Stephen wrote:
> When I was in school, we weren't even allowed to use calculators never mind have
> access to a computer. The youth of today … :)

Stephen, when you and I were in school, the slide rule was considered to
be cutting edge technology :-)

BTW Remind me to listen to the Kat when she suggests that going for a
drink with a bad back is not a good idea

John

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Mike Raiford wrote:

> There was somewhere out there a Cray-2 (I think) you could log into via 
> telnet and run apps. It had POV-Ray on it already, an older version (2.x 
> or maybe 3.0) I ran a basic scene from the samples and was surprised at 
> how long it actually took.

Heh. One of the developers working on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler 
commented off-hand that he had tried Haskell's STM implementation on a 
machine with 128 CPUs and it had achieved a good speedup.



...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O 
This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship 
POV-Ray...!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Doctor John wrote:

> Stephen, when you and I were in school, the slide rule was considered to
> be cutting edge technology :-)

I saw a collection of slide rules yesterday... Of course, the really 
"cutting edge" ones were the *spiral* rules. ;-)

I think the most amusing fact was my dad commenting "oh hey, that's the 
model of slide rule we used to use at Glaxo. That brown one there..."

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> 
> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O 
> This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship 
> POV-Ray...!
> 

Probably a custom order for an OEM.

Mmm.. 128+ rendering blocks in POV-Ray 3.7 ... Sign me up!

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Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> There was somewhere out there a Cray-2 (I think) you could log into via 
> telnet and run apps. It had POV-Ray on it already, an older version (2.x 
> or maybe 3.0) I ran a basic scene from the samples and was surprised at 
> how long it actually took.

  The speed of Crays don't come from CPU speed, but from havint a *lot*
of them (as well as fast memory buses, etc).

  POV-Ray versions previous to 3.7 do not benefit from a Cray at all.
You get better speed by buying an old PC for $50.

  Now, POV-Ray 3.7 is a completely different story.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:

>   The speed of Crays don't come from CPU speed, but from havint a *lot*
> of them (as well as fast memory buses, etc).
> 
>   POV-Ray versions previous to 3.7 do not benefit from a Cray at all.
> You get better speed by buying an old PC for $50.
> 
>   Now, POV-Ray 3.7 is a completely different story.

According to Wikipedia, the Cray-1 does an average of about 136 MFLOPS, 
but can peak up to 250 MFLOPS if the code is structured right.

I think in general most "supercomputers" only achieve peak performance 
for very specific kinds of workload. Just grabbing the POV-Ray source 
code and throwing it at a C compiler is *highly* unlikely to just happen 
to produce the right kind of workload.

(As you say, both Cray-1 and Cray-2 work because they're very parallel - 
they're vector-processing machines. POV-Ray isn't structured that way. 
It could be, but it isn't at present.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:29:08 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> .OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O
> This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship
> POV-Ray...!

http://tinyurl.com/67xzsp

Couldn't resist - but I do wonder if HPC clusters of Linux would work 
with 3.7 from a parallel processing standpoint.  Similar concept to what 
Cray does/did.

Would be pretty cool if it did.

Jim

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
>> Clarification: you will NOT find a C64 in there.
> 
> Really? Nobody has modded their C64 to run this yet?

No, but there is one person who at least *tried* to run it on Windows 3.1
(using Win32s).

Workunits nowadays are long enough that a C64 would *never* make it in time
for the deadline. RAM usage will probably be a problem too. (I don't have
any real numbers handy, and the project is currently down so I can't try it
myself to see how long it takes).

Post a reply to this message

>> Really? Nobody has modded their C64 to run this yet?
> 
> No, but there is one person who at least *tried* to run it on Windows 3.1
> (using Win32s).
> 
> Workunits nowadays are long enough that a C64 would *never* make it in time
> for the deadline. RAM usage will probably be a problem too.

Yeah, I know. But you'd be surprised what some crazy nutters try to mod 
their C64s to do... ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> 
> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O 
> This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship 
> POV-Ray...!
> 

http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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>> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? 
>> O_O This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who 
>> worship POV-Ray...!
> 
> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/

"Price: Ask a salesman."

So... the price depends on who you ask? x_x

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> 
> "Price: Ask a salesman."
> 
> So... the price depends on who you ask? x_x
> 

On that level, there ain't much salesmen to ask from. But I'd guess the 
price is defined by what the machine actually will be, where it'll be 
and how good coffees you offer to the salesman.

But darn, that should be capable of counting (512 pcs of dualcore 
Itaniums, mmmm...).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:15:23 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it??
>>> O_O This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who
>>> worship POV-Ray...!
>> 
>> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/
> 
> "Price: Ask a salesman."
> 
> So... the price depends on who you ask? x_x

No, but pricing isn't always a simple thing with a complex setup.

Jim

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On 15-Jul-08 21:05, Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>
>> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? 
>> O_O This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who 
>> worship POV-Ray...!
>>
> 
> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/
> 
I might have posted this before, but the Mark Potse in this press 
release: 
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/january/udm.html 
was a PhD student of mine and when he is in the Netherlands we share a 
room at work.

I did try to find a way to get SGI interested in getting POV compiled on 
that Altix, I did not succeed yet. Perhaps I try again, this time with 
the pretext that in a meeting in Munich next year I will organize a 
track on Art and Scientific Visualization. BTW anyone working in science 
here is invited to join that, I will do a formal announcement when I 
have more details.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Yeah, I know. But you'd be surprised what some crazy nutters try to mod
> their C64s to do... ;-)
> 

And you'd be surprised how much money some crazy nutters spend on computers
just to run distributed computing projects. I know somebody who bought a
PS3 just to run www.ps3grid.net on it.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I think in general most "supercomputers" only achieve peak performance 
> for very specific kinds of workload. Just grabbing the POV-Ray source 
> code and throwing it at a C compiler is *highly* unlikely to just happen 
> to produce the right kind of workload.


That's one of the reasons the really big ones are custom designed for 
the job they'll be running.

Sure, you could just network a bunch of Linux PCs in a Beowulf cluster, 
or you could spec out the actual CPU speeds, RAM and network bandwidth 
necessary to achieve optimum load on all components.

The first option is cheap, but you might have a very fast CPU sitting 
and waiting for network traffic.  Or, conversly, you could have a 
network that's never fully utilized.  Or you might end up running out of 
RAM.

The second option is expensive, but ensures that everything you buy is 
something you need, and that it will be fully utilized.

...Chambers

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> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O 
> This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship 
> POV-Ray...!

Saw a demo a while back where some dude had hooked up 3 PS3's to raytrace in 
realtime at full HD resolution.  That's 27 processor cores.  I wonder how 
fast it would be if someone ported POV to the PS3?

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> Saw a demo a while back where some dude had hooked up 3 PS3's to 
> raytrace in realtime at full HD resolution.  That's 27 processor cores.  
> I wonder how fast it would be if someone ported POV to the PS3?

Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer 
weight of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?

Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield some 
interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the program to 
take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite fast...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
> performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer weight 
> of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?

There's a nice article on Wikipedia about the processor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor

> Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield some 
> interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the program to 
> take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite fast...

The problem is still floating point precision on the GPU - wait until they 
get double precision throughout the pipeline and we'll begin to see some 
interesting stuff.  Also, as Warp always mentions, realistic multi-level 
reflections and refractions are not simple at all (compared to the basic 
"environment mapping" that almost every game uses).

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
>> performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer 
>> weight of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?
> 
> There's a nice article on Wikipedia about the processor
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor

Yeah, I'm reading about it now. (Hmm, I guess I'm not the only person 
who still thinks 512 MB RAM is a lot. ;-)

>> Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield 
>> some interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the 
>> program to take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite 
>> fast...
> 
> The problem is still floating point precision on the GPU - wait until 
> they get double precision throughout the pipeline and we'll begin to see 
> some interesting stuff.

nVidia GeForce 200 series is ment to offer double-precision when driven 
using CUDA...

> Also, as Warp always mentions, realistic 
> multi-level reflections and refractions are not simple at all (compared 
> to the basic "environment mapping" that almost every game uses).

It's a completely different algorithm to be sure. The mathematics is 
simple enough - it's figuring out how to make it efficient on real-world 
hardware that's the hard part. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Yeah, I'm reading about it now. (Hmm, I guess I'm not the only person who 
> still thinks 512 MB RAM is a lot. ;-)

For a games console it's probably enough.  What do you hold in RAM during a 
game?  All the 3D meshes and textures are on the GPU video memory only*. 
Probably only the code, collision meshes, map data?  And the PS3 OS is 
vastly simpler than Windows, so I doubt that uses up much RAM.

* When you write a game under Windows, you must keep all the GPU data 
mirrored in normal RAM, because if the user Alt-Tabs to a different 3D game, 
you need to refill the GPU memory quickly (and not go through some long 
load-from-disk process) when the user comes back to your app.  On a games 
console you don't need to do this, because (at least on the PS3) you have to 
quit one game before you can go into another.

> It's a completely different algorithm to be sure. The mathematics is 
> simple enough - it's figuring out how to make it efficient on real-world 
> hardware that's the hard part. ;-)

There was a nice paper I read in a book a while back (one of the GPU gems 
series I think), where some algorithm was explained for doing correct 
multi-level reflections on the GPU.  It was quite complex, involving 
generating lots of cube-maps with depth and texture information and some 
ray-tracing steps in a pixel shader.  In the end they compared the output 
with a real raytracer, and the results looked identical, but the GPU version 
ran at about 10fps IIRC with something like 4 levels of reflection.  The 
real raytracer (Maya I think) was measured in minutes.

Post a reply to this message

>> Yeah, I'm reading about it now. (Hmm, I guess I'm not the only person 
>> who still thinks 512 MB RAM is a lot. ;-)
> 
> For a games console it's probably enough.

Well, judging by the number of PS3 games... ;-)

> What do you hold in RAM 
> during a game?  All the 3D meshes and textures are on the GPU video 
> memory only*. Probably only the code, collision meshes, map data?  And 
> the PS3 OS is vastly simpler than Windows, so I doubt that uses up much 
> RAM.

That's rather perverse though. Are you telling it you need "at least 2 
GB RAM" to run M$ Office smoothly, but 1/8 of that is just fine for 
running extremely intensive game software?

> * When you write a game under Windows, you must keep all the GPU data 
> mirrored in normal RAM, because if the user Alt-Tabs to a different 3D 
> game, you need to refill the GPU memory quickly (and not go through some 
> long load-from-disk process) when the user comes back to your app.  On a 
> games console you don't need to do this, because (at least on the PS3) 
> you have to quit one game before you can go into another.

Now that you mention it, if I Alt-Tab out of TF2, my PC locks up for 
about 30 seconds. (As in, I get a black screen for 30 seconds.) Then 
Windows comes up - possibly in the wrong resolution. Switching back to 
TF2 is similarly slow. Go figure...

> There was a nice paper I read in a book a while back (one of the GPU 
> gems series I think), where some algorithm was explained for doing 
> correct multi-level reflections on the GPU.  It was quite complex, 
> involving generating lots of cube-maps with depth and texture 
> information and some ray-tracing steps in a pixel shader.  In the end 
> they compared the output with a real raytracer, and the results looked 
> identical, but the GPU version ran at about 10fps IIRC with something 
> like 4 levels of reflection.  The real raytracer (Maya I think) was 
> measured in minutes.

As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary 
code on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU 
that your proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the actual 
calculations you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary code, that 
doesn't necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)

Of course, CUDA is *only* for nVidia GPUs. (Wouldn't surprise me if ATi 
had developed something similar.) I wonder if this will be like the old 
3Dfx API where eventually everything gravitates towards a single API 
that works for any GPU?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> That's rather perverse though. Are you telling it you need "at least 2 GB 
> RAM" to run M$ Office smoothly, but 1/8 of that is just fine for running 
> extremely intensive game software?

Well almost, I know that just double the PS3 RAM would be enough to run 
Vista + Office smoothly.  But then Vista does 842434 more things than the 
PS3 OS does, so I think it's allowed to use up half a gig more if it wants 
to.

> Now that you mention it, if I Alt-Tab out of TF2, my PC locks up for about 
> 30 seconds. (As in, I get a black screen for 30 seconds.) Then Windows 
> comes up - possibly in the wrong resolution. Switching back to TF2 is 
> similarly slow. Go figure...

Of course it is up to the game writer how they handle Alt-Tabbing, and of 
course it will depend how much RAM your machine has and how much of it is 
used for other stuff.  I imagine the mirror of the GPU data gets paged to 
disc first, as it's not used until you Alt-Tab back to the app.  But it 
would be a silly game design if it had to reload and uncompress all the game 
data each time you alt-tabbed back to the game.

> As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary code 
> on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU that your 
> proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the actual calculations 
> you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary code, that doesn't 
> necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)

I suspect that the clever bit about CUDA is how it translates your arbitrary 
code into operations that the GPU is capable of carrying out.  And I also 
suspect, that to get decent performance you need to have a pretty good 
understanding of how the GPU actually works, and write your code 
accordingly.

Post a reply to this message

>> That's rather perverse though. Are you telling it you need "at least 2 
>> GB RAM" to run M$ Office smoothly, but 1/8 of that is just fine for 
>> running extremely intensive game software?
> 
> Well almost, I know that just double the PS3 RAM would be enough to run 
> Vista + Office smoothly.  But then Vista does 842434 more things than 
> the PS3 OS does, so I think it's allowed to use up half a gig more if it 
> wants to.

I just find it ironic that running Word requires massively more RAM than 
running a bleeding-edge computer game, that's all.

> I suspect that the clever bit about CUDA is how it translates your 
> arbitrary code into operations that the GPU is capable of carrying out.  

Er, yuh. Definitely. ;-)

> And I also suspect, that to get decent performance you need to have a 
> pretty good understanding of how the GPU actually works, and write your 
> code accordingly.

Have you had a read of the CUDA manual? I don't know much about GPU 
design, but reading this gave me a better idea of what this stuff works 
internally...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:26:57 +0100, Doctor John <joh### [at] homecom> wrote:

>Stephen wrote:
>> When I was in school, we weren't even allowed to use calculators never mind have
>> access to a computer. The youth of today … :)
>
>Stephen, when you and I were in school, the slide rule was considered to
>be cutting edge technology :-)

So advanced I had to teach myself how to use one :)

>BTW Remind me to listen to the Kat when she suggests that going for a
>drink with a bad back is not a good idea
>
Was it the drink or going into work and travelling during the rush hour?
But then you are a man and listen to no one. :)

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:30:50 +0100, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:

>
>I saw a collection of slide rules yesterday... Of course, the really 
>"cutting edge" ones were the *spiral* rules. ;-)

Grom Google
About 1748 George Adams made spiral slide rules.

Cutting edge :)
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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> I just find it ironic that running Word requires massively more RAM than 
> running a bleeding-edge computer game, that's all.

What you mean is, you don't understand why Vista needs more RAM than a 
modern games console has to work properly.  Did you ever think that a modern 
desktop OS does vastly more than a games console does?  Or that a modern OS 
is designed to take advantage of hardware upgrades?  (Vista is using 2.4GB 
on this machine now with nothing much running, but I know that my CAD 
software will open in a fraction of the time it did on XP - of course I want 
MS to put in features like this).

Actually, I was surprised when I found this:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=247

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> What you mean is, you don't understand why Vista needs more RAM than a 
> modern games console has to work properly.  Did you ever think that a 
> modern desktop OS does vastly more than a games console does?

Well let's examine that one.

I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a game 
called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game, but it looks amazing. 
Only 10 years ago, a game like this would have been impossible. There 
wasn't a computer on Earth powerful enough to run it. It's quite 
impressive that it can even be done today, frankly.

On the other hand, Word just makes text appear on a screen, and lets you 
edit it. (And change fonts and styles.) That was possible 20 years ago. 
So why does it suddenly require so much hardware to achieve the same 
thing as before? It's not like Word has any significant new features or 
anything...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> So why does it suddenly require so much hardware to achieve the same 
> thing as before? 

Ermm, like I said, Word seems to use about 10MB here...

> It's not like Word has any significant new features or 
> anything...

LOL

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> When I was 11 I was doing Javascript. And I've yet to learn *any* kind of
> assembly language.

And that's why I have a big file of one-line-answer interview questions 
testing the breadth of peoples' knowledge.  Nevermore shall I be tasked 
to assist someone implementing a network protocol who has never heard of 
a state machine. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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Warp wrote:
>   On the other hand, we are talking about 1976 here. With regular desktop
> computers we were talking about KMIPS and KFLOPS and a few kB of RAM at
> most.

On the gripping hand, one "mainframe" I programmed on (that was running 
the entire K-12 school district, scheduling and grades and report cards 
and payroll and such) could have been outrun by an Apple ][, if you 
could get a 600 line-per-minute line printer hooked up to it. The same 
kind of computer was running the local bank at the time. (Yeah, around 
1976-1981 or so.)  32Kbytes of real live core memory, punched card 
input, all that good stuff.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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scott wrote:
> Saw a demo a while back where some dude had hooked up 3 PS3's to 
> raytrace in realtime at full HD resolution. 

I saw somewhere that someone took a stack of 8 PS3's to do <mumble> 
(weather prediction? Nuclear simulations?) because that cost less *and* 
was more powerful than a couple hour's time on the supercomputer he'd 
been renting.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:24:11 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> state machine

I think that's what we call the government here in Utah.  It churns and 
churns, but nothing ever seems to happen. ;)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

Stephen wrote:
> Was it the drink or going into work and travelling during the rush hour?
> But then you are a man and listen to no one. :)
> 

How could it possibly be the drink? Evry fule kno that beer is
medicinal! Must have been the travelling in rush hour. Almost back to
normal now and humbly listening to the Kat's advice ;-)

John

Post a reply to this message

John VanSickle wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> John VanSickle wrote:
>>
>>> There were games on the Apple (6502-based) which had seven versions 
>>> of any given sprite graphic so that they wouldn't have to be shifted 
>>> in order to display them on the screen.  8-bit game programmers 
>>> learned much about squeezing every last drop of performance out of 
>>> limited speed and memory.
>>
>> Wouldn't having 7 copies of the same data eat more memory?
> 
> This is what programmers call a trade-off; the only way to get 
> acceptable speed was to use up seven times as much memory (not eight, 
> because only the lower seven bits of each video byte represented screen 
> pixels; the MSB selected the colors).
> 
>> Did it actually store 7 copies, or just precompute them?
> 
> The computer did not precompute them; the programmer did.

Now that I think about it more, there was a bit more involved than 
shifting the bits.  On the Apple ][, if a raster bit was set, but its 
neighbors were not, it was one of four colors, depending on the MSB of 
the byte and whether the bit fell in an even or odd column on the screen.

The upshot of this is that if the programmer simply shifted the bits 
over, then the colors of three of the sprites would be radically 
different from the other four, and if the sprite began in an 
odd-numbered byte (horizontally) rather than an even-numbered one, the 
colors would again be swapped.  Programmers wound up making fourteen 
versions of every sprite, and aside from preserving the MSB, each group 
of seven were shifted versions of the same graphic, shifted across two 
bytes, and not one.

Regards,
John

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary 
> code on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU 
> that your proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the actual 
> calculations you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary code, that 
> doesn't necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)

Every so often some noob posts in the programming group how POV-Ray is 
out of date, and we should just port to CUDA or the equivalent AMD tech 
(Close-to-the-metal, or something, isn't it?).

There are still significant limitations, even on the very newest NVidia 
cards, that would prevent POV-Ray from working well on them.

...Chambers

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Well let's examine that one.
> 
> I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a game 
> called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game,

You don't play many video games, then.  CoD4 has been one of the top 
selling games for the past several months (it came out last November, 
didn't it?)

> On the other hand, Word just makes text appear on a screen, and lets you 
> edit it. (And change fonts and styles.) That was possible 20 years ago. 

No, you're describing WordPad.  Word does significantly more.

> So why does it suddenly require so much hardware to achieve the same 
> thing as before? It's not like Word has any significant new features or 
> anything...

Because your computer is doing a *lot* more than just running Word.

...Chambers

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Chambers wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary 
>> code on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU 
>> that your proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the 
>> actual calculations you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary 
>> code, that doesn't necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)
> 
> Every so often some noob posts in the programming group how POV-Ray is 
> out of date, and we should just port to CUDA or the equivalent AMD tech 
> (Close-to-the-metal, or something, isn't it?).
> 
> There are still significant limitations, even on the very newest NVidia 
> cards, that would prevent POV-Ray from working well on them.
> 
> ...Chambers

But, as soon as it is reasonable, there are some who will be all over it.

The newest chips are capable of double precision floating point 
operations. It's a step, at least.

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>> I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a 
>> game called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game,
> 
> You don't play many video games, then.

Yeah - and? ;-)

>> On the other hand, Word just makes text appear on a screen, and lets 
>> you edit it. (And change fonts and styles.) That was possible 20 years 
>> ago. 
> 
> No, you're describing WordPad.  Word does significantly more.

Yes - you can insert pictures and there are different text alignments 
and you can fiddle with the margins and insert headers and footers and a 
few other bits that nobody uses. But basically, it's WordPad with bells on.

>> So why does it suddenly require so much hardware to achieve the same 
>> thing as before? It's not like Word has any significant new features 
>> or anything...
> 
> Because your computer is doing a *lot* more than just running Word.

But what if you only actually want to run Word?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a 
>>> game called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game,
>>
>> You don't play many video games, then.
> 
> Yeah - and? ;-)

Nothing :)  As long as you realize that the limits of your experiences 
are not the same as the limits of others'.

> few other bits that nobody uses.

You know that saying, "80% of the users use 20% of the features"?  It 
turns out that you can't just put out a product with 20% of the 
features, because everybody uses a *different* 20%.

In other words, *all* the features that are in Word are there because 
there are a significant number of people who use them.  Very few people 
use *all* of them, but all of the features get used a lot.

> But what if you only actually want to run Word?

Then you should run Linux on an EeePC, or an embedded system.  You could 
even buy a 15 or 20 year old Word Processor - basically a laptop that 
only runs Notepad :)

...Chambers

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> Yes - you can insert pictures and there are different text alignments and 
> you can fiddle with the margins and insert headers and footers and a few 
> other bits that nobody uses. But basically, it's WordPad with bells on.

You really have no idea how Word is used in the real world, do you?

A few things you didn't mention which are used *extensively* by most 
companies I've dealt with:

- Document templates
- Reviewing/markup
- Styles
- Spell check
- Page breaks
- Tables
- Picture editing (brightness/contrast)
- Table-of-contents
- Cross-referencing
- Forms and document protection
- Drawings/diagrams

And things which are used less often, but certainly not only by uber geeks:

- General VB scripting
- Mail merge
- Columns
- Address label creation
- Thesaurus
- Automatic emailing of form data
- Simple formulae in form boxes

What I hate most is people who don't know how to use Word, and treat it like 
WordPad.  There is so much power there I don't understand why people don't 
take just a small amount of training for something they probably use almost 
every day.

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>>> You don't play many video games, then.
>>
>> Yeah - and? ;-)
> 
> Nothing :)  As long as you realize that the limits of your experiences 
> are not the same as the limits of others'.

I did say that *I* had never heard of it. ;-)

> In other words, *all* the features that are in Word are there because 
> there are a significant number of people who use them.

Really?

And M$ somehow "knows" what features people do and don't use?

I would imagine most of the features are there because it makes the 
feature list look longer - and that makes it "better", doesn't it?

>> But what if you only actually want to run Word?
> 
> Then you should run Linux on an EeePC, or an embedded system.  You could 
> even buy a 15 or 20 year old Word Processor - basically a laptop that 
> only runs Notepad :)

...or just not bother with Vista?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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scott wrote:

> You really have no idea how Word is used in the real world, do you?

You're right. My place of work isn't the real world at all.

> A few things you didn't mention which are used *extensively* by most 
> companies I've dealt with:
> 
> - Document templates
> - Reviewing/markup
> - Styles
> - Spell check
> - Page breaks
> - Tables
> - Picture editing (brightness/contrast)
> - Table-of-contents
> - Cross-referencing
> - Forms and document protection
> - Drawings/diagrams

And how many of these features aren't in Word 2.0?

(I don't recall it having templates or styles, and it likely didn't have 
picture editing, but I'm pretty sure everything else on that list was 
there.)

As an aside, at work we try to avoid document templates to the maximum 
extent possible because they cause Word to crash. I'm also 98% sure none 
of the Word power users know about styles.

> - General VB scripting
> - Mail merge
> - Columns
> - Address label creation
> - Thesaurus
> - Automatic emailing of form data
> - Simple formulae in form boxes

Now at least we come to some things Word 2.0 didn't have - specifically 
I don't recall it having VB. Or address label creation. Or forms. I'd be 
really surprised if anybody out there actually uses VB though.

> What I hate most is people who don't know how to use Word, and treat it 
> like WordPad.  There is so much power there I don't understand why 
> people don't take just a small amount of training for something they 
> probably use almost every day.

Because M$ tells us that "Word is easy". Why would you need training for 
something that is "easy"?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> a écrit dans le message de news: 
487efeda$1@news.povray.org...
> And M$ somehow "knows" what features people do and don't use?

They have this:
http://www.microsoft.com/usability/studies.mspx

Also, when they don't get something right or when something's missing they 
have gazillions of users who tell them a piece of their mind, like this guy:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

G.

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> You're right. My place of work isn't the real world at all.

Exactly, you seem to base your assumptions of how the whole world uses Word 
based on how the people in your company use it.  You regularly present lots 
of evidence about how screwed up IT is in your company, so don't you think 
that there might actually be other companies out there that are a tad more 
organised in this sort of thing?

> As an aside, at work we try to avoid document templates to the maximum 
> extent possible because they cause Word to crash.

See, it's comments like that that really show a completely screwed up IT 
mentality.  Does it not occur to you that something else might have been 
causing the crashes, given that it is likely millions of people actually do 
use templates daily without Word crashing?  How on Earth do you keep 
consistent looking documents without using templates?  Don't you think it 
would be headline news on every IT website if nobody could use document 
templates without Word crashing?  Don't you think MS would release a fix 
straight away if there was such a problem?

> I'm also 98% sure none of the Word power users know about styles.

WTF?  You really need to send your "Word power users" on a beginners course 
for Word.  And be concerned that they are happy to manually change the font 
styles for every heading/caption/sub-heading and never ever consider that 
there might be a faster way to do it.  What else are they doing in their job 
so stupidly that they could be doing much more effectively?

> Now at least we come to some things Word 2.0 didn't have - specifically I 
> don't recall it having VB. Or address label creation. Or forms. I'd be 
> really surprised if anybody out there actually uses VB though.

Googling "VBA in Word" gives 5460000 results, seems like a lot of people 
have something to say about it.

> Because M$ tells us that "Word is easy". Why would you need training for 
> something that is "easy"?

I think it says more about the mentality of the user if they don't seek to 
find more efficient ways to work.  Not just in using software, but in other 
things too.

Even though we did two MS Office courses at work ages ago, I still quite 
regularly think to myself "oh there *must* be a quicker way to do this, 
surely someone else has needed to do this before" - and 99% of the time, 
sure enough, there is functionality built-in to Word/Excel to do this. 
That's what is the difference between Office 2008 and Word 2.0 / WordPad / 
whatever.

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>> In other words, *all* the features that are in Word are there because 
>> there are a significant number of people who use them.
>
> Really?
>
> And M$ somehow "knows" what features people do and don't use?

Of course they do, I can't believe you would think otherwise.  THey don't 
just sit there in a closed off building, and out pops a new version of 
Office every few years.

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>>> In other words, *all* the features that are in Word are there because 
>>> there are a significant number of people who use them.
>>
>> Really?
>>
>> And M$ somehow "knows" what features people do and don't use?
> 
> Of course they do, I can't believe you would think otherwise.  THey 
> don't just sit there in a closed off building, and out pops a new 
> version of Office every few years.

Are you suggesting that somebody somewhere *wanted* The Paperclip??

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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scott wrote:
>> You're right. My place of work isn't the real world at all.
> 
> Exactly, you seem to base your assumptions of how the whole world uses 
> Word based on how the people in your company use it.  You regularly 
> present lots of evidence about how screwed up IT is in your company, so 
> don't you think that there might actually be other companies out there 
> that are a tad more organised in this sort of thing?

The people who work in IT are pretty screwed up. The regular users at 
the UK site are just normal people trying to get their job done. In 
particular, we have two report writers who spend practically their 
entire way working with M$ Word and do almost nothing else.

>> As an aside, at work we try to avoid document templates to the maximum 
>> extent possible because they cause Word to crash.
> 
> See, it's comments like that that really show a completely screwed up IT 
> mentality.

> Does it not occur to you that something else might have been 
> causing the crashes, given that it is likely millions of people actually 
> do use templates daily without Word crashing?

I'm still waiting to see hard evidence that "millions of people actually 
do use templates without Word crashing".

Word's tendancy to crash at the slightest provocation is the stuff of 
legend, to the point that nobody even bothers to *try* to fix it any 
more. We just placidly accept that if you use Word it *will* crash, and 
there's essentially nothing you can do about it.

> How on Earth do you keep 
> consistent looking documents without using templates?

Hint: It's very slow and tedious.

(Actually, I didn't say we *don't* use templates. I said we *avoid* 
using them. Some customers demand that we use the templates they supply. 
 From what I understand, some of these templates work OK, and others 
cause endless crashes, much to the frustration of people trying to get 
their job done...)

> Don't you think 
> it would be headline news on every IT website if nobody could use 
> document templates without Word crashing?  Don't you think MS would 
> release a fix straight away if there was such a problem?

I thought it *was* headline news that Word is cripplingly unreliable?

Again, Word has a selection of "well known" bugs that have never 
actually been fixed. For example

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/PageXofY.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm

Just two articles explaining ways to cope with Word brokenness. (And 
written by MVPs, no less.)

>> I'm also 98% sure none of the Word power users know about styles.
> 
> WTF?  You really need to send your "Word power users" on a beginners 
> course for Word.  And be concerned that they are happy to manually 
> change the font styles for every heading/caption/sub-heading and never 
> ever consider that there might be a faster way to do it.  What else are 
> they doing in their job so stupidly that they could be doing much more 
> effectively?

Spending many, many hours correcting formatting glitches *is* 
practically their entire job description.

[That's slightly unfair - they also made corrections, add new 
information, rearrange sections, etc. Since they use Word every single 
day, for hours on end, they know way more about Word than I do. For 
example, they apparently comprehend how Track Changes is actually 
supposed to work. But I've never seen them attempt to use styles...]

>> I'd be really surprised if anybody out there actually uses VB though.
> 
> Googling "VBA in Word" gives 5460000 results, seems like a lot of people 
> have something to say about it.

On second thoughts, allow me to clarify: I'd be really surprised if 
anybody who's job is to "use Word" actually sits down to *write* VB. 
There probably are a number of users who *use* VB that somebody else has 
written for them...

>> Because M$ tells us that "Word is easy". Why would you need training 
>> for something that is "easy"?
> 
> I think it says more about the mentality of the user if they don't seek 
> to find more efficient ways to work.  Not just in using software, but in 
> other things too.

Seems to me they're all just resigned to the fact that Word is horribly 
awkward to use? *shrugs*

But you have to admit, when M$ spends millions telling us how "easy" 
their software is to use and how it will "effortlessly transform the way 
you work", it does seem counterintuitive to think that you would need to 
expend effort to "learn" it. (Personally I'd suggest that M$ is vastly 
exaggerating just how "easy" their software is...)

> Even though we did two MS Office courses at work ages ago, I still quite 
> regularly think to myself "oh there *must* be a quicker way to do this, 
> surely someone else has needed to do this before" - and 99% of the time, 
> sure enough, there is functionality built-in to Word/Excel to do this. 
> That's what is the difference between Office 2008 and Word 2.0 / WordPad 
> / whatever.

I, personally, don't spent enough time using Word for this to crop up.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Are you suggesting that somebody somewhere *wanted* The Paperclip??

A woman in my office uses it.  That's 1 out of 8 people, or 12.5%.  When 
you have millions of users, that kind of percentage translates to a 
*lot* of users.

...Chambers

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> I'm still waiting to see hard evidence that "millions of people actually 
> do use templates without Word crashing".

Well most of the people in my company worldwide use our standard corporate 
templates, as did everyone at the previous company I worked for.  Plus 
everything I've seen coming out of companies like Nokia, Sony Ericson, BMW, 
Ford, Daimler is in standard format - I *highly* doubt they have not used 
templates to create these documents.  That's probably well over a million 
people using templates in just the area of industry I work in.  Do you 
really think all these people would use templates if they were always prone 
to crashing?

> Spending many, many hours correcting formatting glitches *is* practically 
> their entire job description.

So surely they should have been on numerous training courses to get the 
absolute maximum out of Word as efficiently as possible?  But they don't 
know how to use styles?  I still can't believe that.

> But I've never seen them attempt to use styles...]

Why don't you teach them?  It will save them hours of work - per day! 
Really, are they manually setting the font size, alignment, style etc for 
EVERY single heading/subheading/caption in every document?  What a complete 
and utter waste of time.

> Seems to me they're all just resigned to the fact that Word is horribly 
> awkward to use? *shrugs*

But it just smacks of complete incompetence when a) they should have been 
trained for this if it's their main job, and b) they don't ask anyone if 
there's a more efficient way to do it.  Especially when there usually *is* a 
more efficient way than just typing as if it is wordpad.

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