> It's the edge technique described in Milkdrop's preset authoring page.

 From what I can tell, very little is actually *described* in the 
Milkdrop documentation.

> When used carefully, you can produce reaction/diffusion and "skin dot"
> effects.

Yeah, you can do all kinds of really funky stuff with systems of 
differential equations, and the graphics hardware is pretty much 
designed for this type of number crunching.

> Evidently there are some security issues involved with allowing an
> applet to access graphics hardware, which is likely the reason the new
> version of JRE is so intolerant.

I can't imagine what the possible security risk could be...

>> I wish to God I could figure out how half of Milkdrop works. There are
>> some amazing 3D effects which cannot be done in realtime, and yet it
>> does them in realtime, even though that's clearly impossible.
>
> It's really not that difficult to learn (mastering it OTOH...). It draws
> graphics (shapes, dots) to a texture residing on a screen-wide...

Oh, yeah, I get how a graphics card works. What I can't figure out is 
how some of the effects that Milkdrop generates are mathematically 
possible. Figuring out the math is the hard part; actually making the 
hardware do it is usually quite simple.

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