Comment Re:Regardless of any warning (Score 2) 86
Another way to cripple Equifax is to freeze our credit reports, which denies Equifax the income it makes from charging corporations for our data.
Same story here with a Whirlpool HE front-loader. The washer quickly developed a moldy smell. The clothes often came out of the machine with completely dry spots because of inadequate water levels. It started leaking a few months ago. We replaced the logic board and the front door baffle only to have the problems return. All this despite taking all the preventative steps and using the recommended products as directed.
The service techs that came out to deal with the machine had the same story as well -- these front-loading HE washers just do not work due to the difficulty in meeting the new efficiency requirements, and the manufacturers will not design them to do so, since it would cut into their profit margins and reduce demand.
I am also now thinking of purchasing Speed Queen while they are still available.
Also notable -- there is a class-action lawsuit pending against Whirlpool, and it looks like it's getting some traction: http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...
While I'm sure it would allow customized algorithms, they would have to be rather unique to not be handled by the current state of geometry/vertex/fragment shaders. Are they thinking some of non-triangular geometry?
The FA mentions voxel rendering for Minecraft-type applications. Although volume rendering can be achieved with traditional hardware accelerated surface primitives, there are many algorithms that are more naturally described and implemented using data structures that don't translate so easily to hardware accelerated primitives.
Constructive solid geometry, vector based graphics, and ray tracing are also not such a nice fit to OpenGL and DirectX APIs. You don't always want to have to tessellate geometry that has an analytic expression, such as conics, rational quadratics, b-splines, and NURBS, so a more software-oriented approach can provide better renderings for those types of mathematical objects.
The challenge here is that graphics primitives that APIs such as OpenGL provide are of course those that the hardware can most readily accelerate. If you don't use primitives and operations that can be massively parallel then you may not get much use out of the hardware.
What's interesting there is we say it reflects reality because it makes the calculations easier.
That really is the most interesting thing in this discussion. Essentially we are making a leap of faith, that simpler models are more likely to be true as long as they continue to support the data and allow us to make predictions. But it is at root an aesthetic judgement: beauty is truth, and truth is beautiful. It is the essence of rationality.
It's cool to see how Feynman's diagrams may be like the epicycles of the earth-centered view of the universe: they can be made to work as long as you keep refining the model, adding loops within loops within loops. But with this new breakthrough, all that can be thrown away for a much simpler model that leads to deeper insights. And those deeper insights are awe-inspiring: locality and unitarity as emergent phenomena.
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.
