http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/ A discussion forum for programming and game development topics. The home of #flipcode on ETG http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/633/0/ It saddens me to write this, but a good friend of ours, Robin Stanton, known to #flipcoders as prop|fan and to others as uav_fun, passed away Saturday night. From what I gather he has been suffering from depression for a number of years, although I think the extent to which he did was not apparent to anyone but him. Robin brought a lot of insight, stimulating conversation and camaraderie to our corner of the web. He was always sincere and always helpful. Our community has indeed suffered the loss of a good friend. There is also a thread on gamedev.net. Robin Stanton http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/633/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/632/0/ To the unclean South African himself, Mr Lionel Brits. We in #flipCode wish you and Kelley all the best and hope your grand unifying theory lasts for eternity... ... Except for propfan who just wishes you were his man, you made him cry like a baby. http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/632/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/630/0/ In case you haven't seen it already, there's a raytracer that runs in Javascript using the canvas element (Wikipedia). Others have done even more impressive things, including the (original?) 3D shooter, an MSX emulator, and more (check out the Wikipedia link). Warning: these may bring your 300 MHz Celeron to it's knees =) http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/630/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/629/0/ Hot off the heels of SanDisk's announcement of a 32GB solid state mobile drive comes news of Samsung's 1.8 inch 64 GB solid state wonder. Quoth the article: ...the 64 GB unit can read 64 MB/S, write 45 MB/s, and consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle). In comparison, an 80 GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and eats 1.5 Watts either operating or when idle. For what it's worth, my 300GB Barracuda is supposed to be able to do about 78 MB/s sustained, so although small, these puppies aren't sluggish. On the other hand, solid state storage was supposed to herald in an era of instant boot times and personal jetpacks. Maybe I'm asking for too much. http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/629/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/628/0/ We all know Microsoft can afford to sell a new product at a loss when they enter a new market, but Windows Live Search is taking this even further in an effort to catch up to Google. According to this article, Microsoft has a new program that will give companies credit for services and training if they have their employees use Live Search at work. Unfortunately, you can't do this at home to get a new video card... or at least not yet. http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/628/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/625/0/ Well I'm not going to make any excuses for lack of updates, but we all know what that special holiday means for productivity. I bring you two articles (and a new articles section): Reflections and Refractions in Ray Tracing by Bram de Greve and Creating Artificial Intelligence by Richard Garand. Big round of applause to these guys. The reason the articles didn't go up right away is because I had to tweak the content code of the site a bit to get things to work nicely. The articles list is very bare bones at the moment, and I will fix things like authorship and dates when I have time (hopefully soon). http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/625/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/622/0/ Spotted on that other news site, SFGate is running an article about the growing female demographic in competitive gaming. The article has some interesting first person perspective on what is needed to bring gender equality to a traditionally male dominated market. http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/622/0/ http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/621/0/ "NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in graphics processors, today unveiled NVIDIA CUDA technology, a fundamentally new architecture for computing on NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), and the industry's first C-compiler development environment for the GPU." "CUDA-enabled GPUs offer dedicated features for computing, including the Parallel Data Cache, which allows 128, 1.35GHz processor cores in newest generation NVIDIA GPUs to cooperate with each other while performing intricate computations." Wow.. not sure what to make of this one... might be worth a look if you can afford a GeForce 8800 :) View the press release here. http://www.flipcode.dxbug.com/board/topic/621/0/