In article <3edaad06@news.povray.org> , "Ray Gardener" 
<ray### [at] daylongraphicscom> wrote:

> Well, I'm not sure there's any need to employ
> derogatory remarks in this discussion or insinuate
> that my intelligence is lower than it should be.
> It sounds like you're threatened or uncomfortable
> about something.

Yes, the fact that someone uses a 16 year old paper that used a CCI 6/32 as
basis does indeed make me uncomfortable seriously question this persons
ability to evaluate "facts" before reaching any conclusion. -- For those not
aware, this system delivers proximately the same computing power as a 4 Mhz
(yes, four Megahertz!) Pentium 4, or in the standard of the time, about six
MIPS (peak) or around a rating of five on the Specmark 89 scale, which is
slightly better than a 386 with FPU or less than half that of a SPARCstation
4/60 (Sparc 1).

(from another of your posts)
> Fair enough. I submit the following picture:
> http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/tour/ss_scanline.jpg

Lets see, you have an image that has about 275000 pixels, and you render
16.8 million triangles, that yields about 61 triangles per pixel.  More,
actually, somewhere around 70 triangles per pixel, because some part of the
image is the sky.  This suggests very ineffective or nonexistent clipping
and culling algorithms.  I have hardly ever seen a scene with more than one
million triangles that, after clipping and culling well before (!!!) getting
down to a triangle level, reached more than 10 triangles per pixel.  in
short, on any computer you could have bought in the last two years this
should render in a few seconds using scanline rendering.

16 million triangles is peanuts, nothing else, compared to properly clipped
and culled datasets that created (and still create, of course) very good
results when used with POV-Ray even several years ago:
<http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/terrain/mars32/>

> I suppose ignorance is bliss...

No, just a necessity because if I would spend as much time explaining
details every time somebody comes up with completely unresearched,
misinterpreted or just plain random "facts", I would hardly find time to do
anything else.  Yet, few of the users in these groups care (or need to know,
your response to Gilles reply is a good example, but that takes to long to
explain here why) enough about the technical reasons that so clearly show
why your "facts" are plain wrong.  One problem with newsgroups is that false
"facts" tend to come up weeks later when somebody simply accepted everything
that went unchallenged as true "fact".  Especially if that person appears to
have knowledge about the topic being discussed.

In short:

***
I consider it a matter of courtesy, especially in any non-verbal discussion
where writing the reply takes longer than anything else, that people *first*
find out what they are going to talk in a responsible manner about and
*then* speak up rather than depend on others to do the thinking for them.
***

(Rhetorical question)
Now that I wasted over 50 minutes of my time on this, are you happy? :-(

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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