Roger
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Posts posted by Roger
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I disabled the integrated graphics but haven't had time to properly test it yet to confirm it fixed the problem.
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I didn't grow up with this show, but I do believe in what he's doing and thought I'd post this here in case any Hashers want to throw a few bucks his way.
He's already hit his target but extra can't hurt.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/readin...h?ref=discovery
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In keeping with discussing old PCs, I thought this might bring a few chuckles:
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I'll try again...I am perfectly capable of drawing on paper, it is the problem with looking at a monitor and then drawing on a smaller tablet with no display that is difficult for me. Drawing directly on a tablet with a display would be a similar enough experience to paper.
I too found a regular Wacom tablet awkward to use. i was doing and re-doing strokes until I got it in the right place. Generally not usable for me.
Drawing on the screen is way better.
But it looks like what will be the case is that I can't afford what I want, anything I get that I can afford will likely have serious compromises, so I'm better off spending $100 on sketchpads and pencils than pissing my money away on an inferior product. Maybe I will revisit the whole drawing tablet thing a few years from now. Or when I can afford $2000 for a proper Cintiq or $1200 for the "lite" version.I'll note that I got my 18" Cintiq used, for about $600 on ebay several years ago and the same model goes for much much less now. The stand is handy in that it tilts down to a regular drawing angle but I also need my adjustable chair that boosts me up to a high enough level to feel right with the drawing surface.
That's more in my range but a ways down the road. Maybe next tax refund.
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With the Sony Flip it has a dual core i7 up to 3gz and the ideal part of a dedicated video card is you can use it on a regular monitor or display on a tv with pc input, I think it has an HDMI jack. Again it's comparable to the Surface Pro in price. As far as hand eye coordination if you can't draw on paper then no tablet or screen will be any better. Downside of drawing on a Cintiq is with the stock stand it get's tiring and I would recommend an Ergotron arm but that adds another $150 to the price tag. It is better than a standard tablet but the larger tablets are pretty nice in the 9x12 size but they don't have the same aspect ratio as the most screens so scaling does make it harder to get used to.
Big downside to tablets and portables is the processing speed isn't there yet. My workstation is a dual chip xeon quad cores thats 8 cores with combined 24mb cache. Dropping back to a the top of the line i7 dual core could be an issue with rendering and with crunching huge files, something I breeze through right now and fear stepping back to something else.
Atom chips are fine for poking around the web but pretty much useless for any graphical work. Stay with i5 or better. With Win8, 8gb minimum for ram.
Glad they solved the virtual smudge issue, I'll take another look at them.
Good vector drawing application to use is Serif DrawPlus X6, pressure support is nice and the program is realy light on the os, should fly on those little tablets. I use it here for much of my illustration and layout work. Try the free one and you can upgrade from that.
I am perfectly capable of drawing on paper, it is the problem with looking at a monitor and then drawing on a smaller tablet with no display that is difficult for me. Drawing directly on a tablet with a display would be a similar enough experience to paper.
But it looks like what will be the case is that I can't afford what I want, anything I get that I can afford will likely have serious compromises, so I'm better off spending $100 on sketchpads and pencils than pissing my money away on an inferior product. Maybe I will revisit the whole drawing tablet thing a few years from now. Or when I can afford $2000 for a proper Cintiq or $1200 for the "lite" version.
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With the Sony Flip it has a dual core i7 up to 3gz and the ideal part of a dedicated video card is you can use it on a regular monitor or display on a tv with pc input, I think it has an HDMI jack. Again it's comparable to the Surface Pro in price. As far as hand eye coordination if you can't draw on paper then no tablet or screen will be any better. Downside of drawing on a Cintiq is with the stock stand it get's tiring and I would recommend an Ergotron arm but that adds another $150 to the price tag. It is better than a standard tablet but the larger tablets are pretty nice in the 9x12 size but they don't have the same aspect ratio as the most screens so scaling does make it harder to get used to.
Big downside to tablets and portables is the processing speed isn't there yet. My workstation is a dual chip xeon quad cores thats 8 cores with combined 24mb cache. Dropping back to a the top of the line i7 dual core could be an issue with rendering and with crunching huge files, something I breeze through right now and fear stepping back to something else.
Atom chips are fine for poking around the web but pretty much useless for any graphical work. Stay with i5 or better. With Win8, 8gb minimum for ram.
Glad they solved the virtual smudge issue, I'll take another look at them.
Good vector drawing application to use is Serif DrawPlus X6, pressure support is nice and the program is realy light on the os, should fly on those little tablets. I use it here for much of my illustration and layout work. Try the free one and you can upgrade from that.
I am perfectly capable of drawing on paper, it is the problem with looking at a monitor and then drawing on a smaller tablet with no display that is difficult for me. Drawing directly on a tablet with a display would be a similar enough experience to paper.
But it looks like what will be the case is that I can't afford what I want, anything I get that I can afford will likely have serious compromises, so I'm better off spending $100 on sketchpads and pencils than pissing my money away on an inferior product. Maybe I will revisit the whole drawing tablet thing a few years from now. Or when I can afford $2000 for a proper Cintiq or $1200 for the "lite" version.
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The "globes" were amusing.
I think I remember seeing a clip from "girl can't help it" with an erupting milk bottle when Jayne Mansfield walks by the milkman.
You can't tell me THAT wasn't "code" for something
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Well I would definitely take the word of the guy that actually did it. There must have been some reason punch cards were attractive over magnetic storage. I don't remember the exact year Tron was made, I think it was 1981 or 1982? Actually it was released in the early 80s so it was probably in production in the late 70s. So I guess it is possible that magnetic storage was just prohibitively expensive, or that system could only accept punch card input. Still, yikes. Would not want to have to model/animate like that.
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I had a Commodore 64 in 1983 which had the same processor as an Apple II.
I read an article that explained the math of projecting 3D shapes onto a flat screen and wrote a BASIC program to do that but it was seriously tedious stuff to enter all the coordinates for the line segments and all that. I didn't get much 3D modeling done that way.
But somehow that's how they did TRON. All the CG was done with typed commands and data on punch cards. Ouch.
Yeah, I don't even want to think about. Povray with a text editor was bad enough. I never got beyond primitives or the obligatory chrome sphere over a checkerboard.
What it amounts to, is you are manually generating the text file to describe the scene, whereas in AM you are using a graphical interface. But they both (I believe) pass some sort of simple text file to the renderer with the commands telling it what goes where and what to do.
You could do some pretty fancy stuff with Povray by plotting out everything on graph paper before hand, building each component separately with the text description language, and then putting it all together in the renderer at the end to generate a single object. There was a guy way back (name escapes me at the moment) that did some pretty amazing stuff with just Povray using that technique.
You can imagine this would be beyond tedious for more than a few objects, and animation probably impossible other than simple path animation.
I don't want to think about throwing punch cards into the mix, that sounds like an enormous pain. Were they really stuck using punch cards for Tron? I know they had some super-duper tricked out PDP-11 that they used, but I thought they had some sort of primitive hard disk (or at least tape) by then.
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If I think about it, most of that computing power is devoted to making the computer more accessible rather than presenting us with more complicated endeavors to do.
It takes a lot of power to run the GUI but we're doing fairly mundane things... reading, searching, texting and messaging mostly... with it.
But then there are A:M users like ourselves who are doing real future stuff like 3-D modeling that wasn't feasible with that Apple II.
Oh totally. Most of that is devoted to the interface. There is a lot of stuff on a modern PC that boils down to making text processing attractive. And there is nothing stopping you from using an ancient PC to write a novel (in fact, the Game of Thrones guy uses Wordstar on a 30 year old PC with no internet).
So if you want to write a novel, or do a simple database or spreadsheet a 30 year old PC will work as well as a new one. Or do text based browsing or searches on the internet, provided you can connect it somehow.
But no amount of wishful thinking will let you do the kind of graphics stuff that we do with AM on an Apple II.
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For comparison, first computer I ever owned was a 286 (this was cobbled out of spares at a time when a 386 was more common)
Hard disk (none), later upgraded to 30MB full height
16mhz 286 cpu, no mathco
1mb of RAM
4 color CGA graphics, later updated to VGA
1 5.25 and 1 3.5" floppy drive
No networking, but I had a 2400bps modem
Sound: PC speaker upgraded later to Sound Blaster
There were of course no 3d graphics at the time, at least not the way we think of them, but the cpu could push around a couple hundred (Dozen? I know flat-shaded low poly games were possible back then) polygons maybe at 320x200.
Compared to my modern machine:
Core i7 with probably tens of thousands of times more speed
16GB of RAM
750GB of disk space
3d graphics capable of full HD and several billion polys per second
Wired and wireless networking, 3G with a dongle
Surround Sound (using some kind of positional audio)
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Those kids are too photogenic.
I don't recall any of my fellow nine-year-olds being that articulate.
Maybe they're all from the drama club.
Oh I agree, they were carefully chosen. These aren't your average 9 year olds they just pulled off the street (I think, anyway).
My favorite part of the video was when the adult explained it has no internet and you have to type all the commands in, and the little girl gives him this look like "I don't even hear the words you are saying". LOL
Modern desktops blow these machines away in every category. Even a budget Android phone has infinitely more capability. Odd when you think about it, that the average American has more computing power in their pocket than the entire country had in 1969.
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So ran across this and thought it might be good for a couple laughs for everyone else:
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I'm very tempted to get the Surface 3 as I would love a cintiq but can't really afford one (unless I look for used ones, then I might swing it).
I've also been looking at the Thinkpad Tablet 10, which should be coming out soon. It has one of the newer Atom chips and is supposedly on par with a lower speed Core i3. It comes with a Wacom digitizer.
However, these are very much "wants" and not "needs". I have a Wacom Intuos currently but I have problems with hand/eye coordination given I'm not looking at what I'm drawing. I'm just leery of getting another gadget that will have a limited lifespan.
So maybe I'm better off sticking with what I've got than trying to find a budget solution and ending up with something that isn't all that great.
I don't do a ton of digital painting/photoshoppery and would like to do more, but can't quite get used to the disconnect between drawing on the tablet and seeing the output on a monitor.
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Ok, I think I know what is happening now.
The center panel is closed off properly, but none of the other facets of the panel are. Since none if the other facets are closed off properly, the only one that is rendering is the main one, thus hiding the others. I'm pretty sure that is what is happening, anyway.
Edit: Well, I think some variation on the above must be what is happening, but what I've tried to fix it isn't working, so I'm going to step away for a bit and give it another whack a bit later.
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I'm sure it has, and I'm just rusty as heck and forgot.
However, made the correction and still have a solid surface with no indent. You mind if I shoot you an email?
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Ok, after seeing your example I see how to fix it and was able to close off the inner panel. I just wonder why I didn't run into this before. Maybe I just never tried to create this type of depression before now, or forgot to create the interior patches in order for it to close properly. I guess this underscores the need to get back to daily Hashing.
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I guess they must be, but how could they not be on the same spline? It seems like they would more or less have to be on the same spline.
I see why it would fill with the 3 point patches, but it seems as if it should also fill the other way. But I realize that may just be the way it works.
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Here is an example of what I'm trying to do. Although now I don't know why the inner panel doesn't render, since 4 points should be a valid patch.
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So I managed to settle on a project for the sci-fi contest, and if I finish it early I may do another entry. It seemed like a relatively straight-forward bit of modeling, but something isn't working quite right.
It could be that I haven't sat down in front of AM for so long that I'm missing something obvious.
Here is my problem: I've got one rectangular surface with another rectangle inside, and I'm trying to push the inner rectangle inwards to create a depression or indent in this robot (I would post an image but it will be immediately obvious what my project is, I think).
I thought I knew what the problem was, I didn't have any splines connecting the 2 areas, so I put 2 splines per side and then pushed the inner panel inwards. While it looks right in wireframe mode it doesn't look right in shaded mode, there does not appear to be any indent at all.
What do you figure I did wrong?
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I think that it isn't so much fat that's bad for you as it is sugar and carbs. When I was really watching my carb intake it was a lot easier for me to keep the weight off. Unfortunately it is hard to stay away from carbs forever.
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When young ( a looooooonnnnggggg time ago ), I used to say you knew you were getting old when your age exceeded your waist line in inches.
Now I'm trying not to catch up with the age around the middle !
regards
simon
I'd be happy to get back to a 34 or 36 inch waist. I don't see that happening easily though. I'll settle for maintaining where I'm at.
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I like the ad copy... "After 35, when eating habits may be restricted, it's the easy way to supplement the diet."
I wonder what "eating habits may be restricted" was supposed to mean?
And do you suppose the "regular" version is there just to make the "fortified" version look more powerful?
Maybe it means you're not supposed to eat red meat, so it is to supplement your iron intake?
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you need the t shirt I got when I turned 40 it read
So
Happy
I
Turned
40
I'll be 66 in June
Yeah, that's exactly about how I feel about it, too. I don't too terribly different than I felt at 30. Maybe a little wiser, hopefully.
Nostalgia
in Off Topic
Posted
My first HD was a 30MB (!) full-height 5.25" beast that could probably stop small-arms fire. I think I paid $100 used. My first proper HD that had enough useable space on it was I think $300 for 500MB.
I think that amount of storage is about $0.25 for flash.