...in an expensive city. While the building looks awful from the outside, what's inside is beautiful IMHO, and would certainly be a 'solution' for people looking for a way to utilize their small expensive living space to the fullest. At least, I don't know of any large city that isn't expensive in terms of house prices.

One would wonder about humidity etc. though. The bed being stored away like that would be a recipe for - okay, you can fill that in yourself. And what about leaking etc. - if you'd even find out about that in time that is...

According to the statement on the IMSLP Journal, you could still reach the site through http://petruccilibrary.org/. It's up and running again though, but I still think I'll bookmark that one url as well.

From the journal: Workaround: You can still reach the site by using either petruccilibrary.org or petruccimusiclibrary.org Note, however, that some links on the site that refer to IMSLP.ORG may be broken; you will have to manually replace IMSLP.ORG with one of the two above domain names manually in the URL bar.

Yes, that's a good example of a relatively simple game still offering a lot of fun, but really, when you've finished everything, grown your yard and wisdom tree to enormous sizes, got all achievements, and can't seem to finish 'Survival endless' because you found (on the interwebs - yes, I'm a cheapskate) a strategy that still works when you're at round 99, the fun starts to dissipate somewhat - and so does the replayability, because why go back to do this all again...

Yes, I have this exact same experience. And even though there are some 'old gems' I still should try (Grim Fandango certainly being one of them), I also find that I've come to dislike certain games that I used to be quite fond of. For example all Sierra Online adventures, which seemed quite lengthy and rich in content at the time, now seem somewhat shallow and really short, even though I can appreciate the music or ambient sounds much more nowadays (or less, when I play a game with an awful soundtrack, such as Kings Quest V for that matter).

Currently, I only like games like HL2, L4D1 and 2, and some others. Civ 5 didn't manage to grab me yet, and all those fancy shooters don't seem interesting at all.

I think there are two reasons for this. One is that I used to marvel at the worlds in which I would be able to escape, but as I've grown older I've seen movies and read books which were much better in 'sucking me in', to the point that games' experiences just are too shallow to me. Even though games have one clear advantage over books, and that is the way in which a player can shape her/his own story.

The second reason is that several years ago, games seemed to become more and more advanced and pretty. Right now, the difference between a new game and one that has been out for, say, some years, just isn't big enough to get me all enthusiastic (admitted, I don't have the means to run such a game anyway). I used to marvel at all games reviews in the magazines; now, when I go to, say, GameSpot, chances are pretty much 50% that I'm bored to tears at what I see, no matter what graphics these games feature...

I'm pretty certain I got your point, actually. :) It's just that games don't need photo realism, so why use a very very math intensive method to render something perfectly when you can use a method that's just very math intensive to render something not perfectly but acceptable to the eyes of a game player nonetheless?

It'll always be that way: the time needed to ray trace a certain scene will always be more than what's needed to render the same scene using umpteen triangles, the textures of which can be enhanced by techniques like bump mapping and what-have-you. The amount of details in a ray traced scene would always be less than the amount of details in a scene that's rendered using 'tricks', because of performance trade-offs.

Yes, current games do stuff that's very math intensive. They might also have multiple methods for rendering the same thing: one for when it's up close and needs to be displayed very detailed, and several more optimized ones for other scenarios. John Carmacks career is pretty much built upon finding clever optimizations like that, enabling Id Software to come up with novel rendering engines (Mike Abrash talks about this in his articles 'Ramblings in Realtime', which make for a pretty interesting read, if you're somewhat into games programming). For ray tracing you'd still have to trace all rays, it's kind of hard to optimize that.

Plus, hardware would only be developed for something that has the potential of becoming widely adopted. The advent of semi-3D games like Wolfenstein, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D made a switch to real 3D very likely, so the gamble of developing 3D rendering hardware proved to be a very profitable one, and nowadays a PC without such hardware is virtually unthinkable. I don't see that happening with ray tracing. I mean, ray tracing a not-so-detailed scene requires a cloud of computers, while for rendering a highly detailed scene in Crysis nothing more than a good gaming PC is required.

From that page:

'(...) Moses simply wrote: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." (Genesis 1:1).'

However, it's not very probable that Moses wrote the entire book of Genesis, especially the first part.

And later: 'Accordingly, the psalmist David wrote the following:'

It's not even certain whether David himself has written all psalms attributed to him. Which is quite common knowledge in theological circles.

These aren't even nice tries, they seem more like attempts to be comical.

Judging the video clips in TFA it's the Wolfenstein remake they're ray tracing (with the BS Swastika replacements, by the way).

Ray tracing has been with us for many many years now. However, it's much too math intensive, so totally unsuitable for use in games. Apart from using it to pre-render scenes, which in turn can only be used as statical images.

The use of ray tracing in games doesn't have a future. Figuring out new tricks to get games to render ever more realistic graphics while retaining a playable frame rate does (it's basically what John Carmacks entire career is built upon).

Ray tracing is way too CPU-intensive to ever be used in actual games. However, to be able to render scenes so fast that you can actually play through them (somewhat), that's new.

The Source engine doesn't ray trace anything, it renders. As do all games. Ray tracing has always been used to create images (remember all those old, quite static games featuring beautiful, pre-rendered images?), just not real time.

This is Intel, not Id. It's a tech demo to show off what Intel's technology is capable of. Ray tracing scenes in real time was absolutely unthinkable just a few years back (and honestly I'm quite impressed with what they've achieved here, since ray tracing is about the most expensive (though also most realistic) way to render a scene in 3D).

And there I was, having misunderstood this and thinking you guys were talking about raisins. Now, I'm all for mentioning food in an otherwise somewhat sour political discussion.

That would indeed be a good thing, even though for example not keeping log files of user activity would be illegal in countries like The Netherlands, where keeping log files is mandatory.

In the eyes of your average consumer, it's illogical. You want to borrow my CD, so I give it to you. You want to borrow my MP3, so I copy it for you. That's all that average Joe will ever understand about this.

Seems like the thing's been done with for quite some time already - at least that's what I read on Spamhaus' site. So how come it's come up in TheRegister just now?

These people then are very skilful in passively gathering knowledge. Passiveness still is a good way to atrophy parts of your brain.