AMD supports OpenGL just fine? That's gotta be the quote of the day. If AMD ever supports OpenGL just fine I'll throw them a fucking parade. Kernel panicking and bringing the entire system to it's knees because AMD doesn't check to see if a target is attached to a shader output? Sloppy coding yes, but not an acceptable response by the driver as you have no idea where the crash is coming from.. No OpenGL error message, just a crashing system. GPU to GPU buffer copies don't work unless you do any other memory operations first on the target buffer on AMD... Numerical precision is often dodgy on AMD cards. Phantom shader errors on certain generations of cards with no error message string... just failure to compile. Hell there was a series of crashes with AMD cards just trying to bind and clear framebuffers that only ended up being fixed by a driver update. Allocating too many vbo ID's causes cascading memory consumption and kills your application. And those are just the bugs I remember off hand today (and these were for their supposedly "good" Windows drivers, I shudder to think how bad their Linux stuff is. )

If the spec is even remotely vague about something, it seems like AMD consistently chooses the least robust and slapdash manner to resolve that ambiguity.

As a side note I'm fairly certain AMD only opened up their drivers because they're so terrible at writing them they're hoping the community will do it for them. It's not altruism, it's bottom line they don't have the resources to do it well and decided to try and look good. It's just PR.

1) The framerate doesn't need to be optimized as they're not going for immersion, but rather the ability to look things over from novel angles in a semi natural way. In fact immersion might run counter to their goals in this situation.

2) The car models are probably extremely detailed and overmeshed even to guarantee that the model has high physical fidelity. A large amount of the performance in games that is lost in CAD is due to geometry bandwidth.

3) Also X-Ray mode implies some pretty interesting alpha blending type effects so they're probably losing most of their Z-Culling and line drawing also isn't as optimized in graphics hardware as most people don't use it. It's actually a selling point on several CAD workstation graphics cards that they accelerate line drawing.

4) The motion capture system tracking their hands and heads also probably introduces some level of system latency.

I am shocked! Shocked I say, that a company who's major VC investor sits on the board of Facebook was bought by Facebook.

Will this kill VR? Probably not. Is this going to usher in VR sooner? Maybe. Is this the wave of the future for social media? Probably not. Most people have no idea what the Oculus is nor do they care. The average person thinks you're a dork for wearing VR but will enjoy it for its novelty for a while. I say all this as someone who backed the Kickstarter and has a DK1.

VR is inherently anti-social and oriented for consumption of media. Most people want to hang out with their friends face to face and not in a virtual land because humans are hardwired for social contact (for the most part). Plus Facebook has an inherent asynchronous aspect that makes it appealing. It's a broadcast that people can respond to overtime. But VR demands equipment and attention. I don't see people having this commitment to VR for this sort of activity.

I honestly don't think it's just the technology not being there that held back VR all these years. The tech to do this has probably been here for about 6 to 10 years if the will to do it had been as well. I think the future of this sort of thing is much more likely in the field of Augmented Reality. Things that enhance your day to day life and help you complete tasks or activities. VR has some appeal for gaming/entertainment, but I think the only serious task I see for it might be teleoperation of robotic systems. Most of the time you want to be able to engage the world around you, not shut it out completely.

One last point, if VR is going to take off like people hope, we need rendering systems that can do real time photo realistic rendering of realistic scenes with serious fidelity. We're getting close, but it's still going to be a while and even then the computing power required is going to be stout.

There's nothing wrong with setters and getters provided one writes them well. It's extra work but I've had times where having setters and getters to put break points in would have allowed me to catch and fix highly insidious bugs caused by people doing bad things in other parts of the code. To be fair it was their use of globals that made it an issue in the first place :/.

That being said I always try to write them in attribute style as it looks almost as clean as direct public access.

Seriously, before DICE bought /. it seemed like I just didn't have enough time to catch up on all the articles I wanted to. Now I'm lucky if there's two or three articles a week that are interesting enough for even a second glance. And now this shit? Terrible...

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything. It can also be detrimental depending on what you want to do as some companies consider it too much or too expensive. You'll be better off starting in a Masters program and then deciding if you you really see a need or feel the desire to go for the PhD. A PhD is a LOT of work and time.

Really unless you plan to go into academia or hard core research I'd steer clear.

I have the same issue. Sleep study confirmed and everything. I was working with a clinical behavioral psychologist to improve some, but life went crazy and my sleep is back to pretty much being shit.

Light therapy did help some though. I need to get back on trying that.

People are basically assclowns about it though.

That's the ideal and idyllic world. In many areas there's a ton of hidden parameters and secret sauce that doesn't get reported. I found this to be especially true in robotics and machine vision and other computer science papers.

I spent a year and a half working on trying to replicate results from one paper. Total failure. A few years later I was talking to one of the researchers and sure enough, the results only worked in that one case for that one data set and pretty much had no real chance of working any other way. That's pretty much the straw that broke my brain. The entire time it was my fault the results weren't being reproduced....

Correcting myself, NP-Hard isn't just the numerical version of NP-Complete. But rather the set of problems which are at least as hard as NP. NP-Hard includes the numerical versions. Sigh.

The numerical version of many NP-Complete decision problems are often NP-Hard.

I'd love to know what you consider the most basic algorithms. There are entire classes of problems which are polynomial and are not "basic". I also think you don't understand what it even means to be NP-Hard (which is just the numerical version of being NP-Complete.) Also to show that something is NP-Hard is equivalent to showing something is NP-Complete, which means you show there is a Polynomial time reduction to another problem in the appropriate class. Seriously, how did this get modded insightful.

Honestly, I don't think you even begin to understand complexity spaces or how they work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_class

Offer up your daughters to placate them? So they don't rape your angelic guests?

Huh,

I've carried a 2 dollar bill in the back of my wallet for years as a good luck charm.

Maybe I'm siphoning the luck away from these other people.

Deploy the Deathwatch! The Ordo Xenos protects.

Oh sure you've ruled out binary and unary, but you haven't eliminated ternary, hex, octal, and just about any other counting system. Won't somebody please think of the Slashdotters!