Comment Re:Were they made by Sony? (Score 1) 224
The times I've had to get that crap off a system I felt I needed a priest rather than a technician. Ugh.
Comment Re:Is spam still spam if it's relevant? (Score 1) 284
(For discussion's sake I'm assuming against all hope and reason that it wouldn't be ultra-aggressive, malign Futurespam(tm) which constantly fills your browser and email and HUD with exquisitely personalized 3D video, surround audio and complimentary pheromones.)
At that point I'd be annoyed at the tunnel vision it involves - you'd see a bunch of stuff you're demonstrably interested in, but what about the things out of left field you wouldn't have acquired an interest in until you went "hey, what the.."?
Might be useful for some people, but for those of us with a lot of interests and every desire to acquire more, it'd fall short. You can't personalize advertising for things which haven't wound up as part of someone's personality, after all.
Comment Re:Necessity (Score 1) 206
This is likely to be an extremely unpopular view but there are very legitimate reasons for a state to seek limits in the distribution of news, and limits to what its citizens communicate to outsiders. Most of these actions truly do have the welfare of the citizens and their crucial security in mind. These things are done to preserve their life most of the time.
No there aren't, no they don't, and no they aren't.
Comment Re:Number One! (Score 1) 356
The one where her character was talking about Turhan? Yeah.
Comment Re:c'mon ppl,this is really sad,please hold the jo (Score 4, Interesting) 356
Having (briefly) met her once, I think she'd appreciate the cascade of awful, awful Trek jokes that would spring up at the news of something like this.
Or the Scotty route, which ideally done results in a thundering hangover and the inability to find at least half your clothes.
Comment Re:Number One! (Score 4, Interesting) 356
I loved the kind of stealth eulogy for Gene she gave in her appearance there.
Submission + - Take your corporate PC home on an iPod
MsManhattan writes: RingCube Technologies Inc. today will release software that enables users to store an image of their PC desktop on a USB device and then access their corporate applications, files and network privileges on any Windows-based PC. The package, MojoPac Enterprise Suite, works with a variety of USB-attached devices, including hard drives, flash drives and iPods. Because all of the settings and files reside on the USB device, the data is safe in the event that a worker's laptop is stolen — provided, of course, that the USB device is not stolen along with it. 'Companies today have a lot of remote access needs, and they are also trying to control software and access to systems,' one analyst said. 'This gives employees access to the applications that they need remotely, but still gives control to IT.'
Submission + - Google exec talks about R&D opportunities abro
StonyandCher writes: In this interview with Computerworld, Kannan Pashupathy, the director of Google's international engineering operations, talks about hiring staff overseas, cultural obstacles, and the challenges and opportunities that face Google's expanding international R&D operations.
From the interview: "In addition to your raw smarts and your analytical thinking and your problem solving and your grade-point average, we do a very strong culture-fit test.
Part of that culture-fit test is to look for people who have an open mindset, people who think there is a richness in different cultures, that they can learn from everybody and hierarchy is not important and ideas are. If you're in the company, you're already somehow predisposed to thinking or at least aligning yourself in that direction.
From the interview: "In addition to your raw smarts and your analytical thinking and your problem solving and your grade-point average, we do a very strong culture-fit test.
Part of that culture-fit test is to look for people who have an open mindset, people who think there is a richness in different cultures, that they can learn from everybody and hierarchy is not important and ideas are. If you're in the company, you're already somehow predisposed to thinking or at least aligning yourself in that direction.
Submission + - Book Review - OpenGL SuperBible (Fourth Edition)
Martin Ecker writes: "The OpenGL SuperBible, in its vastly expanded fourth edition and as the latest addition to the Addison-Wesley Professional OpenGL series, "strives to provide the world's best introduction to not only OpenGL, but 3D graphics programming in general" according to the authors. A tough goal to achieve. Read on to see if the book keeps its promise.
The OpenGL SuperBible (http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321498828), quite a heavy-weight with its more than 1200 pages, is split into three parts, appropriately called the old testament, the new testament, and the apocrypha. Arguably, appendix C, an OpenGL API reference with more than 350 pages, could be considered a fourth part even though it isn't listed as such in the table of contents.
The old testament provides an introduction to both OpenGL programming with the fixed-function pipeline and to the basics of 3D graphics programming. The new testament then moves on to describe how shaders, small programs that run on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), allow us to use the programmable features of today's powerful graphics cards. It also contains information on recent advancements of the OpenGL API, such as floating-point textures, pixel buffer objects and framebuffer objects. The apocrypha closes the book with a discussion of how to interface OpenGL with the underlying operating system.
The first part of the book — the old testament — consists of 14 chapters with around 500 pages total. The first chapter gives a general overview of 3D graphics and the various effects that the remaining chapters in this part of the book are going to show how to implement with OpenGL. The writing style is very casual and easy to follow. Especially in these first chapters, the book is very light on mathematics, but does explain some of the basics, such as coordinate systems, some simple vector algebra, and matrices. The second chapter introduces OpenGL and immediately presents a few simple sample programs to wet the reader's appetite. The programs are analyzed in detail with explanations to nearly all lines of code. It should be easy for a beginner to follow and understand the code.
The next few chapters gradually introduce more and more OpenGL API functions intermixed with new 3D graphics concepts, such as rendering points, lines, and polygons in various ways, how to use geometric transformations and projections, and how to use the fixed-function pipeline to render lit objects with simple projective shadows. Eventually, texture mapping is introduced with pretty much everything you need to know about the topic. In particular, multitexturing, the various filtering modes — even anisotropic filtering, texture compression, and using textures with point sprites are discussed. The book continues with an overview of curves and surfaces as supported by the OpenGL Utility library (GLU, for short). The book dates itself a bit here, since this is a software-only, and thus fairly low-performance feature that is rarely ever used in professional software. The same applies to the discussion of feedback and selection, which are not implemented on current graphics hardware and therefore not widely used. After this short excursion down the OpenGL memory lane the book moves on to the fairly recent addition of occlusion queries. Occlusion queries are used to detect complex, occluded objects in the rendered scene, so that they need not be rendered. Most modern-day graphics software that renders dense scenes with a lot of overdraw, such as video games, uses this feature. The old testament closes with a chapter on depth textures, which are prominently applied to render real-time shadow effects.
After laying a solid foundation for 3D graphics programming with OpenGL in the first part, the second part of the book — the new testament — deals with the new era of graphics programming that started a few years ago when the first programmable graphics card came into the market. This part consists of 4 chapters with about 100 pages. The first chapter provides an overview of the programmable pipeline and explains which features of the fixed-function were replaced by shaders. This introduction is followed by a sample program that gives a first glimpse of GLSL, the OpenGL shading language, in which shaders are written. The next chapter is all about vertex shaders and how to implement simple lighting models, fog, and vertex transformations using them. The third chapter is about fragment shading with some interesting post-processing and procedural texture mapping shaders. The final chapter of this part of the book discusses advanced buffers, such as floating-point textures and color buffers, and pixel buffer and framebuffer objects — all recent additions to OpenGL that allow to achieve various effects, such as rendering directly to a texture or creating vertex data on the GPU.
The final part of the book — the apocrypha — consists of 4 chapters explaining how to integrate OpenGL with the underlying operating system, in particular with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux plus various other Unix flavors. The last chapter of this part of the book is about OpenGL ES, which is a version of OpenGL designed to be used especially on embedded system devices, in particular mobile phones and PDAs, to render real-time, interactive 3D graphics.
The book has a lot of images and diagrams throughout, though unfortunately not all of them are in color. There are however 32 color plates of the most interesting images in the middle of the book. The complete source code of the book, and even precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, can be downloaded from the book's webpage http://www.opengl.org/superbible.
If you are new to both 3D graphics programming and OpenGL with a bit of C/C++ programming experience and you are eager to learn how to develop interactive programs with OpenGL, then this book is exactly right for you. The book is written in an easy to understand style without skimming the details. It is the most comprehensive introduction to OpenGL that doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge I have seen to date. If you already have experience with another graphics API or are well-versed in 3D graphics in general, but want to familiarize yourself with OpenGL, you might also want to consider the OpenGL Programming Guide, also known as the Red Book, which I've reviewed previously http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/01/ 1446257.
All in all, the OpenGL SuperBible succeeds fairly well in keeping its promise to be the best introduction to OpenGL and 3D graphics programming. Even after you're done working your way through the main parts of the book you will always come back to the handy OpenGL API reference in the appendix of the book.
About the review author:
The author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios http://www.highmoonstudios.com/ in sunny California."
The OpenGL SuperBible (http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321498828), quite a heavy-weight with its more than 1200 pages, is split into three parts, appropriately called the old testament, the new testament, and the apocrypha. Arguably, appendix C, an OpenGL API reference with more than 350 pages, could be considered a fourth part even though it isn't listed as such in the table of contents.
The old testament provides an introduction to both OpenGL programming with the fixed-function pipeline and to the basics of 3D graphics programming. The new testament then moves on to describe how shaders, small programs that run on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), allow us to use the programmable features of today's powerful graphics cards. It also contains information on recent advancements of the OpenGL API, such as floating-point textures, pixel buffer objects and framebuffer objects. The apocrypha closes the book with a discussion of how to interface OpenGL with the underlying operating system.
The first part of the book — the old testament — consists of 14 chapters with around 500 pages total. The first chapter gives a general overview of 3D graphics and the various effects that the remaining chapters in this part of the book are going to show how to implement with OpenGL. The writing style is very casual and easy to follow. Especially in these first chapters, the book is very light on mathematics, but does explain some of the basics, such as coordinate systems, some simple vector algebra, and matrices. The second chapter introduces OpenGL and immediately presents a few simple sample programs to wet the reader's appetite. The programs are analyzed in detail with explanations to nearly all lines of code. It should be easy for a beginner to follow and understand the code.
The next few chapters gradually introduce more and more OpenGL API functions intermixed with new 3D graphics concepts, such as rendering points, lines, and polygons in various ways, how to use geometric transformations and projections, and how to use the fixed-function pipeline to render lit objects with simple projective shadows. Eventually, texture mapping is introduced with pretty much everything you need to know about the topic. In particular, multitexturing, the various filtering modes — even anisotropic filtering, texture compression, and using textures with point sprites are discussed. The book continues with an overview of curves and surfaces as supported by the OpenGL Utility library (GLU, for short). The book dates itself a bit here, since this is a software-only, and thus fairly low-performance feature that is rarely ever used in professional software. The same applies to the discussion of feedback and selection, which are not implemented on current graphics hardware and therefore not widely used. After this short excursion down the OpenGL memory lane the book moves on to the fairly recent addition of occlusion queries. Occlusion queries are used to detect complex, occluded objects in the rendered scene, so that they need not be rendered. Most modern-day graphics software that renders dense scenes with a lot of overdraw, such as video games, uses this feature. The old testament closes with a chapter on depth textures, which are prominently applied to render real-time shadow effects.
After laying a solid foundation for 3D graphics programming with OpenGL in the first part, the second part of the book — the new testament — deals with the new era of graphics programming that started a few years ago when the first programmable graphics card came into the market. This part consists of 4 chapters with about 100 pages. The first chapter provides an overview of the programmable pipeline and explains which features of the fixed-function were replaced by shaders. This introduction is followed by a sample program that gives a first glimpse of GLSL, the OpenGL shading language, in which shaders are written. The next chapter is all about vertex shaders and how to implement simple lighting models, fog, and vertex transformations using them. The third chapter is about fragment shading with some interesting post-processing and procedural texture mapping shaders. The final chapter of this part of the book discusses advanced buffers, such as floating-point textures and color buffers, and pixel buffer and framebuffer objects — all recent additions to OpenGL that allow to achieve various effects, such as rendering directly to a texture or creating vertex data on the GPU.
The final part of the book — the apocrypha — consists of 4 chapters explaining how to integrate OpenGL with the underlying operating system, in particular with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux plus various other Unix flavors. The last chapter of this part of the book is about OpenGL ES, which is a version of OpenGL designed to be used especially on embedded system devices, in particular mobile phones and PDAs, to render real-time, interactive 3D graphics.
The book has a lot of images and diagrams throughout, though unfortunately not all of them are in color. There are however 32 color plates of the most interesting images in the middle of the book. The complete source code of the book, and even precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, can be downloaded from the book's webpage http://www.opengl.org/superbible.
If you are new to both 3D graphics programming and OpenGL with a bit of C/C++ programming experience and you are eager to learn how to develop interactive programs with OpenGL, then this book is exactly right for you. The book is written in an easy to understand style without skimming the details. It is the most comprehensive introduction to OpenGL that doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge I have seen to date. If you already have experience with another graphics API or are well-versed in 3D graphics in general, but want to familiarize yourself with OpenGL, you might also want to consider the OpenGL Programming Guide, also known as the Red Book, which I've reviewed previously http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/01
All in all, the OpenGL SuperBible succeeds fairly well in keeping its promise to be the best introduction to OpenGL and 3D graphics programming. Even after you're done working your way through the main parts of the book you will always come back to the handy OpenGL API reference in the appendix of the book.
About the review author:
The author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios http://www.highmoonstudios.com/ in sunny California."
