Ray Cromwell

WebGL + WebSockets seems like a great combo to bootstrap real-time web 3D gaming of some sort. 3D Cafe Farmville, here we come. - Matt M (inactive)

We need something in the spec that makes Farmville impossible to implement, but doesn't affect any other game. - Joel Webber

Hahah, quote of the year. - Ray Cromwell

Augmented Reality - Nick Lothian

Very interesting to watch that just a few minutes after reading this opinion piece on OpenGL vs DirectX: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010... According to that article, OpenGL has had features like polygon tessellation for years. - DeWitt Clinton

OpenGL had a lot of stuff for years before DX, but ARB became too bureaucratic like the W3C and OpenGL stagnated, while NVidia and ATI continued to innovate like Firefox/WebKit, and Microsoft was more accommodating as a benevolent dictator. Now OpenGL is catching back up with 3.0 and OpenCL, but DX11 still has some features OGL is missing. The key is a programmable tessellation system. DX11 added a "hull shader" and "domain shader" that happen after vertex shading but before geometry shading. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us... - Ray Cromwell

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the hull shader, tesselator, and domain shader concepts at a glance, but they look like still more points for OpenGL to chase on DirectX. I just read the opinion piece DeWitt links to, and afaict it's full of errors and half-truths. Which is unfortunate, as I really would *prefer* a world where OpenGL was the standard to follow, and where half the drivers weren't garbage, but that seem like more wishful thinking than anything else. - Joel Webber

Speaking of which -- can any of you guys who keep up with these things speak to the *actual* state of OpenGL on Windows? What I'm most concerned with is whether WebGL is doomed to failure (at least in the near term) by crappy drivers. - Joel Webber

That tooth thing is pretty odd. I bet it saves a lot on dental work, though :) - Joel Webber

He already draws better than me. :) - Ray Cromwell

I had a thought: Mechanical Turk + Preschool Kids = CAPTCHA! - Ray Cromwell

Hopefully each quake just means there's less potential energy for a big one. - Matt M (inactive)

SJ Mercury News coverage: http://bit.ly/6YXtLq - Ray Cromwell

Ouch. - Matt M (inactive)

Kartik, it's in Santa Clara near Intel/Sun campus in the Rivermark master planned community. As part of the community, a new K-8 school was built (first in 40 years). Due to demographic factors (mostly high tech/white collar workers), the school's scores have been rapidly rising. The district authorized many new apartment complexes to be built that weren't in the original plans when the school was designed, so now there is overcrowding and population pressure for the school. Therefore, people are lining up to ensure they can go to their local school and not have to bus their kids miles away. - Ray Cromwell

About damned time! - Joel Webber

The school board is threatening a lottery, which means you may have to bus/drive your kid far away as opposed to the school you've been volunteering/supporting. The school board also ensures that the top performing bay area school Milliken Elementary is stocked with the children of government employees who get preference. Something like 4-5% of slots (out of 60) go to non-employees/non-siblings, or around 2 every enrollment period *for the whole county*. Sound fair? - Ray Cromwell

Yikes. - Joel Webber

That's really fascinating, and not entirely surprising. When you have a huge country that's approximately 90% comprised of one ethnic group, there's probably a strong tendency to reject that sort of difference. Hopefully it won't last, though. - Joel Webber

My wife seems to think that a big component has to do with her mom's violation of traditional Chinese morals (she cheated/cuckholded her husband) - Ray Cromwell

Did it sell, and is that how you ended up at Adobe? - Joel Webber

It sold, but it was 2 weeks before the dotcom NASDAQ crash in April 2000. :( - Ray Cromwell

Ha, I remember that crash well. Marie-Claire and I were sitting at the airport gate, having just quit our jobs and going to Portugal for a couple of months. The TV blurted out something like "largest drop in the market since 1929", and we sort of looked at each other and said "oh well, there go our investments; nothing we can do about it from here". - Joel Webber

"Recent publications predict the possibility of a phenomenon called Parelectricity [Chaio, 19941. Parelectricity predicts that illumination of a layer of solid ammonia by 9.56 micron microwaves will create a population inversion in the material. One result of this inversion is that an image charge will be induced by an approaching charged particle that is ofthe sames ign. Thus, the approachingp article will be repelledb y the image charge. A thin layer of ammonia on the surfaceso f the trap may reflect any approachingc hargedp article with near unity probability. Therefore, the original idea of making the walls of the trap reflective is still valid - just the methodology has changed." - Ray Cromwell

"This interaction was first examined in 1936 bennard-Jones,l936]. They predicted at the time the possibility of “quantum reflection.” Quantumr eflectionp redictst hat in the limit as the energyo f a particle approachingth e wall of a containerg ets near zero, the probability of “sticking” to the wall approachesz ero. Classically, the sticking probability, S, is predictedt o approachu nity but quantumm echanicsp redictsj ust the opposite solution, i.e that S is proportional to the squarer oot of the particle’s energy" - Ray Cromwell

Sorry for bad quotes, this is fault of cut/paste out of Acrobat PDF conversion of PS paper - Ray Cromwell

hello - chadaporn

Meanwhile, it will take us 10 just to ready all the paperwork before ground is broken. - Ray Cromwell

(I think @mmastracci said this before) Somebody really needs to go through this stuff, along with the WebGL and WebSockets APIs, and normalize all the weird methods for handling binary streams. It all smells kind of like java.nio, but for some reason everyone keeps wandering along in their own little worlds. - Joel Webber

hello - chadaporn

[email protected] - chadaporn

I loved that movie as a kid (Clash, I mean). - Joel Webber