Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

KozmoNaut posted:

My rule of thumb is that if someone tosses you a capacitor larger than the last joint of your little finger, you let that sucker drop. If it's the size of a beer can, you duck and cover.

Taking electronics classes in trade school was nerve-wracking at times.

And now you can get an MP3 player with 512GB of flash storage, if you're willing to sell your firstborn for a FiiO X5 with a pair of 256GB SDXC cards. Apparently, cards up to the full 2TB SDXC spec will be supported in the future. Who the hell carries around that much music?

Audiobooks and radio dramas take up lots of space uncompressed and I carry hundreds of them on my HDD iPod Classic.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 16:14

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 17:09

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Humphreys posted:

I will take you up on that offer/challenge tomorrow.

at hospital, lost ebyeal

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 07:16

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Captain Trips posted:

I will never understand the witchcraft that allows those cassette adapters to function.

They convert (marginally, it's pretty straightforward analogue stuff) the analogue signal from the headphone jack to the electromagnetic signals that the cassette deck would be picking up from the "tape" portion of the cassette. They're mostly solid-state, too - the spool-holes don't actually spin or even connect to anything, they're just there for hardware compatibility.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2014 21:18

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

All I know is that my dad at one point secured for me "batman@yahoo.com", but I never used it (being, like, six) and someone else has it now.

My greatest shame.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 18:31

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

DarthBlingBling posted:

I have the greatest email address: looking@goatse.cx

That's pretty great, but it doesn't make me feel better about losing "batman@yahoo.com".

On the upside, I did score [my lastname].[my firstname]@gmail.com, which is nice.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 19:18

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

DarthBlingBling posted:

Me too. Did you know that gmail ignores the dot. Great way to have 'infinite' email address to sign up for poo poo.

Don't know if this is common with email suppliers?

Yeah, I'm aware.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 19:29

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

It could be firstnamemlastname and he's forgetting his middle initial.

# ¿ May 18, 2014 00:11

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

DrBouvenstein posted:

BlackBerry, the company that gives on giving, has given us a unique look into obsolete tech of the future...today!

And yes...that last one is real:

The gently caress is with that keyboard?

# ¿ Jun 19, 2014 20:36

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Shovel Knight has like 350 cheat codes and they're all great.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2014 16:27

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Boiled Water posted:

South Korea exclusively uses Internet Explorer for online banking. It's literally the law.

How the hell did THAT happen?

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 11:58

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

mng posted:

My mind was opened when I was taught how to use mouse+keyboard in Quake. I say 'taught' when it was more like a friend at my first LAN asking me what the hell I was doing. It was a bit alien since the 2.5D FPS games before that were pretty much keyboard only and autoaim

Same, man. My first FPS experience was the netplay in Sonic Robo Blast 2 (I was like 12), and once I wrapped my head around mouse-and-keyboard I couldn't believe how much better it was than literally anything else.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 15:10

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Baronjutter posted:

I'm surprised keyboards don't come with the wasd keys coloured or with little arrows on them.

Some gamer keyboards do, or you can get key-caps, but really that's just a pain in the rear end. It's muscle memory, like typing in general.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 21:19

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

I took darkroom photography in High School, but in the past few years since I graduated they've gutted my HS's old darkroom.

My 14yo cousin is taking DR Photo at her fancy-shmancy school though.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 21:23

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

# ¿ May 12, 2015 14:49

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Manuel Calavera posted:

Or 160GB if you still have a working ipod Classic like I've got. Hopefully it doesn't die anytime soon. I don't even have it full and I'm somewhere around 16k songs currently.

Mine just died a couple of months ago. Hard drive stopped spinning up. Managed to recover all the data but maaan, being able to cart around my entire audiobook/radio drama library was nice.

# ¿ May 13, 2015 02:38

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

I actually just dumped the old iPod Classic anyway. Alas alack.

# ¿ May 13, 2015 07:42

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

...they're....still making these? Good lord, I thought they'd quit in the mid 00s.

College radio is horrible to listen to but good for helping you, as a student, figure out if you've chosen correctly. If you spend two semesters behind that mic and haven't found your voice yet and your show is "Dead air, um, dead air," you need to seriously consider changing your major, or, at the very least, your specialization.

Homestar Runner went on hiatus around '08 but they've been putting out a couple toons a year since like 2013.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2015 17:42

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

It's also because the GCN component cables had the encoding chipset built into the cable itself rather than the console and no one's reverse engineered them yet.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 23:50

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Some people attest that GCN Component produces a better picture than Wii Component. I don't know about that.

What I DO know is that the Game Boy Player doesn't work on the Wii, so if you want the best real-hardware TV/capture ready feed possible from GB(C/A) games then you gotta pony up.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 02:41

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

drgnwr1 posted:

And they made an awesome clicking noise as you spun your phone around in them slowly.

Love me some ratchet joints.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 19:24

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Metal Gear?

# ¿ Oct 3, 2015 13:37

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Jerry Cotton posted:

I wonder if there's a Wikipedia article/list of languages where you can spell boobs or some variation thereof in calculese?

You're in luck! :eng101:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_spelling

# ¿ Oct 22, 2015 15:00

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Wasabi the J posted:

Why does it seem that projectors are the display equivalents of printers? Filled with poo poo you never wanted, a nightmare to work with, and expensive to find replacement parts for.

Moving parts seem to be the common factor.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 21:12

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Something about Type-C makes me uncomfortable.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 02:13

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Twist-knobs built into the socket are the Norm in the US for most floor and desk lamps. On-cord click-wheels or foot-pedals are abberations, and furthermore everyone hates them because they aren't always in the exact same place relative to the bulb so you have to actually look for them instead of being able to quickly, blindly locate the switch.

# ¿ May 24, 2016 16:37

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

The Gasmask posted:

Brief History: What is Scanline?

Back in the day, to get a 3D scene from the computer to the display, there had to be some way of translating that 3D data to a 2D format. Some smart guys figured out that you could first sort the polygons in the order that they appear, then render row by row and discard the no longer visible polys from the sorted list. Wikipedia goes into a bit of detail about this, but as it was superseded by raytracing I won't focus on it, beyond saying that scanline was good to avoid memory bottlenecks as you're not reading vertices multiple times (and is still used today, notably on the Nintendo DS). In terms of offline (non-realtime) rendering, raytracing is where we started to explore the crazy things that light can do.

Raytracing:

(From Wikipedia): "In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of visual realism, usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where the image can be rendered slowly ahead of time, such as in still images and film and television visual effects, and more poorly suited for real-time applications like video games where speed is critical. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and dispersion phenomena (such as chromatic aberration)."

In a simplified sense, it traces a line from each pixel on the screen, and determines what it hits and what color that pixel should be as a result. It also tests for intersection from each of the hit points, may re-cast based on reflective or translucent materials, and gives you a color for that pixel.
One of the reasons why it goes outwards from the camera instead of inwards, like light does to a real camera, is that the majority of light rays will bounce off to oblivion. Looking at the picture above, quite a number of the rays coming from the single light would bounce at such an angle that they'd miss the camera completely. Calculating rays like that is hugely wasteful, so it's much better to only figure out what can actually be seen.
All these calculations of the paths of rays meant that now, with some additional rays beyond the first one (which the material of the object would determine if needed), bending light (refracting), bouncing light (reflecting), and sharp shadows could be calculated with relative ease. It was pretty mindblowing to see it in action for the first time, and allowed things like glass to be rendered with significantly more realism than previously achievable.

Unfortunately, this came with a cost. Render times shot up dramatically, especially when you'd need to do multiple traces for refractions, reflections, transparency, and so on. Also, Global Illumination (GI), where objects are lit by indirect light bounces, was not a part of raytracing, though it could be faked (i.e. not using physically based equations), which generally had less-than-perfect results. There were a number of tricks to increase the accuracy and a different model (radiosity) came about to deal with it, but by nature raytracing could only deal with direct illumination. Still, you can look at a movie like WarCraft, which uses RenderMan's REYES (Render Everything You've Ever Seen) raytracing algorithm for an example of how good modern variants using current tricks and workarounds can be.

For quite a while this was the best we had, and render farms (lots of computers networked together, all rendering a part of the final product) started springing up to deal with the crazy computational complexity needed for things like motion pictures. It meant that there really wasn't a hobbyist market for high-quality, realistic animations, unless you wanted to pray your computer would stay on for the 3 months it would take to render that 30-second 320x240 animation of a glass ball bouncing around on a flat plane.

An interesting fact: Pixar used 117 computers to render the movie Toy Story, with single frames taking from 45 minutes to 30 hours to render. The film required 800,000 machine hours and 114,240 frames of animation in total.

Some raytracing renderers include the internal renderers for Blender (free)/3dsmax/lightwave/modo/maya, POV-Ray (free), and Renderman REYES (free for noncommercial use).

The Future is Now: Path Tracing

Expanding upon the research done with raytracing, it was discovered that using a Monte Carlo method to calculate the paths of light meant that GI could now be accurately incorporated, along with caustics, soft shadows, and pretty much anything else you'd see in reality. It did this by (extremely simplified explanation) shooting the rays out, continually sampling each pixel while adding more rays of light to it, calculating the color, and as each pixel was sampled more and more, the color would converge on the correct result. To compare, instead of tracing a single ray like raytracing, it's following the path of the light as it bounces around, from the object to the light, and by repeated sampling gets a much more accurate result. This does mean there's no set "end" to the path tracing, besides the amount of samples you choose - and some renderers, like LuxRender, by default scan progressively forever, leaving it up to the user to decide when its converged enough.

While render times have progressively gotten longer and longer, the visuals that path tracing provides more often than not make up for it, and depending on what kind of results you're looking for (i.e. lots of caustics), you can choose different path tracing algorithms to converge the results quicker. There have also been advances in denoising technology, which allow a grainy final render to be cleaned up dramatically while losing practically no detail or sharpness, thanks to using a bunch of extra unseen rendered deep-data to determine what's noise and what's part of the image itself.

Unlike raytracing, path tracing also led to a whole new way of looking at materials. This is where it gets super mathy and well beyond my understanding, but to kind of break it down, we currently use a Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) to define how light bounces/scatters/is absorbed in those materials. It required a complete overhaul of the texturing/material workflow, for the benefit that instead of having to make a texture for every lighting scenario, you'd make one using the physically-based workflow and it would look accurate in any lighting condition. Oh, and lighting - instead of point lights and spotlights galore, to get the most realistic results you want to use image based lighting (IBL), area and mesh lights. Having a light source be a single point just doesn't look real, you want them to have an actual size and shape.

Pretty much any modern 3D "realism aimed" game is using at least PBR for materials, though realtime path tracing is out of the question so lighting is often baked in, with IBL and reflection captures helping to mimic true GI. It's why there was a huge shift in the realism of game visuals partway throughout the PS3/360 lifecycle. IIRC, Remember Me was one of the first games to utilize physically based rendering (PBR) into it's workflow. Now, even games like Overwatch, which use a very stylized art direction, are using PBR for their lighting and materials.

Side note about path tracing and PBR: it's based around an energy conserving model, meaning you never get out more energy than you put in. Therefore you should never have specular highlights that are brighter than what the light that creates them could provide, and combined with the BRDF that says that the more reflective an object is the smaller and sharper it's highlights are, helps solidify an accurate look. Compare that with raytracing using a non-PBR system, where it's up to the user to decide the size and hardness of the specular highlights independent of the energy from the light, which can look good but is not physically realistic. The raytraced image I posted is incorrect in this sense because it's fully refractive yet has a medium sized, kind of blurry highlight which I had to set manually, while the path traced one has sharp highlights which were set automatically based on the intensity of the reflections.

Some examples of current path tracing renderers are Cycles (free), Arnold, Octane, Mitsuba (free), LuxRender (free), Renderman's RIS (free for noncommercial use), Corona, and VRay. Some of these are straight unidirectional path tracing, others offer bidirectional path tracing/bidirectional VCM along with other variations.

E: Added a few more details, fixed a spelling error. I didn't touch on how dramatically the PBR workflow changed things and the specifics of it, or the difference between unbiased and biased rendering, as this is a huge topic even seasoned 3D artists have trouble understanding fully. But for anyone looking for further reading, Allegorithmic has a pretty detailed couple of guides on PBR here. Biased vs. unbiased is a stupid controversial distinction currently because people automatically think unbiased is better (pro tip: it's not always), but Carnegie Mellon put out a technical PDF here which I think explains it super well.

How does the pre-baked Global Illumination implementation in the "Hedgehog Engine" relate to these methods?

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 02:07

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

That sounds right re:Hedgehog, based on what I've overheard from the level editing community/modscene.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 03:08

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Ideally, we'd get the best of all possible worlds via Variable Frame Rate. Boost the framerate during horizontal pans (or for aesthetic effect) to maintain smooth motion, while appealing to tradition when necessary

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 00:05

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

TinTower posted:

Knowing Apple's experience with other lightning dongles (hello there Lightning-to-HDMI), it'll be some hacked-together DAC-ADC-DAC poo poo that pitch shifts the entire thing.

Didn't lightning -to-HDMI add, like, MPEG compression or some poo poo?

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 01:28

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

The Bombe isn't turing-complete, is why.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2016 00:08

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Boiled Water posted:

Did you spreadsheet with the controller or how was it supposed to function?

The Famicom in Japan had keyboard peripherals.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2016 14:25

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

SCART can carry raw RGB, which people like.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 14:23

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

I thought the advantage of CompactFlash was that it seamlessly replaced/emulated hard drives on legacy machines without needing drivers, just using a dumb adapter.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2016 00:48

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

send me that ipod please I'd give it a good home

# ¿ Mar 17, 2017 06:26

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Wasabi the J posted:

I have two of the 6th gen (""Classic"") ones with 120GB in a kitchen drawer.

pm me

# ¿ Mar 17, 2017 07:53

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Printers are Raster, Plotters are Vector.

e:f,b

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 07:00

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

SUBroutine?

# ¿ Sep 16, 2017 09:32

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

What do Pentiums and rabbits have in common?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 08:18

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

I used Doggy Hour for a long time until my wife threatened me with divorce.

God I love Doggy Hour.

(For context, we threaten to leave each other over every little thing)

# ¿ Feb 9, 2018 01:26

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 17:09

DoctorWhat: Nov 18, 2011; A little privacy, please?

I thought Looms made Time Lords.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2018 10:11

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