Voxels vs Displacement Mapping

2011-08-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Voxels on the left. Displacement mapping on the right.

What is being shown here is a pyroclastic sphere primitive. Link

This is a good example of the difference between a voxel technology, and a displacement mapping technology that the GPU manufacturers are pushing.

The DM tech is pretty obviously just pushing out parts and pulling in parts of the surface, making things look more like a wave function on a sphere.

The Voxel tech looks like a much more natural expression of the function.

Disclaimer: To be fair, both pictures are using voxels in the source article. However the right picture could easily have been accomplished with DM and does IMO represent the difference between the two approaches.

What a 128bit addressing space is useful for...

2011-07-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

What if you had unlimited storage capacity and it was fully redundant... and what does this have to do with a 128bit addressing space?

To answer that question, you have to look into how to implement a P2P Cloud Storage solution.

To make a long story short, every file sector gets an address - a very big one. Some P2P services use up to 160bits. 128-bits is good enough for this new purpose though.

What if every file, every document ever made was in this P2P cloud storage. And it could be referred to as naturally as having a pointer in your code. The OS would page in part of this data from the internet on demand.

This is what I would think of as the ultimate computer storage solution -- blurring the line between computer and internet - to the point of being indistinguishable. This blur between internet and computer is where I believe computers are headed... I can't wait. :D

A shame 128-bit addressing is probably 20 years away... I'll be old by then (by my current standards anyway). It will be neat to watch the incremental progress towards this though as the years go by.

A few questions that keep crossing my mind is - If the internet could be applied to computing in general, to the extent of running something as simple as notepad.exe. How would it be done? How would it be secure? Is that possible with the internet of the future which has 10-100 times the bandwidth and 1/10th to 1/100th the ping? Which brings up more questions, such as what are the limits of internet related technologies? How fast is it advancing as to be able to make predictions about where it will be. etc...

Designing to make ATM Skimmers impractical

2011-04-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

I was curious about how thieves make these things. Turns out you can buy ATM skimmers on online auction sites for $3000. They make them by manufacturer. So this got me thinking about what ATMs could do to make a skimmer impractical.

My first thought is to have 1000 different ATM front plates from each manufacturer. That would make most skimmers very expensive, but not quite impractical yet as they can just make a universal fit -- we can do better. If the shape of the card receptacle was easily identifiable by a human and able to match easily with a picture, then you could take advantage of the fact that a skimmer, no matter how complex never hides the display. You can use that to show a picture and have people manually verify the shape of the receptacle. If it is different, then there is a skimmer on top. While it would not eliminate skimming, it would make doing it incredibly expensive and unpractical to do for most thieves. The maker of the device would often be directly involved.

While this sounds all well and good, manufacturers would not like making 1000 different versions of their ATMs just to stop skimming. Implementation of that approach is unlikely and it doesn't solve the problem for millions of existing ATMs. Is there any other way to solve those problems?

Holographic stickers. If they printed out 10,000 different holographic stickers and put a different one right over the face plate, and then had people do the manual verification with a picture (for example a bunny, a squirrel, etc... easily recognizable to humans and you can have many hundreds if not thousands of variations). That would also serve the make impractical purpose for the most part. Its not as good as the former solution, but its a whole lot cheaper and can work on existing ATM machines with just a software upgrade.

At a minimum, you might even be able to not have the manual verification part and instead just have the holographic sticker with some special certification message. If it doesn't say ATM verified something or other, than its a fake. Having a sticker in the first place is a deterrent. Only risk without is somebody could rip off the sticker off the ATM and then use it on their skimmer. So that wouldn't be full proof.

Perhaps you could have a sequence of numbers on the sticker that you would have to enter before using the ATM. I would hate that, personally. It would work as well though and only work for that single ATM.

Know your SPU transposes - part 2

2011-03-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

In this part of the SPU transposes series, we will cover 2 element transposes. Same format as last time.

AOS to SOA, 2 elements

4 input vectors of the format:


in1 = in1.x, in1.y, ?, ?
in2 = in2.x, in2.y, ?, ?
in3 = in3.x, in3.y, ?, ?
in4 = in4.x, in4.y, ?, ?

2 output vectors of the format:


out1 = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x
out2 = in1.y, in2.y, in3.y, in4.y

I'll start with the simplest way to do it - all on the odd pipe. Then show some ways to do things differently to trade odd instructions for even instructions.

0 even, 4 odd, 3 shuffle masks, 10 cycles

Instructions	In English
shufb t1, in1, in2, s_AaBb	t1 = in1.x, in2.x, in1.y, in2.y
shufb t2, in3, in4, s_AaBb	t2 = in3.x, in4.x, in3.y, in4.y
shufb out1, t1, t2, s_ABab	out1 = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x
shufb out2, t1, t2, s_CDcd	out2 = in1.y, in2.y, in3.y, in4.y

1 even, 3 odd, 4 shuffle masks, 9 cycles

Instructions	In English
shufb t1, in1, in2, s_AaBb	t1 = in1.x, in2.x, in1.y, in2.y
shufb t2, in3, in4, s_BbAa	t2 = in3.y, in4.y, in3.x, in4.x
selb out1, t2, t1, m_FF00	out1 = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x
shufb out2, t1, t2, s_CDab	out2 = in1.y, in2.y, in3.y, in4.y

4 even, 2 odd, 4 shuffle masks, 10 cycles

Instructions	In English
selb t1, in1, in2, m_F000	t1 = in2.x, in1.y, ?, ?
shufb t2, in3, in4, s_aABb	t2 = in4.x, in3.x, in3.y, in4.y
shufb t3, t1, t2, s_BAba	t3 = in1.y, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x
selb out2, t2, in2, m_FF00	out2 = in2.x, in2.y, in3.y, in4.y
selb out2, out2, t3, m_F000	out2 = in1.y, in2.y, in3.y, in4.y
selb out1, t3, in1, m_F000	out1 = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x

SOA to AOS, 2 elements

2 input vectors of the format:


in1 = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x
in2 = in1.y, in2.y, in3.y, in4.y

4 output vectors of the format:


out1 = in1.x, in1.y, ?, ?
out2 = in2.x, in2.y, ?, ?
out3 = in3.x, in3.y, ?, ?
out4 = in4.x, in4.y, ?, ?

Again, I'll start with the simplest way to do it - all on the odd pipe. Then show some ways to do things differently to trade odd instructions for even instructions.

0 even, 4 odd, 4 shuffle masks, 7 cycles

Instructions	In English
shufb out1, in1, in2, s_Aa00	out1 = in1.x, in1.y, 0, 0
shufb out2, in1, in2, s_Bb00	out2 = in2.x, in2.y, 0, 0
shufb out3, in1, in2, s_Cc00	out3 = in3.x, in3.y, 0, 0
shufb out4, in1, in2, s_Dd00	out4 = in4.x, in4.y, 0, 0

0 even, 4 odd, 2 shuffle masks, 9 cycles

Instructions	In English
shufb out1, in1, in2, s_AaBb	out1 = in1.x, in1.y, in2.x, in2.y
shufb out3, in1, in2, s_CcDd	out3 = in3.x, in3.y, in4.x, in4.y
shlqbyi out2, out1, 8	out2 = in2.x, in2.y, 0, 0
shlqbyi out4, out3, 8	out4 = in4.x, in4.y, 0, 0

2 even, 3 odd, 4 masks, 7 cycles

Instructions	In English
shufb out2, in1, in2, s_Ba00	out2 = in2.x, in1.y, 0, 0
shufb out3, in1, in2, s_Cc00	out3 = in3.x, in3.y, 0, 0
shufb out4, in1, in2, s_Dd00	out4 = in4.x, in4.y, 0, 0
selb out1, in1, out2, m_0F00	out1 = in1.x, in1.y, 0, 0
selb out2, out2, in1, m_0F00	out2 = in2.x, in2.y, 0, 0

2 even, 3 odd, 3 masks, 8 cycles

Instructions	In English
shufb out2, in1, in2, s_BaCc	out2 = in2.x, in1.y, in3.x, in3.y
shufb out4, in1, in2, s_Dd00	out4 = in4.x, in4.y, 0, 0
shlqbyi out3, out2, 8	out3 = in3.x, in3.y, 0, 0
selb out1, in1, out2, m_0F00	out1 = in1.x, in1.y, 0, 0
selb out2, out2, in1, m_0F00	out2 = in2.x, in2.y, in3.x, in3.y

Next post...

... 3 elements

Know your SPU transposes

2011-03-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that this is some needed and useful information to have. Too useful to keep to one's self. At Naughty Dog, some years back, Cort Stratton and I compiled a pretty comprehensive list of transposes. Its unbelievably handy to have on the fly as you need it. I've reconstructed the transposes as best I can and put it up here for your general use. Enjoy!

Introduction

There is more than one way to skin a cat. When converting from AOS to SOA and back there are many variations. How many instructions you have available to schedule in your even/odd pipes, how many spare registers you have to spend, and the latency of the combination of instructions used will dictate which you should use.

The goal is to first find all variations where you can trade even for odd or odd for even instructions -- and minimize the number of registers used in the process (including shuffle masks used).

Shuffle Masks
To specify shuffle masks, I'll use A-D,0 to specify the element 1 through 4 in the first parameter and a-d,0 to specify element 1 through 4 in the second parameter. '0' is special in that it means put a zero in the output for that element.

For example, s_ABab would take the first 2 elements in parameter 1 and the first 2 elements in parameter 2 and put them side by side into the output register.

Example - AOS to SOA, 1 element - 0 even, 3 odd, 1 shuffle mask, 9 cycles
Lets first consider the simple case of 4 input registers, where we are interested in combining the first element of each in(1-4) register into a single out register.

Instructions	In English
shufb t1, in1, in2, s_ACac	t1 = in1.x, ?, in2.x, ?
shufb t2, in3, in4, s_ACac	t2 = in3.x, ?, in4.x, ?
shufb out, t1, t2, s_ACac	out = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x

Example - AOS to SOA, 1 element - 1 even, 2 odd, 2 shuffle masks, 7 cycles
This variation on the above splits up the even/odd pipe usage a bit at the cost of more masks.

Instructions	In English
shufb t1, in1, in2, s_Aa00	t1 = in1.x, in2.x, 0, 0
shufb t2, in3, in4, s_00Aa	t2 = 0, 0, in3.x, in4.x
or out, t1, t2	out = in1.x, in2.x, in3.x, in4.x

Example - SOA to AOS, 1 element - 0 even, 3 odd, 0 shuffle masks, 6 cycles
This example converts back from SOA to AOS. Still working on 1 element.

Instructions	In English
shlqbyi out2, in, 4	out2 = in.y, in.z, in.w, in.x
shlqbyi out3, in, 8	out3 = in.z, in.w, in.x, in.y
shlqbyi out4, in, 12	out4 = in.w, in.x, in.y, in.z

Contribute
Know a transpose that I didn't list? Find a better one? Post in the comments and I'll update the post.

Next post...
... will be on 2 element transposes.

Designers should Learn to Code, Even if Poorly

2011-02-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, "The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

The same is true for companies that separate their designers from their engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the engineers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being "thrown out the window", a lack of empathy is to blame.

The best way to create empathy as a designer is to make a prototype. It meets the rest of the team half-way and gives you a sense of what's hard and what's easy to implement. Having thought through the edge-cases and being able to speak an engineer's language gives you street cred. You don't need to be a great coder, but you should at least be able to get your idea across in a scripting language.

To design is to inspire participation. To do that you need to be respected. For that you need to be a designer-coder.

High Resolution Textures -- The Field Guide

2011-02-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

The options:

Static Texturing
No dynamic loading. Just use higher resolution static textures. Standard stuff.
- VRAM limited

Dynamic Texturing
Dynamically load mips (Unreal 3 style).
+ Allows for much higher resolution
- Still ultimately resolution limited.
- Sometimes implemented with a feedback pass to a low resolution buffer.

Virtual Texturing
Dynamically load parts of textures.
+ Use as high of resolution textures as your heart desires.
+ Static memory footprint
- Sampling the virtual texture is slightly slower than Static or Dynamic texturing.
- Bi-linear filtering. (Tri-linear is possible, but requires more work.)
- Requires an extra rendering pass with most implementations (for the feedback of what pages to load)
- Problems with transparent materials. *****
- Popping mips when the disk streaming doesn't keep up very well with the game. *

Unique Virtual Texturing (AKA Mega Textures)
For each mesh in the world, allocate a portion of virtual texture space for that mesh and then bake in any lighting and diffuse information.
+ Use as high of a resolution texture as your heart desires.
+ Static memory footprint
+ Infinitely complex lighting algorithms.
+ Can bake in decals to allow an infinite number of them. ****
- Bi-linear filtering. (Tri-linear is possible, but requires more work.)
- Requires an extra rendering pass with most implementations (for the feedback of what pages to load)
- Iteration time is very slow
- Popping mips when the disk streaming doesn't keep up very well with the game. *
- Lighting is mostly static. **
- Requires massive disk space. ***
- Some games may have a world that is too big for UVTs -- exceeding floating point precision.
- Problems with transparent materials. *****

* The popping can be mitigated through "blending" of tiles as they load. However this requires using RGBA uncompressed textures for your physical tiles -- making texture reads slower and increasing memory requirements.

** I toyed around with animating virtual textures, so that you could have looping or one off lighting animations. Is a lot of extra space, and streamer had a hard time keeping up with the animation. Not impossible to pull off though, so something to keep in mind.

*** The disk space is typically reduced by both compression, and not storing the higher mips for areas that are never seen in game. If you happen to predict incorrectly, they just see a blurry texture.

**** Watch out for problems with changing the meshes after the baking process. Causes headaches.

***** VT typically uses a feedback rendering pass to a low resolution buffer to tell what to load and what not to load. This is typically rendered opaquely. The common work around is to render transparent materials using Standard or Dynamic texturing.

Where is the sweet spot?

Standard texturing is the easiest to implement.

Unique virtual texturing offers the best results.

But -- Virtual Texturing takes the prize.

Huh?
While Unique Virtual Texturing is great, it doesn't work for every game (your world size may be so large that it is unrealistic or you require a day-night cycle), and the bake times for lighting and texturing can be horrendous -- making fast iteration very hard.

Living Blog Post
I'll be updating this blog post from time to time as reference for myself and others. If you would like to see something added or corrected, send me a message or post in the comments.

-- Kind of wish this was a wiki or something. --

Business and Ethics

2011-01-17T18:27:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a book called the Ten Day MBA

Its got a pretty interesting chapter on Ethics...

Relativism

The proponents of relativism hold that we can't decide on matters of right and wrong, or good and evil. Things are rarely black or white. There are so many shades of gray. Relativism proposes that ethics are "relative" to the personal, social, and cultural circumstance in which one finds oneself. Relativists are not torn by ethical dilemmas since they do not believe that truth can be discovered through soul searching. Professors teach relativism so that students may guard against it. To understand relativism, you need to recognize its four forms.

Naive Relativism
Naive relativism holds that every person has his or her own standard that enables him or her to make choices. No one can make a moral judgment about another person's behavior. So many variables affect behavior that an outsider cannot possibly be privy to all the elements that went into making a decision. Therefore, an executive at Borden is not equipped to make a moral judgement regarding the actions of the CEO of Nestle, whose corporation is possibly selling harmful baby formula in developing countries.

Role Relativism
Role Relativism distinguishes between our private selves and our public roles. These public roles call for a "special" morality which we separate from the individual making the choices. The president of a fishing company may personally dislike the incidental killing of dolphins in his company's tuna nets, but as an executive, he must not let his feeling interfere with the best interest of the company.

Social Relativism
Social relativism is akin to naive relativism. People refer to social norms to render ethical judgments. "Industry Practices", "club rules", "professional codes of conduct", and "accepted practices" are the cop-outs of the social relativist. In the produce industry, it is "industry practice" to ignore child labor laws and employ small children to work in the field and miss school.

Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism holds that there is no universal moral code by which to judge another society's moral and ethical standards. If a whole culture holds certain beliefs, how can an outsider sit in judgment? "When in rome..." The concept of cultural relativism becomes more important as companies compete globally. Multinational corporations often follow local laws and customs that may violate ethical standards in their home countries. Discussions about aparthied revolve around issues of cultural relativism. Adopting a cultural relativist philosophy, a multinational corporation might have justified its participation in South African gold and diamond mining activities despite the employment of "slave" labor in the mines.

In some instances US corporations and citizens are barred from adopting the host country's business practices. In some countries it is ordinary business practice to pay bribes to get favorable treatment from businesses and government. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 outlaws overseas bribery.

The relativism concepts provide MBAs with an awareness of and a way to guard against inaction on ethical and moral issues. They provide a framework to go beyond currently held beliefs and patterns of behaviors.

Natural Law
Natural law servers as a gude to some who believe that the "right" thing to do is revealed in nature or the bible.

Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism holds that an action is justified if it provides the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people.

Universalism
Universalism propounds that any action is condonable if the motive behind the action is good, since the results of a person's actions are so often not in his or her control.

My Personal Take
What is ethics?
Ethics, in my opinion, is what you do when you think that nobody is watching.

People are easily corruptible. Money and more specifically the love of money, really is the root of all evil. To justify putting an additive into a baby formula because it saves you money when it actually hurts the people your giving it to.. is morally wrong. I don't care if you think that because it costs less you can sell it to more people, and thus less babies go hungry. Its evil and wrong to knowingly sell things that hurt other people. Find some other way to make more money. Sure the road is harder, but the payoff is that everyone is better -- Not just the company. Doing what is ethical is doing the right thing, and saying no to doing what is wrong just because it is easy.

Nobody is perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. Sometimes, you might find yourself doing something that you think you shouldn't be doing. Making the choices which correct those things after the fact takes courage. Courage to face yourself in a mirror. Do it though. For your self, your family, your community, and your world.

This is why Facebook is Valuable

2011-01-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

The data plot above is google.com, the data plot below is facebook.com. Google has a market cap of 250 billion. What the investors are betting on, is that with all that juicy information they get from users, they can make uber targeted ads that people can't help but click. Basically achieving the same click-through ratio that searching enjoys, about 1 in every 100 people (sometimes better). Now, I'm not really sure if they can achieve that ratio or not, but I do know one thing -- I hardly use facebook anymore, but I have been using google consistently for 11 years. I don't think I'm alone in that. Maybe that doesn't matter? Maybe they figure the can get enough of the world hooked on facebook, it doesn't matter that they don't get everyone hooked on facebook. Who knows. But anyway, yes it does look like a good investment. The stock will likely triple after the IPO. I would suggest to buy it until the honeymoon period wears off, then sell like crazy.

Facebook is worth 50 billion

2011-01-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

You've got to be kidding me. This is obviously just investor valuation overload. Goldman paid 450 million for less than 1% of Facebook. Really....

So facebook has 500 million users. That means each user is valued at $100. And thats assuming that each user is an active user, which is not the case. The real valuation may be more like $250 - $500 per active user. That just doesn't make sense to me. Their primary revenue source is advertising. You get about $1 for every 1000 views in non-search advertising. If somebody visits their Facebook page once every day, then each user is worth $0.365 per year. To recoup the best case of $100 per user, that would take 300 years or so. As in, impossible. I don't know what those investors are smoking, but it must be Zuckerberg's !@#$.

In other news, Apple is worth more than Google. Seriously, and not by a trivial amount either.

Something is wrong with the world.

Next generation graphics

2011-01-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

While there are many directions for video games to improve in the future. Animation being a big one. People are looking for things to do for graphics. First, avoiding the uncanny valley in next gen games may be a big problem. In general high level though (probably mostly obvious)

- Higher resolution textures.
- Higher resolution geometry.
- More world clutter and detail.
- Enormous worlds with little to no loading.
- I'd like to see water reflections that are actually reflections and not just cube-maps.
- Some people think that many more dynamic lights (1000's in a scene) are the future of video games.
- Soft shadows via variance shadow mapping or the like.
- Hair on video game characters will get a huge upgrade. No longer will characters look like they haven't showered for 2 weeks.
- Smoke using fluid simulations (this would be awesome)
- Geometry LOD is going to be a serious problem (even more so)

If you were to stick with triangles, then you would probably do some kind of subdivision surfaces.

There are other options though like voxels which can give triangles a serious run for their money. When properly optimized, they can provide very consistent frame rates irrespective of world detail.

Voxels aren't all static either. Lattice skinning can be used for characters, as well as I've seen some research in the area of dynamic KD-tree generation. There has also been some research in completely dynamic voxels, such that the world is actually changeable real-time. Leaving a foot-print in the sand actually leaves a foot-print there. Possibly permanently depending on how you implement it.

You could also do interesting procedural stuff if you had the compute power, where grass could grow back over craters over time, etc... Other benefits of voxels are the sampling you can do to do motion blur, depth of field, etc stochastically.

You can guarantee a framerate by doing progressive rendering of the frame. Stopping at a certain ms. That gives a lot of freedom to the content people to make the world how they see it in their imagination and no longer be limited by what hardware can provide.

All very interesting stuff, and I'm sure its only the tip of the iceberg.

However... things are not without its challenges. The PS4 may make the life of voxels a little harder. You will likely have to write a custom ray-casting solution for the PS4.

I'm sure many people will continue to use triangles. Hell, even I might. I'm a reasonable guy and will likely measure both approaches and pick the best one for the task at hand. However, ignoring voxels as an option seems kind of silly to me. The game developing public needs a good example implementation of voxels in order for it to really take hold in any sort of realistic way. There is an open source one from NVidia which has lots of ideas pulled from my stuff, however their solution is not really prime-time ready. For example, it doesn't stream from disk so you can only do what you can fit in memory. I don't really have time to write a public implementation of voxels, or to really contribute anything significant to the nvidia one. I'm just too darn busy right now. Who knows though, maybe I'll have time in the future.

Ok, enough voxel talk.

Another big challenge is going to be doing things for 3D displays. I don't have a lot of experience with 3D conversions for games yet, but I will very soon. I'll write more when I know more. Doing so in a deferred renderer seems like it might be a bit troublesome.

I'm sure there is much more that I could chat about here with next gen graphics. Taking each of the previous things in detail. Maybe I'll do a dedicated post to each one.

Playstation Brain

2011-01-01T03:05:00.000-08:00

It would be very interesting for a next generation console (I'm looking at you Sony) to do a brain-wave controller. It would be different enough from both Nintendo and Microsoft to stand out. Of course the technology itself is incredibly primitive at the moment, but nothing a massive r&d push can't fix. :) How awesome would it be to play a game by not moving at all?

Gaming in 2011

2010-12-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

Free to Play
Despite Red 5's game Firefall being a AAA free to play game, most games will still be pay to play in 2011. However, this is a growing trend that more and more games will adopt in the future. Red 5 is 2 steps ahead of the curve. Companies will always be willing to accept lower margins in order to gain market share. (Interestingly though, some free to play games make more money being free to play than they would if they were pay to play.)

Retro-fitting a free to play mechanism into an existing game will fail. It must be designed that way from the start.

Mainstream Indie
Minecraft has put indie in the forefront of many gamers eyes. Next year will have at least one other popular indie game that goes mainstream, and chooses to not align with any console manufacturer or publisher.

I know that many can argue about other games which reached this category, but I do believe that Minecraft is different enough to be considered its own class.

Linear Videogames
More and more games are going to feel like they are on rails. The rising costs of creating content will push most if not all games in this direction. Sad... but true.

Next generation Console Details Leaked
Some detailed information about the next generation consoles may be announced or leaked. After which the pissing matches get worse then they already are...

Playstation Move Fail
I love Sony dearly, but I do believe they have been out-gunned. Kinect is different enough to stand out against Nintendo. PS Move isn't really all that different from Wii. I expect to see lots of Wii knock-offs that many people will buy. However, I don't expect to see anything radically different. More of the same, but with fancier graphics and possibly some better camera interactions. I'm interested to see SPUs saving the day with PS Move. Go SPU!

Kinect Success
Microsoft will spout out some big numbers showing how Kinect is a financial success. Followed shortly by people being tired of flailing their arms and legs in every game. Still, I expect to see some interesting titles come out of Kinect.

Rage redefines beautiful
Rage from id Software is a fantastic game that I had the pleasure of working on. Id will release Rage with unique virtual texture mapping with a very many jaw dropping scenes in the game. I am a bit worried about the financial success of the product. This being ids first new title in a great many years (over 11 years). Will Rage be able to garnish the attention the title deserves, or will it be a viral hit that takes a while to reach its potential market penetration? Only time will tell. I hope for the best.

Epic releases next generation game
In typical Epic fashion, they will release a game shortly after id which many will praise as being superior. The flame wars begin! At the very least, I expect a tech demo showing something incredible. Epic won't give up their #1 spot without a good fight.

Housing bubble precursor

2010-12-29T18:21:00.000-08:00

Foreclosures were way up in Q3 2010 causing housing prices to plummet in Q4. Read More

A precursor of things to come.

Real-time translation on an iPhone

2010-12-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

Wow, I'm very impressed that this exists.

http://www.wimp.com/iphoneapp/

This is basically what I said few posts ago w/ computer vision & real-time translation. Very very impressed. I have to try it out.

They just had to cut some corners somewhere. :) Still very cool even if they did!

Home owners association

2010-12-20T17:58:00.000-08:00

This is some really messed up things some people are doing.

As a member of the HOA, you have the ability to put a lein on somebody's house if they don't pay their dues. You then have the ability to foreclose on the house. Then you personally have the ability to bid on that house and then re-sell it at a profit to you personally.

That is messed up.

The crash of 2012

2010-12-20T17:47:00.000-08:00

The housing market may have another dip in 2012. My measurements show that this may be a real possibility. Watch out home owners!

Review Xbox Kinect & Kinectimals

2010-12-20T16:08:00.000-08:00

I got one of these for my daughter for X-mas. She loves it. She loves to watch me play it that is, not so much playing it herself. That is probably due to her age though. Kinectimals is a genius bit of hardware / software combo. Very well matched.

Here is my review of the hardware: Kinect.

Overall Fantastic device. I'm very impressed that they have been able to pull off what they can with it. The data is fairly low resolution in Z, and very noisy I bet.

It only works when you face the camera. Kind of obvious when you say it like that, but this has some pretty serious implications for what kinds of games you can create.

If you try to play the game with one hand behind your back, it breaks completely: Randomly positioning your arm trying to figure out the best position for it. Don't put your hands in your pockets or behind your back.

Don't point the camera at a window. If sunlight comes in the window, it doesn't work very well at all.

Don't have anything in your hands. It screws up. Including don't hold your kids in your arms.

Don't play while sitting on a couch.

In general, I think the corollary to the Wii's waggle is the flailing of your arms and legs wildly while you try to get the game to do what you want it to.

Precision with the device is apparently pretty bad. So bad that most games auto-aim for you when you try to toss something.

It doesn't detect any finger motion at all, so don't worry about it.

There is also a pretty significant lag from doing something, to the game actually registering the movement. Its pretty easy to plan for that ahead of time with the existing games. So no problems there. It might limit what kind of games you could make with it though.

As long as you are using the games the way they were intended. 9 times out of 10 it does what you want. Which is pretty awesome considering the data they are working with.

The software:

My daughter loooves kinectimals. She just can't get enough of it. Good job on that one Microsoft.

You purchase real-life stuffed animals and then register them with the games. Very cool idea connecting the physical and the virtual with that.

The other games are pretty nice too. Kinectimals is clearly the winner of the bunch though.

Augmented Reality, Boom or Bust?

2010-12-13T16:41:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of excitement brewing recently, and will be even more so in the coming year about Augmented Reality. Quite frankly, the technology just isn't there yet. The most advanced piece of augmented reality tech we have is Xbox 360 Kinect, and even it IMO leaves a lot to be desired. Don't get me wrong, its an amazing achievement! I think we will have a boom for the next few years in augmented reality will be followed shortly after by a bust when people realize that its just not what they expected. After the bust though maybe 5 years from now, maybe a little longer, we will have a true and lasting boom for augmented reality. Computer Vision is still in its infancy. There is an incredible amount of improvement that will come. I look forward to it. Here is a short list of what I think computers should do better and/or faster than people with the aid of advanced, in some cases yet to be invented Computer Vision tech:
1) Security Monitoring (this would also incorporate various parts of advanced AI)
2) 2D to 3D conversions (much to be desired in this area)
3) Automatic Driving (this is nowhere near ready for prime time, no matter what googlers think)
4) Targeted In-store advertising a la Minority Report. (I'm going to hate this, but this would be a billion dollar business, hello google...)
5) Real-time Augmented Reality OCR of names of places, menus at restaurants, etc. When I'm in Japan, I want to see things in English. (mobile phones aren't fast enough to do this entirely ATM)
6) A vacuum cleaning robot which doesn't act like a drunken sailor.
7) An automatic fan which points at me, wherever I go.
8) A computer which would automatically log me in, because it knows who is sitting at the computer. (lol, fooling it with a picture... priceless)
9) etc...

There are probably hundreds of great ideas where computer vision will revolutionize technology. This is only the beginning.

On Framerate

2010-12-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

Every video game I own runs at a solid 60fps. I have a new Samsung TV with motion flow technology. It is sometimes very jarring for TV and Film, but for video games.... it rocks. This is presumably because with TV and film, you have all sorts of very very hard problems to solve such as noise. Video games have no such problems (most video games anyway, as some inject noise for style). This is great for graphics programmers though. Drop a frame, no big deal because the TV will compensate. Have to run at 30fps because you game looks just too darn awesome for its own good? No big deal. --- Fantastic. My life just got a whole lot easier. And I didn't have to write a single line of code! Thanks TV makers!

We will not live forever?

2010-11-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

According to many futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, we are destined to live very very long lives. Evidence of this is the fact that people are living longer. However, I read some conflicting evidence the other day that made me think. I wanted to share it. It said basically that we are not in fact living longer. People are living the same amount of time in the extreme as they did 200 years ago. However, a more accurate representation of the data is to say that a higher percentage of the population is living to very old age. Bleak prospects for infinite life. I was hoping to live to see Superbowl MXII. The only saving grace might indeed be the transfer of my brain to a computer and hope my RAID array doesn't fail and I lose 2 weeks worth of memories from backup.

Verizon vs AT&T mobile broadband

2010-11-09T05:36:00.000-08:00

I just did a cross country trip to head to a funeral. The funeral was nice, but thats not what this post is about. Its about Verizon and AT&T mobile broadband, or more specifically Verizon mobile broadband (pre-pay no contract) and AT&T via tethered connection (iPhone). The setup was that I figured I could get some work done by using a mobile internet connection while on the road. I used Verizon on the way there, and AT&T on the way back. The results are that Verizon had much better speed in more places. That is very true, when I did have service, it was awesome. However it was very unreliable, constantly disconnecting whenever you switched cell towers. Also, vast parts of Kentucky and West Virginia had no service what so ever. AT&T via MyWi was a very reliable service (which is great for persistent connections), but it was dog slow. I got effectively dial-up speeds pretty much the whole way. I partly believe the unreliability of Verizon was due to poor software, but there is no way to tell for sure.

Which should you choose?

Verizon if you don't care about persistent connections and aren't traveling through Kentucky or West Virginia.

AT&T if persistent connections are required or your traveling through some dead states.

Or heck, you could do both, and use whatever is best at the time.

Visions of a possible Future for Mobile Phones

2010-09-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

I had some interesting thoughts about where mobile phones could go in the far future, and I wanted to write them down. Here they are.

Phones will lose their holes one by one, preferring at first multi-function holes and then proceeding to prefer surface contact receptacles for transmitting power and wireless communications for transmitting data.

Phones will get progressively lighter and thinner.
In fact, they will get so light and thin, that they will transition into a sort of paper, but it won't stop there. They will then become just like a handkerchief, a small piece of cloth with a very interesting property when you run a current through it. It will become hard, flat and light up with a touchable screen. Dropping the device or breaking the screen will turn it into a handkerchief again and result in no damage to the device. Take the cloth out of your pocket, touch it in a corner to turn it on, use it and then stuff it in your pocket to turn it off.

HTML5 Killer Feature?

2010-09-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

Sockets, and why? You can implement a javascript based P2P (bit-torrent?) client.

Of course, there is that pesky problem of writing files to disk... Luckily there are signed scripts.

P2P is everywhere these days, in many many things. The ability to do these things directly in the browser without having to rely on a separate executable should make things much simpler, and better too!

I'm not talking about illegal downloads either. ;) I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years every download, for every-thing, was a P2P download with a HTTP-seeder. It would save many web-hosts tons of bandwidth and dollars. It just makes sense from their perspective. The only nail in the coffin would be the lack of net neutrality... darn.

Surviving 32-bit

2010-08-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

32-bit 2GB limitations has reared its ugly limitation head on me more often recently than I would like.

2GB limitations sounds all nice and dandy for a console, but on the PC you have double copies of all your data in both RAM and VRAM. It sucks. Granted VRAM is windowed, but that single extra copy can eat up a lot of space. High end video cards have 1.5GB of VRAM in it for example. If you had a double copy of all that data in RAM, then you should have less than 512mb for your game. That being said I'm using up nowhere near 1.5GB of VRAM, but the thought that in a couple years that I could is troubling.

So naturally, the first angle I attacked is don't let D3D manage the resources in video/main memory. IE, do it manually yourself and store the copies on disk, not in RAM. That worked out great, except in the cases where you actually can't do that cause you need the RAM copies around. Which unfortunately is more often than I would like. In that case you can sometimes compress the data while its not in immediate use. (Its also worth noting that if you go the route of manual resource management you may need to pay attention to LRU resources and flush them to disk if a VRAM allocation fails.)

One thing that did help though was that on Win7/Vista 64-bit you can enable /LARGEADDRESSAWARE and are then able to use the entire 4GB of address space. Which is awesome. Except that some parts of D3D9 are not really made to work with that very well. One of the problems arises with D3DXHANDLE. Negative numbers are handles, and positive numbers are pointers to strings. This just doesn't work with >2GB address space. You can hack around it by detecting when the D3DXHANDLE is actually a string and not a handle and then copying that string to a store of addresses which are under 2GB. So far this has worked out. However, the looming threat that external libraries might do these tricks in other places is a bit scary.

Its disturbing that they are selling Win 7/Vista 32-bit copies. Are they crazy? Get rid of 32-bit! don't keep it around! This was obviously not an engineering decision and had much more to do with business. Somewhere there is an engineer at Microsoft who told them it was a bad idea. I feel your pain. This is really going to cause problems in a couple years for everybody. Having to support a 2GB address space is hell if your memory constrained, and in a few years we will all be memory constrained when making PC games.

Something else to keep an eye on:
Its typical to use default parameters when using CreateThread, however this is bad when you have lots of threads. A game usually has a stack size of multiple megabytes these days. Each CreateThread called with default parameters will have an address space reservation of the same size as the executable's main thread. It adds up.

So fun, its better than Starcraft 2

2010-07-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

Step 1) Find a web-cam video of a celebrity on youtube.com
Step 2) Download the video with Keep Vid
Step 3) Convert the video to MPG with Pazera
Step 4) Use Virtual Dub to cut out a looping section of the video
Step 5) Download Many Cam and set it up with that video you made. (It will make a virtual web-camera with that video looping in it)
Step 6) Head over to Chat Roulette and point it to your many cam.
Step 7) Watch the hilarity of people's reactions. Priceless

Most people figure out pretty quick that its fake. Like when the video doesn't react to them and especially if the loop isn't perfect. Still lots of fun while your waiting for SC2 to install.... and it does take a looooong time to install.

PS. I'm still looking for a good Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris video. Comment with your favorite source videos. A good example one is Jessica Alba.

Other probably funny ones:
Klingons
Woody from Toy Story 3
Gatekeeper? No clue, but its funny
MRirian
Jonas Brothers

DXT compression aware UV unwrapping

2010-07-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

When compressing DXT textures you usually compress the whole texture at a time. The goal in recent research areas (http://www.sjbrown.co.uk/squish/ for example) has been how to choose the end-points of the color line. There is a limit to this research area and some configurations of colors will still produce bad results, even using brute force methods to search the entire problem space.

There are some cases however where texture compression quality can be improved even further (which typically appear on sharp color discontinuities for example).

What if you had more data than just the input image?
Such as in the case of a UV unwrapped model. You can also input/output the triangle mesh that goes along with it. This will allow you to move pieces of the texture around to get better texture compression quality.

For example, a UV unwrapped model on the texture is built up of "islands" of triangle meshes. These islands are disconnected from each other and can move around freely.

As such, we can adjust the location of the islands in the texture, moving them 1 to 3 pixels to the right and 1 to 3 pixels down to see if the texture compression for those blocks improved.

Because they can move freely, we can also re-order and re-orient them in order to take better advantage of color coherency between island borders, as well as to line up the sharp color discontinuities with DXT block borders.

Its also technically possible to warp the islands's meshes themselves to line up the texture problem areas better with the DXT blocks.

Devices with screens on both sides

2010-07-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

iPhone 5 -- your next.

What would you use gigabit internet for?

2010-07-23T01:11:00.000-07:00

I just got upgraded to a new 50Mbps Docsis 3 internet connection. Its just awesome....

This brought up an old question for me. With google building a gigabit fiber to the home internet connection, what would you or could you saturate that bandwidth with? As in what applications could possibly use it all up with nothing to spare?

1) Cloud/cluster computing
This one's a bit obvious I think. Computing clusters require massive bandwidth with very fast response times.
2) Direct Brain Communication
Having nano machines communicate with all the cells in the brain would require some pretty hefty bandwidth. This sounds crazy and probably is, but you never know I suppose what crazy things the future might hold around the corner.
Blogspot = blogging
Twitter = micro blogging
? = nano blogging (via direct brain communication?)
3) ?

Any ideas on what could saturate a gigabit internet connection?

Additional info for +1% dropped calls with the iPhone 4

2010-07-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

One of the big key points Jobs hit home again and again, was that its about 1 more phone call dropped per hundred. So how is it that this is such a big issue that people are experiencing if its clearly not a big issue.

Quite possibly lefties.

People who are left handed and making phone calls with the iPhone 4 will have greater signal loss than people who are right handed.

7% to 10% of the population is left handed.

If 7-10% of those dropped calls are from lefties, and that 1% additional dropped calls is from those lefties, then 1 out of 7 to 1 out of 10 of every left handed iPhone 4 user has experienced the problem.

They would also experience it more regularly. Which is why its such a big issue.

Apple might be making TVs

2010-07-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

I called that one. ;)

http://gizmodo.com/5578591/apples-redesigned-apple-tv-might-be-a-tv

The next battleground is apparently TVs with integrated consoles.

Long-term view of Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox

2010-06-21T23:44:00.000-07:00

What makes Apple and Nintendo so special? Why do they both consider each other competition? Its because they control everything on their mobile consoles. They control the hardware, the software, and the display. This control of the display allows them to innovate much faster than any other console system. The hand-held market will quickly outpace and become the de-facto standard in gaming, simply because they will be two or three steps ahead of the rest of the console market. It also takes less time to develop hardware when every device is uniform. You don't have to support multiple resolutions, different refresh rates, and so on. You have one thing to support. Developing the hardware and software becomes much simpler, which further improves the rate of innovation. Nintendo and Apple will always have the best displays with the latest technology. They will leave everybody in the dust.

or will they?

Microsoft is likely going to have a hard time keeping up, however Sony on the other hand might have an advantage. Sony also makes TVs. Sony can control the whole package, the display, hardware, software and so on. They do have the disadvantage of the PS4 having to support other displays and the displays themselves must be backwards compatible with old input streams, but the advantage of being able to ship an entire package TV + PS4 is provocative. If they can meet their goals of being the biggest TV supplier, they may also be able to take the world by storm with the PS4. I think you will see the PS4 being bundled with TVs, built-in. Not right away keep in mind, maybe a year or two after launch.

Microsoft would likely respond by making deals with other manufacturers of TVs, however they will be far behind the curve having to coordinate between two different companies. Sony's advantage is to be able to put out new technology TVs faster than their competitors and pair them with interactive software made for that technology. A similar advantage to Apple and Nintendo.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Owning an iPad makes you a minor celebrity.

2010-06-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Seriously. You bring it around with you and girls hit on you, random people walk up all the time and say "Is that an iPad? wow!"

Apple 1up

I bought more Apple stock.

Incremental Google Search

2010-05-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.heapr.com

Wow... Google should adopt this!

The future of the Database?

2010-05-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

Meet FluidDB

This kind of open database is very interesting for use with HTML 5 apps.

I get the feeling that HTML5 apps really are going to be very real applications which are public in an important sense. The traditional architecture of having a web server with a back-end database, where there are dynamic scripts which generate web-content seems very old and stale when you look at what HTML5 is capable of.

Re-thinking the Stop Sign

2010-05-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

There was a funny you-tube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wac3aGn5twc

With a good complementary article: http://www.slate.com/id/2254863/?from=rss

Does the stop sign need re-designing? Its certainly interesting how many people ignore them, I certainly do most of the time as well. I slow down, but rarely come to a complete stop.

The article mentions many great ideas such as a Yield-Stop, or the Take-Turns sign, etc

However, the article largely assumes that the future evolution of the Stop Sign will be unchanging lifeless signs. I think that looking at Stop Lights is a show of what is to come, and it is dynamic intelligent signs. Signs that change based on the traffic around it. These signs could be placed automatically via augmented reality projected on the windshield. They are yield signs when nobody is around, and switch to stop signs when the situation calls for it.

Certainly the augmented reality solution sounds like a good one as it doesn't require continuous power consumption when nobody is near, especially in rural areas. It can save on a lot of energy that would normally be wasted or used somewhere else anyway.

Perhaps this is a good practical use of augmented reality.

Another interesting implication of intelligent traffic signs with augmented reality. Is that the rules of traffic can change much more rapidly than they do right now. The traffic shaping can be tweaked on an hour by hour basis. Adding stop signs, stop lights, controlling the flow of traffic to reduce congestion in ways that are just completely new and different than today. For example, the signs can change based on algorithms which include the behavior of individual drivers as a whole.

Legend of the Seeker Canceled!

2010-05-14T20:02:00.000-07:00

Nooooooo!!!

I could do a star wars reference here, but that would just be tacky.

First Firefly, and now Legend of the Seeker.... Why oh why Mr TV do you tease me with good shows then rudely take them away.

http://ausiellofiles.ew.com/2010/04/26/legend-of-the-seeker-canceled/

http://www.saveourseeker.com/

Interesting Idea for the next iPhone or Android

2010-05-09T19:58:00.001-07:00

Imagine a device where every side of it is a seamless touch screen. The front, the back, and the sides. There literally is no wrong way to use the device. You can hold it any way you want. In fact, the way you hold it defines its function. Hold it like a camera, and its a camera. Hold it like a phone, and its a phone. Hold it like a game pad, and its a game pad. Hold it like a ... You get the picture. Its the ultimate universal device. Its everything you want it to be. Talk about endless possibilities. Its just an incredibly powerful idea.

Stephen Hawking on Time Travel

2010-05-07T21:19:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hawking on Time Travel

Stephen Hawking describes that it is impossible to travel into the past using a very persuasive feedback-effect phenomenon.

In the end, I think a wormhole like this one can't exist. And the reason for that is feedback. If you've ever been to a rock gig, you'll probably recognise this screeching noise. It's feedback. What causes it is simple. Sound enters the microphone. It's transmitted along the wires, made louder by the amplifier, and comes out at the speakers. But if too much of the sound from the speakers goes back into the mic it goes around and around in a loop getting louder each time. If no one stops it, feedback can destroy the sound system.

The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won't last long enough to be of use as a time machine. That's the real reason no one could come back in time to my party.

I have no idea what I'm talking about but, it should be possible to travel back in time, somewhere else. Somewhere very far away, as long as the wormhole only existed for a short amount of time. This is because the radiation, which travels at the speed of light, would never reach the beginning of the wormhole in time before it closed, therefore eliminating the feedback phenomenon possibility.

So.... If this is true (which I'm sure its not for some reason which is painfully obvious to a physicist). That means that you could go back in time somewhere else, and then go back in time again, but this time back here at Earth. Of course you'd be way far in the past. Then all you'd need to do is go forward in time from that point on to get to the present, or any point in the past.

Internet Nostalgia

2010-05-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

I still am unsure how this became as popular as it was at the time.

For the interested readers who have no idea what this is, but are too curious for there own good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby

Inside Steve Jobs. His High Level Principals

2010-04-29T13:46:00.001-07:00

I feel that this article needs writing. I've known it for a long while, but I think its important to point out what I feel that he thinks. Steve's actions do indeed follow rules and principals. Understanding of this may predict his overall actions.

Steve thinks that many people must be ruled in order to thrive.

Steve thinks that those people wish to have a leader who will cut the taller plants so the sun will reach them.

Steve thinks that no plant should be allowed to grow taller than the shortest, and in that way give light to all.

Steve thinks that people would rather be provided a guiding light, regardless of the fuel, than light a candle themselves.

Steve thinks people need an enemy to feel a sense of purpose.

Steve thinks its easy to lead people who have a sense of purpose.

Steve thinks that the sense of purpose is more important than the truth.

Many of these principals are correct in some sense, although I hold no judgement to the morality of them.

Apple bans the use of Scripting languages in iTouch, iPhone and iPad apps.

2010-04-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

"Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."

While the intended target for this was Adobe, I think this also means that they may have unintentionally banned scripting languages.

lol... I mean seriously now. Banning scripting languages?

Does this mean that Unity is in violation? That cuts out a very large market I would think considering how great and prolific Unity is.

What does Apple have against Adobe anyway? Did they egg Steve Job's house or something? This is a little ridiculous.

Simple JPEG Encoder/Decoder

2010-04-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

Its hard to find simple, single C/C++ file jpeg encoders/decoders with no dependancies on external libraries.

For decoding: http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=137

So far thats the best I've found as far as simplicity.

For encoding:

Thats right, its blank. none, that I've found so far. Anybody out there have any suggestions?

I've started to write my own simple jpeg encoder. I'll throw it up somewhere if I don't find something else on the net before I finish.

iPad and obvious flaws... the next iMac

2010-04-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

One of the oldest tricks in the political book, is to put an obvious flaw into something so you can then control the conversation.

Perhaps (and I do stress perhaps) the next generation iMac, will be an iPad with Mac OSX on it and the internal guts of a MacBook Air. This way he can have tons of haters and free press about the iPad and its lack of user freedom and control. This is the kind of press money simply can't buy. Imagine an entire internet up in arms about the denying of iPad apps, raging madness from some about the closedness of the platform, only to then turn around and say a year from now... "we listened and here is the new iMac". Everybody in elation goes out and buys an iMac in much greater numbers than if he did it the straight forward way as more people than ever were aware.

Jobs isn't stupid. He knows that tablets, laptops, and portability at large is the future of personal computing. By limiting Apple to a closed solution like the iPad, he is simply waiting for some good competitor (google?) to come along and blast them out of the water. (and they will eventually, it is only a matter of time). He won't let that happen, so I think he will provide both closed and open solutions. The only question is when?

----

Of course, the opposite argument is that a closed solution that you control entirely is what all capitalists salivate over. In general, control like this equals money. If he can pull this off, and do it while keeping everybody happy, then Apple will be absolute. de facto. save a few small-time competitors which take up the other 15% of the market. I don't really like this however.

I would like to hope that a computer revolution birthed in openness and freedom will stay free and open.

Batteries

2010-03-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

I love portable electronics, but I hate batteries with a passion. My iPhone, I end up having to charge every 3 days or so, and for the last day and a half I'm always thinking, "I don't want to use the phone because I don't want to lose my battery if I really need to call somebody". Has there really been significant progress in batteries over the last 10 years? Seems like the best people can do is be more power efficient and use larger batteries. Its 2010... I'm supposed to have jetpacks by now, but I'll settle for a battery that lasts 2 weeks. I only hope that carbon nano-tubes will save me from my battery hell.

Has Steve Jobs lost his Mojo?

2010-02-02T19:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe its just me but, the iPad doesn't really look very interesting. The hardware looks very interesting, but the software has come up very short. They really should have put mac-osx on it, but in their ultimate greed to control things for their own personal gain, they may have killed a beautiful product. Perhaps they went too far on the greed spectrum that it blinded them of what consumers really want. Consumers expect that a computer of that size to have more freedom. Freedom in applications, freedom in choosing to browse the web with flash, freedom to run many programs at once, freedom to run a development environment if they so choose. (I'm a bit biased with the latter obviously).

Of course, one of the most interesting things is to pay attention to the marketing campaign that they are doing for the iPad. The marketing is stronger and uses more intentionally subconscious cues than the iPhone or any other previous Apple product I can remember. I think this is very telling. They know that the iPad isn't very good, and they are scared.

JPEG Format Alpha Channel

2010-01-29T21:41:00.001-08:00

I occasionally wonder why JPEG doesn't support an alpha channel. Its really quite a drag sometimes.

Malpractice Insurance and Health Care Costs

2010-01-25T16:09:00.001-08:00

The right wingers tend to say that the rising health care costs are directly related to malpractice insurance. I think that would make sense if the costs of health care aren't increasing dramatically every year. Just this year our private policy went up 30%. Thats crazy, but I don't think that malpractice insurance is the whole picture. If it was, then that means that doctors are screwing up more often every year or that they are screwing up more severely every year. Both points are unlikely to deviate too much from the standard. So what that means is that more people are getting sicker every year.

Old people aside, I think though that the likely case is the following (from my own experience with doctors, hospitals and potentially life threatening illnesses), is that there is a negative feedback loop in effect. Doctors do not take the safest routes first, far from it they always go straight to the big guns before trying out safer procedures. For example, they will opt for a CAT scan over a MRI almost every time, however a CAT scan gives out huge doses of radiation and is very dangerous as it can cause cancer and such. MRIs on the other hand are entirely safe. So, in effect, I think that this, in combination with improper long-term testing of drugs, is the cause of our health woes. Improper long term testing of drugs causes problems which in turn they use drugs of which those effects cause problems later on which when those take affect etc..... The chances of avoiding any serious illness this month is good, but over your entire lifetime is bad. Therefore everybody will eventually enter the cycle of poorly thought out medication policies and poorly tested long term effects of drugs entering the medical system.

The other possibility which I think is a contributing factor, is that we are treating more illnesses which are just minor inconveniences now than we did before. AKA People don't like being uncomfortable. This still falls under the "there are more sick people" umbrella. Perhaps its a combination of the two which are the cause of our current predicament.

If I didn't miss anything (and I likely missed something), who is to blame for this?

I blame capitalism. But before you go and tweet about this, lets think about this for a second together. For one, I am not against capitalism. Some companies should definitely be for-profit and some should be not-for-profit companies. Any company which deals with the health of the general public should be non-profit. Their sole concern should be the safety of their products and the usefulness of their products. Quite frankly a for-profit drug company encourages this negative feedback effect as it makes them more money. A for-profit drug company for example doesn't really care about curing diseases as there is far more money in just cleaning up the negative affects and forcefully addicting the people on their drugs. Just like any other greedy optimization algorithm, if you let one measurement metric go wild (profit in this case) then it will go crazy and optimize that, however that does not always produce the best results over the long term.

Opinions? Please comment, I'd like to hear it.

CES 2010 -- 3D TVs

2010-01-08T10:49:00.001-08:00

Any 3D TV which requires glasses is doomed to ultimate failure. Sure, lots of TVs will have it, but ultimately people aren't going to want to sit down on the couch with these glasses on for everything. Movies, perhaps, but everything, no. For example my wife cooking in the kitchen while having 3D glasses on so she can watch her favorite shows while she cooks. uhm, no. I don't think this is going to take off like people want it to. That is, until the TV allows 3D without glasses. Only then will it really hit mainstream.

My Perhaps Controversial View on Video Game Piracy

2010-01-01T20:27:00.000-08:00

I personally look at piracy like this. Piracy is the will of the future imposing itself on the present. The game is changing, companies need to change with it. If they do not, they will be swept up in the wave of change and likely die. The change is this, people want things differently than they did before.

Some developing trends...
#1, they want easy, instant access to video games and at a reasonable price.
#2, they want free to play games where perhaps part of the content (which does not restrict play, only enhance it) as the paid part.

When more and more people play the free-to-play games and their quality subsequently improves, games that charge an admission fee will have to increasingly justify that, and likely they will fail over the long term. Its hard to beat free. Google if nothing else has proved that.

A Message to Baby Toy Makers

2009-12-31T08:30:00.000-08:00

Why is it that baby toy makers are compelled to take simple songs and nursery rhymes and add notes everywhere and make them overall much more complex. This is harder for babies. They need to start out with simple tunes and patterns and then when they are older build to more complex ones. I get the feeling like very few baby toys are actually designed to be educational for babies, and instead they are designed to be pacifiers, ala the horrible baby einstein (should be baby caveman cause thats what it will make your baby (and no, this is not a geico pun)). Another example is so called baby books where they pay more attention to rhyming words than the simplicity of the words they use. I mean common now... kids need common simple patterns, not complex ones that aren't used by their parents regularly that sound nice. Ok, so this makes finding good toys hard, but it also means that it is far easier for other people to gift bad toys to your kid than it is to gift good ones. The only reason that this works at all is that people trust the kid toy makers to make good toys, and the vast majority of them obviously have no idea what they are doing.

So anyway, the lesson to learn is buy simple toys for young children, then when they master those toys buy slightly more complex ones, and so on. Take the time to measure the simplicity of the toys that your child is playing with as any time you spend now teaching can have profound effects on your child's future. For example, if you set out walking north for 1 hour, but then later decided to change directions and you wanted to go 1 hour south instead, it would now take 2 hours to walk south (not including the 1 hour you spend walking north wasting your time), than if you originally just went south in the first place.

Designer Babies

2009-12-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

First, some background information.

What are designer babies? Designer babies are what will come to pass in the next 10 to 20 years. That is to say, that we will be able to pick our child's eye color, hair color, or whether our hair glows in the dark or not, and most importantly rid our children of congenital diseases or disorders.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a convergence of the human race. As we will all trend to pick lots of the same fundamental traits. For example, everybody wants their children to be smarter, more beautiful, not prone to weight gain, depression, etc... These designer babies will make people very alike to one another.

Is this a good idea? Overall, I'd say yes. However, it does introduce certain frailties into the gene pool. One of the advantages of our sexual reproduction is that it introduces diversity into the system. Different ways of doing things, different ways of thinking about things, different immune systems etc. A lot of that will be lost with designer babies. Perhaps this won't matter, given that computers will do most of the thinking for us and that we won't be prone to any diseases at all. However, I do believe that a part of us, human beings, will be lost in this transformation. For all our short-comings and all our frailties, there is a underlying beauty of it all. But alas, it cannot be stopped. It is like the wind, fighting it would be a futile endeavor.

Web Scalability

2009-12-27T20:41:00.000-08:00

The problem of web-scalability is an interesting one. In general you need a web server to scale between 1 and 250,000 simultaneous connections. The 250,000 peak is to survive a digging or slashdotting or the like. Although the peak doesn't happen very often, you still have to prepare for it as it can be a very important time to be responsive. There really are two sides to the problem. On the one side, you need a solution to add hardware dynamically as needed and on the other side, you need a software solution which can actually take advantage of all that hardware. Luckily, cloud services like Amazon and Rackspace fit the hardware problem nicely. The problem left is the software problem. So first, lets describe the process every web request goes through.
1) The web-browser connects to the web server via TCP/IP.
2) The web-browser send a HTTP request looking something like "GET /\n\n" (in the simplest possible format).
3) The web-server gets the requested document, and sends it back to the client.

In any modern web app step 3 is performed differently if you are serving static or dynamic content. If the content is static, then the file can be cached in memory in the best case and served rather quickly. If the content is dynamic then the php, perl, python, whatever is run with the source file and the given parameters (index.php?foo=bar&bar=ack). The output is then piped back to the web-browser through the TCP connection. Done.

There are a couple problems with this. If we had a 1,000 processor machine this would be trivial, but alas, such a computer is the stuff of future for at least another 7 or 8 years. So a solution must be found with todays hardware, and so that is what we will do.

First, lets go into a little more depth on the previous list:
1) TCP/IP connection to port 80
2) HTTP request
3) CGI program startup (Python,Perl,PHP,ASP,etc)
4) CGI code parse
5) Database connect
6) Database requests
7) HTTP response

In 2010, a single computer can't handle a digging, so we must share the load.

Turns out that there already is a solution that parallelizes 3,4 and 5. Its called FastCGI (http://www.fastcgi.com/drupal/).

Parallelizing 6 takes a little thought. At first glance, you might think that FastCGI will parallelize that too, however upon closer inspection it is pretty easy to see that while you may have 10 different FastCGI servers, there is still only a single SQL database which serves them all... Ok, so you don't want to pay ridiculous amounts of money (or any money really) for a SQL solution which can handle this so you choose MySQL. MySQL however as far as I know doesn't have a parallelization through automatic database replication and synchronization of multple computers. However, that is pretty much exactly what you want to do. Luckily you can do this by hand in your CGI. First you need an identical initial DB setup, then any time you UPDATE or INSERT you do it to every server replication, but any SELECTs you only need to do from any one of the servers. Reads are fast, writes are slow. So you randomly select a server to do the SELECT requests from (or round robin, or whatever) in order to distribute the load. With the typical property that you will generally do 10x to 20x more DB reads than writes this will likely do a good job at paralellizing enough to be able to support a digging.

So what are we going to do about 1,2, and 7?
In order to give yourself the best chance of reaching 250,000 simultaneous requests, you need a good choice of web server. Apparently, Apache 2 sucks, Apache 1 is better, but Lighttpd beats them all. Ok, so once you chose a good server, the rest is quite simple, make duplicates of the server at different IPs then add multiple "A" records to your DNS entry. Each "A" record will get sent an equal amount of traffic. So you want 3 front end web-servers, then just have 3 "A" records. Each server will get sent 1/3 of the total traffic. Easy.

IGDA Spam

2009-12-23T17:06:00.001-08:00

I'm not liking being a member of the IGDA, I get so much spam mail from them its driving me nuts. Don't they have something better to do than to bug me every day? I'm tempted to unsubscribe.

The Economic Explosion of 2015

2009-12-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

Along with the culmination of many great things, the year 2015 is set to bring about a great economic depression possibly much worse than the last one. There are many possible triggers for this next collapse, some more likely than others:

1) Housing Bubble v2.0

Even worse than the last, but the reality is that none of our bad habits have changed which caused the last housing bubble, which means history is doomed to repeat itself. When will people learn?

2) Education Crisis

The cost of education has been rising well beyond inflation for many years. This will eventually cause a crisis.

3) Health-Care Crisis

Obama's worst fears have come true where decisions that were made only accelerated the crisis's timeline and other countries lost faith in the dollar and switch to gold as the standard for international currency. The surplus of US dollars being circulated as countries spend them to get out will cause massive inflation of the US currency.

4) Government Spending Crisis

The government has spent so much money and was unable to pull back the "stimulus" without causing a massive inflation. Other countries lost faith in the dollar and switch to gold as the standard for international currency. The surplus of US dollars being circulated as countries spend them to get out will cause even more massive inflation of the US currency.

5) Financing Crisis

The lack of taking any risks will cause many companies to go bankrupt as they seek funding, but nobody is lending. This will cause many companies which would have fueled economic growth in the coming years to be non-existent causing an economic downturn.

Lots of possibles there (as well as many more that I didn't mention). I think the most interesting is #2.

For the average Joe, the key thing to remember here is the date. 2015. Be sure to sell your stocks before then and then buy them back after the collapse hits bottom.

PS4 GPU

2009-12-10T19:02:00.001-08:00

There is a rumor floating around that the PS4 GPU will be a PowerVR chip. While this is possible, especially if intel buys nVidia, I have to ask if Imagination has the experience to do something like this? If this is true, this could either be the best play since the dreamcast or could completely back-fire and hurt Sony significantly. I'd give them a coin toss of a chance for that of success or failure. Is it something I'd bet the company (Sony) on? uhm, no. Its way too risky. So....

heres my take on what Sony may be planning. A PS2 like model with a dummy, lightning fast, high bandwidth rasterizer and maybe 128 SPU cores to feed it. Sony may think it is a good idea to get back to basics with the PS4. Is this a good idea?

I think that this goes against the grain here. Each console generation, games have been getting easier and easier to make over time, not harder and harder. ... This can be dangerous ..., I hope they know what they are doing.

On the plus side, PowerVR does solve Ahmdal's Law better than ATI or nVidia. If it can scale well to a dual GTX 295 level of performance, then perhaps things are all well and good. Thats a pretty big if though. I'd still say that they would be treading dangerous waters even if that does work out.

Intel Cancels Larrabee

2009-12-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

This means that Intel will likely buy nVidia, because it has to in order to stay competitive with AMD.

More interesting is that the primary two graphics vendors would then be soaked up into processor companies. Will they force future consoles to use AMD and Intel processors along with their AMD and Intel graphics cards? Profit driven decision making says yes.

What really matters?

2009-12-08T13:12:00.001-08:00

In the future... (in some cases far future, where I define far as beyond my lifetime, but perhaps not beyond my kids or my kids kids)

1) All Software will be open source

2) All Hardware will be open source

3) All Design will be open source

4) All Education will be open source

5) All Entertainment will be open source

6) All Food will be open source
7) All Pharmaceuticals will be open source

8) All Small Manual Labor will be automated (by hardware that you can print out)

9) All Communications (the internet) will be effectively free

10) Nearly All Data will be free

11) Nearly all of your time will be spent on improving or making any of the above as you see fit.

The current rat race that we all know and love is exactly that, a rat race.

So, What will be valuable in the future then?

1) Raw material resources (because it will be cheaper for a very long time to harvest than to create)

2) Power (energy can create materials, gather data, transport, and many many other valuable things)

3) Insurance (you will still need protection from outside meteor strike like events)

4) Community (bound together and acting as a single unit, they can enhance many of the other valuables)

5) Data (real measurements that are difficult to come by will hold value)

6) Transportation (because it requires 1,2,3,and 5, specifically long range transportation)

7) Manual Labor (manual labor on grand scales will continue to be valuable as they can require all other valuables to achieve)

Valuable items can be transferred into other valuable items, just like today. However what is valuable will change significantly.

Go Language

2009-11-12T21:07:00.000-08:00

Go is the worst name for a programming language.

Try googling "Go".

Try googling "Go Language".

Also, while I do agree that a garbage collecting language is a great idea. Even if you dedicate an entire processor to nothing but garbage collection it can still be overwhelmed. By doing thousands of concurrent go routines all allocating 1 byte in a loop and then discarding over and over again breaks that idea. One processor cannot keep up with that. You would need roughly an equivalent number of processors doing garbage collection as you do doing processing. That is also assuming a perfectly efficient garbage collector.

They would probably say to this "don't do that" and sure its a worst case scenario, however it shows that you can be sacrificing lots of performance to these garbage collecting processors. Thats possibly 50% or more regardless of the total number of processors in the system.

Ok, so all gripes aside... I think its pretty nice and I'm glad somebody is continuing research into new languages to solve parallelism problems. I installed it and currently am playing with it a bit, I'll know more soon.

When will we run out of energy?

2009-11-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

Why worry about energy consumption?

Humans currently (2010) consume about 510,000,000,000,000,000 BTU per year.

Earth receives 3,649,800,000,000,000,000,000 BTUs per year from the sun.

World-wide energy consumption doubles every 35 years. At this rate, it will take a little less than 490 years in order to exceed our external energy input.

Ok, thats great, but what about things that aren't computers which require some sun too. Sunlight is vital for humans to produce vitamin D. Its also vital for growing the things we eat. If we eat up too much sunlight for computers, we will certainly die.

Majority of the world is ocean, and majority of the ocean doesn't have very much life. This is because life springs up and eats up all available resources, then dies, floats to the bottom of the sea floor and stays there as there is little to swish it around the nutrients to be eaten by other organisms. As such, most of the life exists around the coasts and up-swells in the ocean currents bringing the nutrition from the sea floor to the surface where phytoplankton can thrive and the pyramid of life grows from that. So I think its reasonable to say we can capture a decent percentage of the suns rays and convert that into energy without hurting things too much. Lets say 10% at best although the more realistic number may be much higher. At about 10%, we will exceed this energy source in about 310 to 350 years.

In other words, we won't run out of energy for a loooong time. I read lots of periodicals which say "were increasing our energy consumption and we should be concerned, blah blah blah". Sure, thats all true if solar energy won't get drastically more efficient with more research and time, which is ridiculous. So give me a personal holo-deck please, and damn the energy costs.

References:

http://timeforchange.org/prediction-of-energy-consumption

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

Wikipedia Company Idea

2009-11-08T21:42:00.000-08:00

Make a company which connects companies and individuals with other individuals or companies who will write wikipedia articles for cash.

This sounds bad, but isn't too different from what happens now. If a company wants something changed they have to convince other (hopefully unassociated) people to write about the thing or change the thing they want changed. This happens all the time. I've seen it personally at some companies that I've worked at. The difference is that this company would formalize the transfer for a modest intermediary fee.

I'm not sure if this idea is morally correct or even would follow Wikipedia's COI rules, however it would probably make a lot of cash. The company itself would be morally in the grey area in my opinion as it simply connects unscrupulous people with other unscrupulous people. It doesn't inherently do anything bad, but it does allow bad things. Like how Napster can be used for good purposes, but everybody pretty much just stole music.

Google Wave

2009-11-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

looks like it is a chat room with threads. Currently not many people to thread chat with. I'm looking forward to really giving it a try when there are more people who have it. I think the biggest problem with google-wave is that its not open source. There would be much wider adoption if it wasn't centralized and google controlled. IE, more like e-mail.

Voxels on Tom's Hardware

2009-10-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/voxel-ray-casting,2423.html

Jet Lag Insta-fix

2009-10-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

A tip for travelers with Jet Lag.

Align your eating habits to the time-zone you want to adjust to. Sleep habits will naturally follow within 24 hours.

My 10-month old baby can read

2009-09-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

I tought my 10 month old baby how to read over the past 3 weeks. Literally, no lie. I'll put up a you-tube video to prove it soon.

Here is what you do.

1) Show a flash card with a word on it.

2) Point to the word and say it, moving your finger across the word as you say it.

3) Show a picture of what the word represents and say a simple sentence describing what the baby is seeing where the sentence ends or begins (or both) with the word.

Its better if the word has an action associated with it. Wave, Clap, etc...

I can show my baby a flash card with the word and she does the action and says the word. Without me saying the word first, which is the important part. At this point its probably just simple pattern recognition, however I bet that once I introduce more words she will be able to read new words that I have never showed her before. For example, waving or clapping once she learns to recognize the 'ing' at the end of a word.

Presidential Age Requirement

2009-08-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYrZZ68zhSs

What is wrong with this video? All of the presidents are seemingly getting younger as time goes on. But are they?

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

The average age of every president is 55 years with a standard deviation of 6.25. Presidents have *not* been getting younger. They are all about the same age. Barack Obama for example is 48 whereas president Ulysses S. Grant (who was president over 100 years ago) was 46.

I think there is something that is not as it was originally intended. The minimum age of a US President or Vice President is 35 years old. I believe the original intent of this was to make sure that the person had enough life experience to rely on in order to run the country. However, something has changed since that requirement has set that should affect that 35 age requirement. People are living longer. Much longer in fact, but the age requirement of a president has not increased appropriately to accommodate this change. For example, in some parts of the world, the life expectancy is increasing by 6 months every year.

There are some potential benefits to having older presidents. For one, they may be more concerned with the future of the country as their personal future is coming to a close. If they make changes to the government which benefit them, but hurt the public, they quite possibly have little to personally gain by that, seeing as that their life is coming to a close. As such they may not be able to significantly personally gain from it or if they do it may not matter as much. Unfortunately, while the concept initially sounds good, this doesn't always work. There are plenty of occasions where presidents live to be very old indeed. What about family? One might think that they could still make sure that their family is well off. While that is true, the older a person is the more diverse of classifications of descendant family they would have to improve, some of which may be hard due to the unpredictable nature of those results. IE, some of their children's children could be in poverty while others would be in riches, so that the decisions of who to help and who to hurt are harder. This effect would improve the decisions of presidents as the average life-span of a person continues to improve over time. Therefore older people may have more of the best interests of the future of the people of the country in mind. This concept shows the most promise, however has yet to be verified by taking a look at descendants of presidents of a few generations. I suspect that it might be true some of the time, but not all the time. If I remember correctly, the richer you are, the less children you tend to have, which would directly limit this factor. Still though, I hope I'm wrong and this is maybe a 50/50 chance of being correct.

In any case, I think we should call some attention to this oversight and bring to light these changes and the future changes that this country faces. I do believe this change would be a change for the better.

Voxel Performance and Requirements

2009-07-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

I read lots of papers on voxel rendering techniques and such describing that they achieved 60fps without specifying some of the most important factors.

1) Image Resolution -- This is obviously important, yet some papers seem to magically forget it. It has to run at 60fps or more at HD (720p and 1080p) resolutions in order to be considered for video games.
2) Voxel Resolution -- IE, how deep is the tree? This is very important as each level of the tree adds one more iteration to your traversal loop for every pixel and as such significantly affects performance.
3) Data Transfer Amount / Speed -- This may not be obvious, but it does play an important role. The GPU can do behind the scenes transfers from system ram to video ram, but the bandwidth is only good if you do it in large chunks (many sequential MB). This plays an important role in performance.
4) Cache Responsiveness -- This one shows its ugly head when you look at a scene that you have never seen before. If the cache is not responsive enough, the coarseness of the unloaded oct-tree will show its ugly head. This is primarily more of a quality issue.

Also, I think its important to mention what the system requirements were to run smoothly at those resolutions.
1) How much Video RAM does it consume? If you require more than 2gb of vram SVO/Voxel data, its not realistic for next gen consoles (720, PS4). Even 2gb may be pushing it. Keeping the requirements under 1.5gb is preferable.
2) How much System RAM does it consume? If you have to store the entire volume set in RAM. This is not realistic as most volume sets of a real game will be in the many gigabytes range.
3) What video card were the results computed on? dual GTX 295's may be a sign that the technology is unreasonably expensive.

I would really like it if all voxel papers in the future would mention these things, because its very hard to evaluate otherwise.

4/8/2008 - The Future of Piracy

2009-07-03T11:25:00.001-07:00

When somebody mentions 3D printers, some may think this is the first step towards a star trek replicator. They are probably right. 3D printers will change the world as we know it. Mostly they will usher in a new era of open source hardware and piracy.

Imagine a world where you can download a design for a new ipod, and print it out within seconds.

Imagine a world where there is a thriving open hardware movement to complement today's open software movement.

A bit farther off, imagine downloading a recipe for an entree from a five star restaurant, and then print it in front of you.

What would happen to all the jobs built around the concept of design once, sell many... especially when a hardware design can easily be pirated?
Food and Clothing jobs will eventually change significantly, but chefs and fashion designers will remain for the foreseeable future.
Entertainment will not change a whole lot and still be complaining about piracy.

What would happen to FedEX and UPS?
Shipping services would most likely be relegated to raw materials and perhaps goods made with volatile materials.

How far off is this?
It is hard to tell... but a decent guess would be within 50 years, but it could happen as early as 30 years. You will start seeing the signs of these trends in less than 15 years, although you can see them right now if you look closely enough.

So lets look at the printing of food for a bit and take a few logical guesses about the future here. The thought of whipping out your HP printer and printing out a nice juicy New York Steak and Eggs is probably not going to happen, at least not in the form it exists today. However, the machines could build "flavor" molecules which act as spices or when heated and with water could produce various textures of certain types of food. These machines would more be of the simulation of foods rather than the production of Angus Beef.

Why would anybody want a simulation of a steak rather than the steak itself?
When humanity expands out into space, those space dwellers aren't going to have the amount of land necessary to support cows. Its simply too expensive. However, having one of these fancy simulation machines can trick the person into believing he is eating a Kobe Steak.

So in conclusion, would this technology change the world for the better? I think so. It allows people to experience the entire range of life, and for very little money. Anything that improves the lives of the entire human race, I think is a good technology to have. Even though it can and surely will be misused, its potential for good is too great to ignore.

Wave Riding

2009-07-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

Every large move starts as a small one.