It won't be right, but it will look cool, and that's all that really matters when you're looking at something like that. We are not doing light transport simulation here, we are doing something that is supposed to look good. I'm the sort of guy that watches a movie and notices the compression artifacts in black, listens to music and hears mushy cymbals. I walk by a screen and notice dead pixels and that the input source isn't in the LCD's native resolution.
Yet, when I play a game, I'll admit, I'm not playing glaring attention to these faults. The last thing that really bothered me in games was 16-bit color banding and I haven't seen any of that in, oh, like 3 or 4 years.
The gamer side of me agrees with Carmack on things looking cool who cares if it's wrong, the geek side of me is angry and demands it be pixel-accurate.
If the money isn't in the budget the lawmakers can't pass the bill. If the lawmakers don't have enough money to conduct an adequate study, the bill also shouldn't be passed. Nah, they'll still pass all sorts of crazy, expensive, and worthless laws only then they'll all have tax increase riders attached.
We're not talking about the current technology, we're talking about the future. As in whether Ray Tracing is the Future of Games.
Graphics hardware has evolved into huge parallel general-purpose stream processors capable of obscene numbers of FLOPs per second... yet we're still clinging tenaciously to the old safety blanket of a mesh of tesselated triangles and projecting textures onto them.
And it makes sense: the industry is really, really good at pushing them around. Sort of how like internal combustion engines are pretty much the only game in town until alternative save themselves from the vapor.
Nvidia, either by being wise or shortsighted, is discounting ray-tracing. ATI is trailing right now so they'd probably do well to hedge their bets on the polar opposite of where Nvidia is going.
3D modelling starts out in abstractions anyway with deformations and curves and all sorts of things that are relatively easy to describe with pure mathematics. Converting it all to mesh approximations of what was sculpted was, and still is, pretty much just a hack to get things to run at acceptable real-time speeds.
Saying CS grads don't need "excessive" math and science is sort of like saying doctors don't need "excessive" biology and chemistry. After all, doctors have dosing guidelines, medications approved to treat conditions are all indexed, and the labs do the blood/urine/other analysis and red flag measured traits out of bounds.
Personally, I think the science needs to stay in Computer Science not because of what you're going to do today, but what you're going to do tomorrow. Higher maths and hard (as opposed to soft) sciences mercilessly teach problem solving and deduction, shake the foundations of any man foolish enough to ignore simplification, and demand understanding not so much of HOW things are done but WHY things are done in that way.
I'm not saying someone without that experience can't code well, not at all. Some people are just naturally gifted at thinking through problems and algorithms and following the natural order of things. Others, plain and simple, struggle. Hard corequisites force the sort of muscle memory one needs to properly apply the science to the practice.
I know I'd much prefer to drive an engineered car than one plodged together by a mechanic.
TFA seems to indicate that his complaint is that he has 3G phones that last just as long as the non-3G iPhone... the fact that it takes extra energy isn't lost on him but rather it should have had 3G.
To have it use 3G and maintain it's current battery life might have taken extra engineering to squeeze more energy efficiency out of it, or a slightly more energetic battery. Wozniak doesn't strike me as a "product-cycle schedule is more important that the hardware" kind of guy.
Who's using their home wiring to transmit power across any relevant distances? I don't think GP is referring to replacing AC with DC, just separating the two without a collection of bulky black boxes. I've got more than just a handful of wall warts on my various power strips. 70% of mine deliver 5 volts down cablinb 6 feet or less to a proprietary adapter for my phone or router or cable box or fax machine etc etc etc.
It's pretty inefficient to have the same type of circuitry replicated time and time again when it could be at least consolidated a little. If there was a uniform standard for the tail ends of those cables, all intercompatible for different voltages (like keying the plug to keep accidents from happening), then this AC-DC conversion could happen right on the powerstrip level.
I have a dream of a four conductor GND/5/9/12 DC volt cable that one day will directly connect a streamlined powersupply built-in to a "room power strip" with a device that could mix and match those lines to get whatever voltage they need: 5, 9, 12 (obviously) plus 3, 4, and 7 by being a marginally clever - one day right here on Earth little black routers and black force feedback joysticks will be able to use the same cables as little white cellphones and white battery chargers as sisters and brothers.
Frankly, the whole thing is kind of creepy. It's something you might find championed by MBLA.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. - John Keats
At the top of that page:
This list of rights owners DOES NOT include all rights owners that report through the VeRO Program. These are the rights owners that have chosen to post About Me pages. Many other rights owners have chosen not to maintain an About Me page.
What do they possibly stand to gain from it? Maybe Co$ has a bunch of dirt dug up on ebay leadership thanks to Fair Game. After all, it's about always attacking, never defending.
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Yes I have been there many times. I don't see a lot of the BS you posted. Mostly likely, as a tourist, you stayed in tourist areas. None of the places where you would need a resident's card to get into, which, conveniently, are these unkept slums of poverty. You probably stayed in a nice hotel with electricity, air conditioning, and internet access. Internet access alone is enough to get the common Cuban without the luxury of being in the designated front-of-stage areas thrown in jail. A few blocks down the road you probably had a grocery store filled with just about every item you could want, like in any industrialized nation's grocery store. But you didn't have to carry your ration card, and you didn't have to choose between either canned meat or toilet paper. If you got sick you probably had an excellent hospital waiting for you with private rooms and the skilled doctors and the latest in technologies, not the crumbling biological dumps where they can barely keep the bathrooms clean and the only anti-biotic they have is pennicillin.
The Castro regime tells the poor citizenry that the US embargo is why they suffer, yet for tourists armed with US dollars and Euros, it's nothing but the finest from the shining jewel of the caribbean.
Next time you're there, and you're in private with a local, ask about where their family is from and where they grew up. Build a rapport and then ask about them about the real cuba, not what the travel agent will tell you. If you're feeling inquisitive, give them a camera phone and ask them to take some snapshots and bring it back to you. You'll be surprised what you'll see off the beaten path of the Michael Moore tour.
You don't have to believe either me or parent. Just look at the evidence: if things are so wonderful in Cuba, why would people risk life and limb on barely seaworthy makeshift rafts through shark infested waters just to grab a clumpful of US soil? Are these the actions of citizens of nation that's not really all that bad off?
Re:Yeah, Mission accomplished, watch W take credit
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 0, Troll
When you're the only candidate on the ballot, have no term limits, and any contenders to the office find their limbs chopped off and families murdered, yeah, I guess your reign can last as long as you want it to, old age not withstanding.
Heh, another net positive that Bush can claim credit for even though he had no hand in it's happening.
According to Wrong Diagnosos.com there were 555,499 US cancer deaths,
Frequent cell phone users face a 50% greater risk of developing tumors in the salivary glands Seems to me they were limiting the risk analysis to salivary glands, which seems somewhat reasonable considering that's what the study showed.
There has been some research done in this area. It's not really intentional, but the nature of the CCD sensors. When they're made, they have a target count on how many megapixels it has and not all of them (at least short of research labs) are functional.
Sometimes you can see specifications like "12 Megapixels, 11.1 effective".
These defects are scattered among the surface of the CCD and are statistically unique from one camera to another, even among the same model. While the photos often aren't saved in raw formats, I'd wager if they find a picture of something illegal and wanted to prove your camera took the picture, it'd be trivial to take some pictures with it and match the output files' flaws even with the JPEG encoding by using a control camera of the same shot.
Like how they do ballistic analysis by finding a suspect's gun and fire off a few rounds and compare with rounds found at the scene of a crime.
Exactly. The part I find amusing about the whole thing is that the walk out reeks of the politics and red v blue, but the net effect is, amazingly enough, that the surveilance immunity didn't get to happen. Net effect: good?
It's like me being an ass and cutting off someone in traffic who's going really slow, but it turns out they were falling asleep at the wheel and my assholery jolted them awake and made them pull over after recognizing how sleepy they are.
I'm surprised this hasn't been slapped with the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag yet.... seems like most stories are, pretty much regardless of content. Wish granted. Unfortunately your post was modded off-topic when it should be that tag that's offtopic.
The new most overused tag on/.? Maybe. Personally, I prefer the line from Half-Life "We've assured the administrator that nothing will go wrong." Then again, it's probably hard to get that inflection in tag form.
It isn't at all the fault of the people who actually broke the law? With what proof? An IP address? The RIAA lawsuit carpet-bombing are civil issues and simply don't have to hassle with the burden of proof a criminal case would have.
In fact, with the exception of one high-profile slam-dunk case for the RIAA with a judgment of a quarter million dollars for the guilty music pirate, they have dropped every single other case that actually gets beyond a settlement phase into the bonafide legal system. And even then they drop the cases after shaking them down with subpoenas and discovery and other abuses of process with the hopes to bankrupt them and teach them a lesson.
RIAA shouldn't have the power to demand a list of students with certain IP addresses for what they think is happening any more than I have the right to demand the name of the person using the IP address who I suspect was cheating in my FPS server. The POLICE and other law enforcement are the ones who should have the power to do that, with the burden of criminal just cause to obtain a warrant.
If it's really a matter of law, why not just file a complaint with law ENFORCEMENT? I'll answer: to game the system because they know once casual sharing actually gets tested and appealed upwards then so very many of the copyright and DMCA clauses are in trouble under judicial review.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet, when I play a game, I'll admit, I'm not playing glaring attention to these faults. The last thing that really bothered me in games was 16-bit color banding and I haven't seen any of that in, oh, like 3 or 4 years.
The gamer side of me agrees with Carmack on things looking cool who cares if it's wrong, the geek side of me is angry and demands it be pixel-accurate.
That's the government's line for everything that violates the rights of the citizenry. That and the children.
Forgiveness? Pfft. In this day in age, you know how long it took for me to find this pitchfork?
Next time, *I* get the torch.
We're not talking about the current technology, we're talking about the future. As in whether Ray Tracing is the Future of Games.
Graphics hardware has evolved into huge parallel general-purpose stream processors capable of obscene numbers of FLOPs per second... yet we're still clinging tenaciously to the old safety blanket of a mesh of tesselated triangles and projecting textures onto them.
And it makes sense: the industry is really, really good at pushing them around. Sort of how like internal combustion engines are pretty much the only game in town until alternative save themselves from the vapor.
Nvidia, either by being wise or shortsighted, is discounting ray-tracing. ATI is trailing right now so they'd probably do well to hedge their bets on the polar opposite of where Nvidia is going.
3D modelling starts out in abstractions anyway with deformations and curves and all sorts of things that are relatively easy to describe with pure mathematics. Converting it all to mesh approximations of what was sculpted was, and still is, pretty much just a hack to get things to run at acceptable real-time speeds.
Saying CS grads don't need "excessive" math and science is sort of like saying doctors don't need "excessive" biology and chemistry. After all, doctors have dosing guidelines, medications approved to treat conditions are all indexed, and the labs do the blood/urine/other analysis and red flag measured traits out of bounds.
Personally, I think the science needs to stay in Computer Science not because of what you're going to do today, but what you're going to do tomorrow. Higher maths and hard (as opposed to soft) sciences mercilessly teach problem solving and deduction, shake the foundations of any man foolish enough to ignore simplification, and demand understanding not so much of HOW things are done but WHY things are done in that way.
I'm not saying someone without that experience can't code well, not at all. Some people are just naturally gifted at thinking through problems and algorithms and following the natural order of things. Others, plain and simple, struggle. Hard corequisites force the sort of muscle memory one needs to properly apply the science to the practice.
I know I'd much prefer to drive an engineered car than one plodged together by a mechanic.
Sounds like you really know how to get the computer's O.
Hey-ooo! Thanks, I'll be here all week.
TFA seems to indicate that his complaint is that he has 3G phones that last just as long as the non-3G iPhone... the fact that it takes extra energy isn't lost on him but rather it should have had 3G.
To have it use 3G and maintain it's current battery life might have taken extra engineering to squeeze more energy efficiency out of it, or a slightly more energetic battery. Wozniak doesn't strike me as a "product-cycle schedule is more important that the hardware" kind of guy.
Who's using their home wiring to transmit power across any relevant distances? I don't think GP is referring to replacing AC with DC, just separating the two without a collection of bulky black boxes. I've got more than just a handful of wall warts on my various power strips. 70% of mine deliver 5 volts down cablinb 6 feet or less to a proprietary adapter for my phone or router or cable box or fax machine etc etc etc.
It's pretty inefficient to have the same type of circuitry replicated time and time again when it could be at least consolidated a little. If there was a uniform standard for the tail ends of those cables, all intercompatible for different voltages (like keying the plug to keep accidents from happening), then this AC-DC conversion could happen right on the powerstrip level.
I have a dream of a four conductor GND/5/9/12 DC volt cable that one day will directly connect a streamlined powersupply built-in to a "room power strip" with a device that could mix and match those lines to get whatever voltage they need: 5, 9, 12 (obviously) plus 3, 4, and 7 by being a marginally clever - one day right here on Earth little black routers and black force feedback joysticks will be able to use the same cables as little white cellphones and white battery chargers as sisters and brothers.
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. - John Keats
The Castro regime tells the poor citizenry that the US embargo is why they suffer, yet for tourists armed with US dollars and Euros, it's nothing but the finest from the shining jewel of the caribbean.
Next time you're there, and you're in private with a local, ask about where their family is from and where they grew up. Build a rapport and then ask about them about the real cuba, not what the travel agent will tell you. If you're feeling inquisitive, give them a camera phone and ask them to take some snapshots and bring it back to you. You'll be surprised what you'll see off the beaten path of the Michael Moore tour.
You don't have to believe either me or parent. Just look at the evidence: if things are so wonderful in Cuba, why would people risk life and limb on barely seaworthy makeshift rafts through shark infested waters just to grab a clumpful of US soil? Are these the actions of citizens of nation that's not really all that bad off?
When you're the only candidate on the ballot, have no term limits, and any contenders to the office find their limbs chopped off and families murdered, yeah, I guess your reign can last as long as you want it to, old age not withstanding.
Heh, another net positive that Bush can claim credit for even though he had no hand in it's happening.
Repairman: Yup, here's your problem. Someone set this thing to evil.
I sure wish I could call for google to block searches that wind up returning my competitors' sites in the name of the children.
Well, the 3.5" floppy had a pretty good run.
There has been some research done in this area. It's not really intentional, but the nature of the CCD sensors. When they're made, they have a target count on how many megapixels it has and not all of them (at least short of research labs) are functional.
Sometimes you can see specifications like "12 Megapixels, 11.1 effective".
These defects are scattered among the surface of the CCD and are statistically unique from one camera to another, even among the same model. While the photos often aren't saved in raw formats, I'd wager if they find a picture of something illegal and wanted to prove your camera took the picture, it'd be trivial to take some pictures with it and match the output files' flaws even with the JPEG encoding by using a control camera of the same shot.
Like how they do ballistic analysis by finding a suspect's gun and fire off a few rounds and compare with rounds found at the scene of a crime.
As the saying goes: Republicans have no heart and Democrats have no brain.
Since I don't consider myself either I suppose I lack both a heart and a brain, but, thems the breaks.
Exactly. The part I find amusing about the whole thing is that the walk out reeks of the politics and red v blue, but the net effect is, amazingly enough, that the surveilance immunity didn't get to happen. Net effect: good?
It's like me being an ass and cutting off someone in traffic who's going really slow, but it turns out they were falling asleep at the wheel and my assholery jolted them awake and made them pull over after recognizing how sleepy they are.
The new most overused tag on
In fact, with the exception of one high-profile slam-dunk case for the RIAA with a judgment of a quarter million dollars for the guilty music pirate, they have dropped every single other case that actually gets beyond a settlement phase into the bonafide legal system. And even then they drop the cases after shaking them down with subpoenas and discovery and other abuses of process with the hopes to bankrupt them and teach them a lesson.
RIAA shouldn't have the power to demand a list of students with certain IP addresses for what they think is happening any more than I have the right to demand the name of the person using the IP address who I suspect was cheating in my FPS server. The POLICE and other law enforcement are the ones who should have the power to do that, with the burden of criminal just cause to obtain a warrant.
If it's really a matter of law, why not just file a complaint with law ENFORCEMENT? I'll answer: to game the system because they know once casual sharing actually gets tested and appealed upwards then so very many of the copyright and DMCA clauses are in trouble under judicial review.