Does anyone know why 1400x1050 and 1600x1200 displays, which are now commonplace in mid and high end laptops, can't be found anywhere as stand-alone monitors? You can pay through the nose for the best in lcd displays and still be stuck with a 1280x1024 monitor (with good angle, bright image, dadada...) Why???
Being a major linux fan (and fortunate enough to use it all day at work), I have to admit that in the large image performance area the Gimp just isn't quite there yet. In fact, Photoshop is about the only reason why Windoze hasn't been completely wiped out of my home machine.
Try edititing your typical PhotoCD image (3072x2048x24bpp) in both, even after giving the Gimp as much memory as possible (and on a machine with enough memory to do the job well, like 128 or 256Mb), and the difference will be obvious. It is true that tweaking the gimp's memory setting helps a lot (and thanks for the tip), but it's still very noticeably slower than photoshop.
But we should take this as constructive information: it's actually amazing that in such a short time and without the $$$$ of Adobe the gimp is so close to photoshop in many areas, and even flat out better in others. But the Adobe guys have had many years to optimize their algorithms to death, so it should be no surprise to see differences in this area. Remember, this program is used to prepare 300Mb drum scans for LightJet printing by pros, so optimum performance is absolutely essential.
Realizing this drawback simply points to one area of the gimp where the developers should now focus their attention a little more, especially now that the foundation of the program is so solid. Putting blinders on doesn't help anyone improve their work: if anyone, the open source community should be the pickiest critics of our own work. That's how it will become superior to everything else: because we won't take second place as good enough (not because we ignore our shortcomings, that's Microsoft's job).
As for the article linked to in "the core laws of quantum mechanics...":
There's a slim chance of this not being a crackpot's work, but I seriously doubt it. Over the years I've seen a fair share of physics "outside geniuses" who've discovered something which radically transforms our world view and which every scientist before them had missed. Every single one of those has turned out to be a complete crackpot.
Before you turn on the flamethrowers: yes, I'm fully aware that Einstein was a patent office clerk and not a university physicist at the time, but if you read any of his 1905 papers they are solid science from the first word to the last. This is not!
A few tips:
- It's too long (86 pages) and wordy, full of adjectives. Typical of crackpots in love with their own work but with zero experience in actual scientific writing.
- These guys don't know how to use latex properly (everything is in text mode), which basically every working physicist uses to communicate.
- There's way too little math for something that "deep". And what little there is doesn't look promising. I didn't read the whole thing (barely skimmed it) but one "theorem" (Causal Trace Theo, p. 52) is a linear algebra triviality, while their use of "mixed states" is incorrect. In statistical quantum mechanics, a mixed state (more properly referred to as a mixed ensemble) is an ensemble of states which can *not* be expressed as a linear combination of states. This is fundamentally different from simply expressing any pure state as a linear combination of other states, which is nothing but a choice of basis (another linear algebra triviality). Mixed ensembles are precisely what makes statistical quantum physics different from "regular" quantum mechanics of simple systems, and is a topic not covered by most undergraduate quantum mech. books.
As I said earlier, there's a non-vanishing probability that these guys aren't crackpots. If you ask me, it's comparable to that of a cracked eggshell reassembling itself: non-zero in the purest statistical sense, zero for all practical purposes.
Well, for the sake of argument, I'd say the theory of gravity has been better understood and more accurate over the years.
You may mean the classical theory of gravity. Noone has a clue yet as to how to get a decent (renormalizable) quantum gravity theory, short of using strings. And we're still a looong way from getting numbers out of strings, even though it looks very promising.
OTOH, QED has been tested to insane experimental accuracy, is known to be renormalizable (to arbitrary order) and since perturbation theory converges fast (alpha=1/137), we actually can compute pretty much anything that can be experimentally tested.
So I think it's safe to say that as far as the fundamental physics of light-matter interaction is concerned, we have a very good grasp of what's going on. Which doesn't mean we have a theory of everything: strong interactions are still poorly understood (perturbation theory doesn't work well in general and non-perturbative calculations are crazily hard), quantum gravity is still on the run, and strings as of yet contain many unresolved problems.
Does this matter to computer graphics? Not really... because computation power, not lack of an accurate model, is the limiting factor for all but the simplest simulations.
Actually, I can't think of any day to day computer graphics application where quantum effects matter anyway: classical electromagnetism gives you everything you need to compute light transmission/reflection/diffraction effects for any rendering you want. So good or bad understanding of light/matter interactions at the quantum level is just irrelevant as far as CG's goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know why 1400x1050 and 1600x1200 displays, which are now commonplace in mid and high end laptops, can't be found anywhere as stand-alone monitors? You can pay through the nose for the best in lcd displays and still be stuck with a 1280x1024 monitor (with good angle, bright image, dadada...) Why???
Being a major linux fan (and fortunate enough to use it all day at work), I have to admit that in the large image performance area the Gimp just isn't quite there yet. In fact, Photoshop is about the only reason why Windoze hasn't been completely wiped out of my home machine.
Try edititing your typical PhotoCD image (3072x2048x24bpp) in both, even after giving the Gimp as much memory as possible (and on a machine with enough memory to do the job well, like 128 or 256Mb), and the difference will be obvious. It is true that tweaking the gimp's memory setting helps a lot (and thanks for the tip), but it's still very noticeably slower than photoshop.
But we should take this as constructive information: it's actually amazing that in such a short time and without the $$$$ of Adobe the gimp is so close to photoshop in many areas, and even flat out better in others. But the Adobe guys have had many years to optimize their algorithms to death, so it should be no surprise to see differences in this area. Remember, this program is used to prepare 300Mb drum scans for LightJet printing by pros, so optimum performance is absolutely essential.
Realizing this drawback simply points to one area of the gimp where the developers should now focus their attention a little more, especially now that the foundation of the program is so solid. Putting blinders on doesn't help anyone improve their work: if anyone, the open source community should be the pickiest critics of our own work. That's how it will become superior to everything else: because we won't take second place as good enough (not because we ignore our shortcomings, that's Microsoft's job).
As for the article linked to in "the core laws of quantum mechanics ...":
There's a slim chance of this not being a crackpot's work, but I seriously doubt it. Over the years I've seen a fair share of physics "outside geniuses" who've discovered something which radically transforms our world view and which every scientist before them had missed. Every single one of those has turned out to be a complete crackpot.
Before you turn on the flamethrowers: yes, I'm fully aware that Einstein was a patent office clerk and not a university physicist at the time, but if you read any of his 1905 papers they are solid science from the first word to the last. This is not!
A few tips:
- It's too long (86 pages) and wordy, full of adjectives. Typical of crackpots in love with their own work but with zero experience in actual scientific writing.
- These guys don't know how to use latex properly (everything is in text mode), which basically every working physicist uses to communicate.
- There's way too little math for something that "deep". And what little there is doesn't look promising. I didn't read the whole thing (barely skimmed it) but one "theorem" (Causal Trace Theo, p. 52) is a linear algebra triviality, while their use of "mixed states" is incorrect. In statistical quantum mechanics, a mixed state (more properly referred to as a mixed ensemble) is an ensemble of states which can *not* be expressed as a linear combination of states. This is fundamentally different from simply expressing any pure state as a linear combination of other states, which is nothing but a choice of basis (another linear algebra triviality). Mixed ensembles are precisely what makes statistical quantum physics different from "regular" quantum mechanics of simple systems, and is a topic not covered by most undergraduate quantum mech. books.
As I said earlier, there's a non-vanishing probability that these guys aren't crackpots. If you ask me, it's comparable to that of a cracked eggshell reassembling itself: non-zero in the purest statistical sense, zero for all practical purposes.
You may mean the classical theory of gravity. Noone has a clue yet as to how to get a decent (renormalizable) quantum gravity theory, short of using strings. And we're still a looong way from getting numbers out of strings, even though it looks very promising.
OTOH, QED has been tested to insane experimental accuracy, is known to be renormalizable (to arbitrary order) and since perturbation theory converges fast (alpha=1/137), we actually can compute pretty much anything that can be experimentally tested.
So I think it's safe to say that as far as the fundamental physics of light-matter interaction is concerned, we have a very good grasp of what's going on. Which doesn't mean we have a theory of everything: strong interactions are still poorly understood (perturbation theory doesn't work well in general and non-perturbative calculations are crazily hard), quantum gravity is still on the run, and strings as of yet contain many unresolved problems.
Does this matter to computer graphics? Not really... because computation power, not lack of an accurate model, is the limiting factor for all but the simplest simulations.
Actually, I can't think of any day to day computer graphics application where quantum effects matter anyway: classical electromagnetism gives you everything you need to compute light transmission/reflection/diffraction effects for any rendering you want. So good or bad understanding of light/matter interactions at the quantum level is just irrelevant as far as CG's goes.