Lockerbie bomber Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi released from prison

redditron · 5年前

Well, I guess that he has paid his dues. I assume everyone is going to leave this man alone.

redditron · 6年前

Respect!

mariox19 · 6年前

They'd probably tell Bob Dylan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dennis Kucinich to do the same. Hamlet, too. And to hell with them. These pharmacologically perfected children of the global village monoculture might be ready for the Brave New World, but I am not and I will go down swinging.

andymason · 6年前

Same shit! New Sack!

bobby_badass · 6年前

Ask John Cougar I mean John Cougar Mellencamp Oh, I mean John Mellencamp

But if your name isn't really Bobby Badass, and is really Seymour Lipschitz. Maybe you go with the pseudonym.

IsraGeek · 6年前

Why is "filling in" (read the article) a good thing? Perhaps depressed people are the people who can't lie to themselves.

BlueBeard · 6年前

I am amazed about how long Pujols is holding out as "clean". He has the physique of a comic book superhero and numbers like Babe Ruth. Maybe Selig's policy is to let them get to 500 homers (Manny, Palmeiro, A-Rod, Sosa, McGwire, Bonds, Sheffield) before making an example of them. I believe Andruw Jones is probably back on the juice this year, too. Slugging percentage up by about .350. Hmmm.

bobovski · 6年前

Sounds like Crosby is preparing excuses for a loss to Washington. He needs some major PR coaching. He has to get over the fact that people just like Ovechkin for who he his and his freewheeling lifestyle and play. Let this matter get settled on the ice.

slarty · 6年前

Are pinecone suppositories good for hemorrhoidal pain?

redditron · 6年前

I am going to counter their move by raising my indifference level to 6. Take that!

hhh333 · 6年前

What's really great about O3D is that it throws down the gauntlet to Adobe Flash. Adobe has been resisting putting decent 3D support in Flash, not wanting cannibalize the Shockwave market. The problems is that they forgot one axiom of business, "If you don't cannibalize your own markets, eventually someone else will do it for you."

So, if there are any Adobe-teers out there in Reddit-land. Tell your PHB's that Flash needs real 3D support in version 11. Tell them to kill off Shockwave and its ridiculous scripting language, too.

I would really love to see Adobe and Google duke it out for what will be the web 3D platform. I hope this also spurs Mozilla to put more effort at c3dl.org (the 3D canvas). It could have done what 03D has done, and may still, but development has been slow like molasses.

BLG432 · 6年前

Did they get Lieberman, too?

pasat · 6年前

Well, I am a raytracing fan, too. I would prefer graphics on my PC to look like Pixar movies as soon as possible. Programming in OpenGL for typical GPUs is just hack after hack. I am doubtful that Caustic has brought things that far forward in the year 2009. I suspect that we are still about 5 to 10 years out on this challenging problem.

pasat · 6年前

Reading memory requires, at least briefly, control over the address lines to the memory chips. This is not something that inherently happens in parallel, even for reads. Special kinds of multi-ported memory hardware does exist, but rarely exceed more than two simultaneous readers. More generally, in a uniform-memory-architecture parallel processing system, all processors see the same memory. They probably have their own local caches, too. If the scene and its indices are too large to fit in the cache of each processor, processors will be reading memory. Modern memory controllers are pretty good at handling 4 or 8 CPU's read the same memory simultaneous. This problem is not solved in general with linear performance characteristics.

Second point, if GPU's had harder work to do than Raytracers, NVidia wouldn't be in business. Some really smart people are working on computer graphics hardware and software. Traditional GPUs would have gone away a long time ago if what they didn't wasn't orders of magnitude simpler to compute than what Raytracing with global illumination entails.

pasat · 6年前

Requirements on scene complexity and motion of the scene's objects and lights are needed for to answer the following questions:

1) How they keep the GI calculations up-to-date when the scene changes are very likely to be done on the main CPU.

2) How they compute closest ray/object intersections with hundreds of thousands of objects in the scene.

I believe, and maybe I am wrong, that the scene must be fully in the memory of the raytracing board in order for the speedup to occur, and furthermore that this board must be implementing a spatial index, or it could not achieve any speedup. The memory bandwidth to get the scene changes into the raytracing hardware is an interesting problem and so is the ability to keep spatial indexing structures up-to-date. Spatial indices are also a memory-for-speed tradeoff in raytracing implementations. How much memory do they have on this board? If there are lots of little CPUs how are they all accessing the index structures simultaneously. The memory contention isn't too bad for a ray tracer on a 4 or 8 core general purpose computer. I have doubts that this scales well for lots of little processors. The parallelism in traditional GPUs is possible because they are accessing memory in a very controlled fashion, vertices, textures, etc. They are never having to deal with the kind of ugly, branching, large data structures like kd-trees and/or octrees.

pasat · 6年前

These goals are stated to make sure they are not doing some hack.

1) The minimum triangles could probably be stated better for a ray-tracer as some lower limit on scene complexity. Ray tracers are "free" in geometric complexity if the implementation uses a good spatial index to help find intersections without having to check too many possibilities for each ray. Since Caustic's solution is part hardware, implementing a good octree or kd-tree in hardware and keeping it up to date with objects in motion is a non-trivial task.

3) Shaders are not merely what NVidia and ATI build right now. The term somes from Pixar's Renderman. You very much do need shaders for realistic looking details on surfaces. If you don't, you end up using texture mapping instead, which although popular in Quake and kin, has a sort of inherent cheesiness to it. Running shaders costs CPU cycles and the reason it's a good requirements is to make sure that Caustic is not taking shortcuts.

4) Global illumination is NOT free. Maybe the raytracers you use pre-process each frame render with a radiosity or photon mapping pass. Without Global Illumination you do not get the same quality of color bleeding, soft shadows etc. The raytracer I use, POVRay, does offer these options. However, just like shaders, the additional realism comes at a cost of processing power.

5) It does matter to require Caustic's demo to have everything in motion. This ensures that they have taken no short cuts in their illumination and spatial indexing implementation.

6) Raytracers do oversample to implement anti-aliasing. To get a nice-looking picture, you must have a minimum of 4 rays per pixel, usually more.

techlol · 6年前

IPv6, for people old enough to remember, is a lot like ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) that was going to replace ethernet and many other layer-2 technologies. The problem was, and is with IPv6 is that it was too complex, and not backward compatible with anything. It is classic case of second system effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

It also was written without any respect of "Worse is Better"

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdf

IPv6 has similar problems. Had the packet and address structure been built differently they could have made it backwardly compatible with V4. But, no. The onanistic worship of the flat 64-bit network, 64-bit within network addresses killed any chance of compatibility. They could have taken one of the reserved ranges within IPv4 and made it a prefix into the newer, longer addresses, but no. All of the 4-over-6, 6-over-4 tunnels and gateways suck, and are nearly incomprehensible to the average guys that maintain company networks.

The original internet protocols were written by a close-knit group of hackers, IPv6 is an industry-giant-poisoned piece of junk.

vic42482 · 6年前

Steampunk is to geeky guys as rhinestone-encrusted cell phone cases are to Paris Hilton.

eterps · 6年前

This is a great article, explaining the state of adoption of web standards in a clear concise fashion. Your comment seems to want to introduce fear, uncertainty and doubt about the validity of the author's perspective.

Maybe you are not a paid agent of M$ wasting people's time on article comments, but it wouldn't be the first time.

eterps · 6年前

Microsoft is essentially desperate to stay relevant. Blow-hards like Ballmer don't convey the fear, but know damn well the the Internet/HTTP/HTML IS the platform. They have a very high-level strategy to drag their feet in the most painful fashion and are praying that they can outlast the competition in a war of attrition.

eterps · 6年前

Nice FUD, MicroTroll.

bnporter · 6年前

Right. Just like the rest of Scientology.

redditron · 6年前

OK, then. Shouldn't Bob Marley be alive?

bananatalk · 6年前

Black olive consumption is down. This is how they deal with the surplus.

vajav · 6年前

Fight the Power!!

redditron

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