Posts by Matthew Taylor
5 posts • joined Friday 30th January 2009 15:23 GMT
Just looked like a piece of perspex to me. The '0' and '1' on the screen looked like they'd been etched in somehow - it certainly wasn't turning opaque as described.
VR immersion requires much larger field of view
There have been a few such headsets around in recent years, but they all seem to simulate a screen viewed at a distance, much as one might watch a television - a field of view of 20-30 degrees. This is a far cry from the 110-120 degree view required for the immersive experience that VR is supposed to be.
I have long wished for such an immersive display - but have never found one. Of course such a field of view would not be suitable for watching a film on, (even IMAX is only 70 degrees or so) - which perhaps puts manufactureres off. Still, games could work well - as long as the accelerometer tech is REALLY tightly coupled with the view direction!
CUDA is a tricky customer
I've had a few run-ins with CUDA, and the problem I've found is that you need to know a lot about the architecture of the card, in order to get decent performance out of it, e.g. the memory layout of a "warp" (a small batch of items to be processed), and how the card pipelines texture fetches.
I found I could easily raise or lower my performance by a factor of 4-5 by adjusting some parameters, and it wasn't clear why. I ended up just trying loads of combinations and picking the best - but then on another card, that wouldn't give good results. NVidia need to do a lot more in the compiler to abstract that stuff away.
Having said that, it was over a year ago, so things may well have improved in that regard these days.
Posted in Google expands plan to run own internet
This is, well, annoying.
Sorry to be commenting on the prose style, rather than the subject - but for some reason the use of ", well, " in written pieces has blossomed on the internet of late. It seems designed to mirror spoken language, where one might pause to think of an example to prove one's point, and use "well" to indicate what one is doing.
"I searched, well, everywhere".
"We wrote about it, well, last week".
In spoken language, this is fair enough - but writing is not done in realtime. One can pause during composition without the audience being aware of it, so there is no need for "well, errrm, aaaaand" or any of those "gather my thoughts" fillers.
Sorry to seem pedantic, but I've been noticing this a lot lately (not particularly in your fine publication, but thought I'd post here anyway). It smacks of an attempt to indicate the writer is casually confident and at ease - but writing has it's own tricks to achieve this, and writing down fake "vocal tricks" is, (well), highly lame.
(Beer icon because it's my birthday, yay!)
Kings aiith
This comes as no surprise at all.
But then again, if I were to see video footage of Birmingham city council smearing their badly punctuated signs with their own shit, and dancing around them , screaming and grunting, it would come as no surprise.
However, that would not make it right. The apostrophe is there for good reason, and a million realpolitik, anti-elitism arguments spouted in ugly rustic accents will not change that.
We need to stop anti-intellectualism in its tracks. A pity that organisations, such as the BBC , which once might have been counted upon to take a paternalistic attitude to the maintenance of good standards regarding English language, have instead fallen under the spell of the markets, and chase ratings with Saturday night reality drivel.
Very sad.
