of bounding volume structure and just do intersection tests against triangles. I've seen literally no recommendations that do that: almost all involve some form of bounding volume heirarchy, and sparse voxel octrees are just one instance of that (perhaps a fairly ideal one, and that's great). (Also, raytracing isn't limited to triangles, although most performance comparisons of raytracing to raster-based rendering methods use models constructed from triangles because it allows you to compare same-model performance of the different mechanisms; raytracing engines, however, don't generally need to decomposed curved objects into triangle-based approximations to render them in the first place, although this can sometimes be more efficient.)
TFS further misleads by suggesting that Carmack is proposing an alternative to raytracing, when really what he is proposing is a particular approach to raytracing, and, particularly, a particular approach in one well-known problem area in raytracing to which there are currently a whole array of approaches. And his focus on what he wants to get out of raytracing is a little different. But, essentially, his piece, while there are some potentially good criticisms on some particular aspects of and arguments for Intel's specific approach to raytrace, is in accord with (not opposed to) the general idea that raytracing techniques are going to be increasingly important in gaming.
To reprogram one you need direct skin contact - it cannot be reprogrammed from across the room. I doubt anyone will not notice this being done to them.
At least, not in conditions where they would notice someone walking up with a large knife. I mean, if you are a deep sleeper, you might not notice the contact needed to reprogram a pacemaker, but then, you wouldn't notice the guy sneaking up to stab you in the heart, who can produce, from your perspective, the same end result, with far less in the way of specialized equipment or knowledge.
If you can't secure the physical space around your body, communications security on your pacemaker is inadequate to keep you safe from anyone seeking to do you harm; conversely, if you can secure that physical space around your body, the communications security is superfluous.
Carmack seems to think that Intel's direction using traditional ray tracing methods is not going to work and instead theorizes that using ray casting to traverse a new data structure he is developing is the best course of action.
Surprisingly, a developer things that the technique he is working on is better than other techniques to address the class of problems to which the technique applies.
In other news, a substantial quantity of water was discovered in the Pacific Ocean.
Modern day religions typically have a single benevolent deity the is normally credited with creation that extols it's followers to behave in a moral and kindly manner.
True -- at least ignoring any disputes over the definitions of "benevelonet", "kindly" and "moral" -- of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but not so true of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Wicca and other neo-pagan religions. I don't really see any sane definition of "modern day religions" where the former qualify but the latter don't.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the GPL is "more free" because it gives the licensee less freedom, and imposes more of the licensor's ideology on the licensee while the BSDL is "less free" because it gives the licensee more freedom, and imposes less of the licensor's ideology on the licensee.
Unless he is, say, either directly or via mutual funds a Microsoft stockholder, in which case the faux naivete is completely non-stunning.
Fair Use analysis is unnecessary: if you own the copy of the copyrighted computer program, you have an explicit legal right to make incidental copies when that is necessary to use the program on a computer (17 USC Sec. 117(a)(1)).
The available arguments for EULA's limiting those rights is that the EULA is a contract to which you are bound, and your acceptance of it either (1) makes it so that you never got those general rights you would have under general copyright law (if the EULA is viewed as incorporated into the purchase contract), or (2) constitutes a voluntary waiver of those rights in exchange for something of value other than the physical copy of the software (if the EULA is viewed as a somehow-valid post-sale contract).
Uh, no. The free version uses KDE4, which is, though "released", still incomplete in several respects. The commercially supported version uses KDE3, which is complete and stable, but not bleeding edge.
This isn't a matter of "free" = "reduced functionality", but "free" = "bleeding edge".
Of course you didn't see the same statement about Ubuntu, because Ubuntu (vs. Kubuntu) doesn't use KDE, it uses Gnome. Gnome doesn't have a "released-but-incomplete" new version that lots of users might be interested in but that isn't ready to be commercially supported, that I know of, so there is no reason for the split that Kubuntu has.
So if we mimic Russia ca. 1993, and have troops loyal to the President shelling the Capitol, we'll pretty much have obtained the ideal situation with regard to protecting the rights and incomes of the American citizenry?
I mean, that seems to pretty close to the maximum level of "conflict between the White House and Capitol Hill", and from your statement, the more we have of that, the better.
Nazi Germany didn't not come about in the absense of a push-pull political tug of war, it emerged directly from such a push-pull tug-of-war.
Similar, the totalitarianism of the USSR wasn't something that developed overtime with one original moderate party being unchallenged, it emerged directly out of the war of the revolutionaries against the Czar, and was deepened when the new regime was plunged almost immediately into civil war.
So, while I would agree that an unchallenged faction in an otherwise democratically constituted state might drive a transition from fairly moderate to increasingly extreme to outright totalitarian, neither the Nazi Germany nor the USSR (nor Iran, nor North Korea) is a particularly good example to use to illustrate that threat, as neither arose even remotely that way.
Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian from the outset, not as a result of "sustained single-party rule". The real examples of sustained single-party rule that didn't start out totalitarian from day one often don't end up anywhere near those extremes (consider, e.g., the PRM/PRI regime in Mexico, which lasted for (and at) about the same time as the Communist regime in the USSR -- certainly not an example anyone in the US should want to follow, but also not much like the USSR or Nazi Germany.)
They certainly showed that it wasn't when the orders came from the leadership on the losing side of a war, and the winning side is making the judgements.
The President can't pardon civil offenses, only criminal offenses, so it won't have any effect. On the criminal side, the way the applicable statutes are written, its people in the executive branch that would be most likely to be liable anyway, and its hard as if this administration is going to prosecute them in the first place, so pardons aren't likely to be necessary except on the way out the door to protect against anything the next administration might do.
Note that if the President vetos the bill (as he no doubt will), he still doesn't get the telecom immunity or other expansions of executive power he sought.
Think of the House and Senate, in this case, as Mom and Dad -- and a Mom and Dad who are a bit paranoid, so they've got a bank account where they both have to sign a check for it to be valid. Now, Junior (President Bush) has come to Mom and Dad because he's gotten in a spot of trouble with his friends, and he wants Mom and Dad to write a check to make it all go away -- and he's asked for $100. Mom responds by yelling at him, and writing a check out for $5 and handing it to Dad. Now, maybe Dad won't sign that, and maybe if he does Junior will just tear it up and complain some more, but either way, unless someone changes Mom's mind, Junior doesn't get anything like his $100.
The kind of immunity for the telecoms sought by the Administration would have presented lawsuits against them which, because of governmental immunities, standing issues, and other problems, are pretty the most probable way, if not the only way, that any of the facts necessary to hold the executive accountable are likely to come out in practice.
It also would encourage large companies to violate the law at the behest of the executive in future cases (and not only in this particular area), by setting the example that such violations would be the subject of retroactive immunity. By encouraging lawbreaking at the behest of the President, it would, therefore, have reduced the degree to which the law served as a practical constraint on executive action.
So this law, that superficially concerning immunity for telecoms, had a serious impact on the practical accountability of the President to the law, something which Members of Congress unsurprisingly did not miss, and perhaps more surprisingly actually pointed out and acted upon.
What's your point? The regular backbone is operated by the telecom industry, which has demonstrated willingness to open it up to the government even when that is in direct violation of existing law. Your unencrypted content isn't safe no matter who owns the network it travels over (unless you control both endpoints and all the systems in between.)
Its not that you should feel like your private data is secure traveling over a network whose backbone is made up of random mobile devices, just that you shouldn't feel that it is safe on a network whose backbone is controlled by AT&T, Qwest, Verizon, etc., either.
Now, if only we could get people with a background in government to post on political topics in slashdot, so that there was less of a propensity to create posts based on the perception that members of Congress make (rather than making up a) legislature. (There are several posts so far on this thread that make the mistake: a legislator is a person, a legislature is a body of legislators, and the binding acts of a legislature are legislation.)
I think TFA misses the point entirely: the main reason for the work is to address security and nuclear proliferation fears. Packaging reactors that are not particularly useful in an arms program with a complete lifetime of fuel and making them available to developing countries is intended as a minimize both the reality and the appearance of a legitimate need for developing countries to have their own civilian (or merely "civilian") nuclear programs, which could more easily be converted to (or covers for) military programs.
Clearly, they aren't proliferation proof, but traditional reactors, especially built and developed locally (even if with outside assistance) are even less proliferation-proof, and those are spreading in the absence of any effort to provide an alternative. This is an attempt to lessen the both the actual need and the political viability of the claim of a need for those kind of independent programs.
The alternative to this program is not that the developing world gets no nuclear material and no reactors.
Bidirectional path tracing doesn't take a lot more effort than simple raytracing (building the renderer from scratch takes a bit more work once, building the scenes takes pretty much exactly the same work). It just takes a lot more compute cycles and memory. Which is -- don't get me wrong -- a pretty important concern in lots of situations, especially since there's tricks you can do to avoid a lot of that resource consumption. Good enough and practical beats perfect (or nearly so) and impractical...
You're obviously right. I was confusing focal blur with depth of field.
OTOH, raytracing can handle depth of field just fine, it just requires shooting more than one eye ray distributed across the radius of the aperture.
I don't think Sid did it, I think the publishers did it because his name was and is, even if he's not "cooler" than every other developer, extremely well-known in the target market of those games when they started doing it, and they wanted to emphasize the connection of those games to him. That being said, I'd bet that Will Wright would outscore even Sid, even without his name being plastered over everything he is involved in.
Then again, neither Sid Meier nor Will Wright works in the same kind of game that Carmack is known for.
Good point.
Well, yeah, the "raytracing is ideally photorealistic" argument does rely (even ignoring the wave effects that raytracing misses), essentially, on unlimited processing power and memory, and isn't necessarily applicable in any particular practical domain. My reference to shortcut techniques to directly model particular phenomena instead of tracing all the necessary rays being a feature of even static raytracing package, and to many of the idealized advantages of raytracing not being realized in practice was based on that.
That sounds about right, probably using a quantum computer "graphics card" (QGPU?).
The wording in the article suggested that. I would assume, given your background, that you probably knew better than that, but as written the article seemed to be exaggerating the naivete of the alternative approaches to yours. Part of that was my misreading of what you are proposing, though (as noted below).
I did miss that, whether the article was unclear I just misread it, well, I'm hardly the one to judge. (Transcripts of interviews, in general, I find to be less clear than articles which are written based on interviews rather than straight transcriptions, and maybe that's part of the issue here.)
Certainly, using such a structure as a kind of special primitive is different than a bounding structure, and I can see that it would offer a greater efficiency in time and space; intuitively, I'd assume you'd need to do some kind of normal interpolation across the voxel (keeping normals at all 8 corners?) since you lose the surface normal information that you'd get from normal ray-object intersection tests (but you've got to do that with triangle-based models that are simulating curved surfaces, too, in raytracing, so that doesn't seem to be much of a downside to weigh against the benefits.)
And if my response to the article suggested that it did not have promise, than that was my mistake: even having misread what exactly you are proposing, I didn't mean to suggest that. I thought the article, and even moreso the summary on Slashdot, exaggerated the difference between what you were doing and what others are doing (I think, even read in terms of what you are actually proposing, the summary still does that), but not that what you seemed to be proposing (and even less what you are actually proposing) wasn't something with some promise.
I think that goes too far: if the algorithm isn't memory parallel, then the multiple cores that are working on it in parallel have to access shared memory with the accompanying coordination issues. This isn't problematic in the sense that it doesn't work: it certainly works. But it does result in sublinear speedup whereas a memory parallel algorithm could conceptually see a linear speedup. So there is some reason to prefer a memory parallel algorithm (all other things being equal) if you can find one.
OTOH, Carmack himself points out in his discussion of multi-GPU systems that modern rasterization engines have enough coupling (i.e., they aren't in practice memory parallel) that they don't experience linear speedup in most real game situations with the kind of effects people have come to expect, though they can in simple, ideal cases.
Everything light does is a combination of reflections and refractions (shadows are an artifact of those).
So, yeah, what you are in effect saying is that raytracing only provides realistic rendering of things that light actually does.
Color bleeding and caustics are effects of reflection, subsurface scattering is reflection and refraction, depth of field is refraction (through a lens between the viewpoint and the image). Now, its true, that there are shortcuts that provide tolerable approximations of those effects faster than actually tracing rays in most cases, and that even static raytracers often prefer those to what would be necessary to do those effects through raytracing alone. Its also true that some real effects, to do well with raytracing, would require shooting separate rays for different wavelengths of light, which while conceptually possible (and I think some very specialized systems have been made which do this), is probably utterly impractical for realtime systems for the forseeable future (this is a lot bigger load increase than anti-aliasing would be.)
But as for realism (but not necessarily practicality, especially in a realtime setting), I think raytracing still, ultimately, wins on all of those.
Um, no. What I meant to say is exactly what I said. My first comment was intended to be dismissive, but not of either Carmack's position or TFA so much as the presentation in TFS. And not because someone other than me is considered a "primary expert" (whatever that phrase is supposed to mean) on this subject, which is about as remote from anything that I would claim expertise in as is possible while still being a subject where I am aware of what is going on on even a very general level.
No, my second comment was (aside from the part directly referring to the post it responded to) the comment I probably would have posted at about the same time that I did whether or not I was "called out". Its not uncommon for me to post both short dashes on style (especially somewhat tongue-in-cheek ones) and longer pieces on substance in the same thread on Slashdot, and the latter generally take more reading, consideration, reflection than the former: consequently, they are often (though not always) posted later.
And I never claimed I wasn't being dismissive. Nor, except insofar as explaining, in this post, what it was I was being dismissive of is a "defense", have I posted anything defending that dismissiveness.
Please defend your assertion that any of the arguments I posted (none of which were either intended to, nor serve to, reinforce any dismissiveness) are "cut and paste".
You are misusing quotes here, I'm not sure what you intend by them, but none of the things for which quotes are properly used makes any sense. That aside, you are wrong in both your statemetns: I did take a stand on whether Carmack's approach was better than what he compared it to, and I did not try to imply anything beyond what I said: I said that it was quite clear that Carmack's approach is superior to what he compares it to (naive raytracing against raw triangle meshes), I also said it was questionable how relevant that was to the real alternatives in the domain of raytracing.
If you want a more detailed assessment: by Carmack's own admission, his specific approach is not designed to address or provide many of things held out as unique benefits of raytracing (shadows, multiple-bounce reflections), and it quite obviously isn't "as good" at those things than alternatives which do provide them. OTOH, what little I know of the general datastructure at the heart of his approach (sparse voxel octrees) doesn't provide any reason to think that the general approach couldn't be applied (if it really outperforms other techniques of reducing the number and complexity of ray-object intersection tests, something the TFA provides no evidence of) just as well to the full spectrum of raytracing tasks, including handling reflected rays, so, whether or not this is Carmack's particular interest or something his particular engine will be good for, the approach he is using seems likely, if it is good at all, to be good there, as well. Finally, on an even higher level, I think Carmack is likely correct in arguing (against Intel and others) that hybrid approaches that use raytracing with some other non-raytracing techniques (whether the kind of rasterization popular now, or something else) will have an import
Commenting on the fact that it is unsurprising that someone working on a different technique favors that technique over raytracing is not throwing anything out.
Its not a comment either way on the merits.
Were I to comment on the merits, I would point out that his position is both fairly obviously correct (in that sparse voxel octrees or something quite like them is almost beyond question the key to raytracing that's useful for reasonable quality in realtime), and entirely incorrect in his characterization of what everyone else is pushing: he pretends that "everyone" is pushing the most naive, brute force approach to raytracing, in which you don't use any kind of bounding volume structure and just do intersection tests against triangles. I've seen literally no recommendations that do that: almost all involve some form of bounding volume heirarchy, and sparse voxel octrees are just one instance of that (perhaps a fairly ideal one, and that's great). (Also, raytracing isn't limited to triangles, although most performance comparisons of raytracing to raster-based rendering methods use models constructed from triangles because it allows you to compare same-model performance of the different mechanisms; raytracing engines, however, don't generally need to decomposed curved objects into triangle-based approximations to render them in the first place, although this can sometimes be more efficient.)
TFS further misleads by suggesting that Carmack is proposing an alternative to raytracing, when really what he is proposing is a particular approach to raytracing, and, particularly, a particular approach in one well-known problem area in raytracing to which there are currently a whole array of approaches. And his focus on what he wants to get out of raytracing is a little different. But, essentially, his piece, while there are some potentially good criticisms on some particular aspects of and arguments for Intel's specific approach to raytrace, is in accord with (not opposed to) the general idea that raytracing techniques are going to be increasingly important in gaming.
Is that enough "on the merits" for you?
At least, not in conditions where they would notice someone walking up with a large knife. I mean, if you are a deep sleeper, you might not notice the contact needed to reprogram a pacemaker, but then, you wouldn't notice the guy sneaking up to stab you in the heart, who can produce, from your perspective, the same end result, with far less in the way of specialized equipment or knowledge.
If you can't secure the physical space around your body, communications security on your pacemaker is inadequate to keep you safe from anyone seeking to do you harm; conversely, if you can secure that physical space around your body, the communications security is superfluous.
Surprisingly, a developer things that the technique he is working on is better than other techniques to address the class of problems to which the technique applies.
In other news, a substantial quantity of water was discovered in the Pacific Ocean.
True -- at least ignoring any disputes over the definitions of "benevelonet", "kindly" and "moral" -- of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but not so true of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Wicca and other neo-pagan religions. I don't really see any sane definition of "modern day religions" where the former qualify but the latter don't.