Saturday, November 06, 2004
When did hell freeze over?
Today's the last day of school, no more lectures, labs and tutorials.
No more cursing and swearing at the lousy security system where there's a 30 secs lag before you're BEEPED into the honours labs
No more speed walking up (yes UP!!) to school battling pesky flies and a returning stress fracture along the way.
The academic session (sans 3 exams, 2 assignments of course.....) ended with quite a good lecture, my pet subject this semester - COMP3511 Computer Graphics. We went through 3D graphics hardware today, Nvidia vs ATI, old school days of retro gaming with Alley Cat, Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry and Thexder.
He mentioned how archaic the olden days were with the little "turbo" button which actually was a "make-computer-slower-so-games-can-be-played" and how the turbo button "survived" for a few years even though it didn't do nuts anymore. How games last time were tied to the clock speed of the computer 8mhz for for the 8088 and the "turbo" 16mhz for your 80286.
It's a really interesting course which taught me the maths behind all the graphics stuff like textures, anti-aliasing, polygon rendering, lighting...etc that we just knew were there as things that "need to be" on the specs sheet but didn't actually know what they actually are....well at least not actually knowing the formula for calculating specular reflections on a scene.
How crazy it is now with graphics cards or GPU these days having a transisitor count larger than the CPU itself now. But it's necessary because in order to have a 8000+Megapixel count, all these algorithms need to be hard coded into the GPU itself.
Well, all I need to do now is mug, mug, mug and try to relearn secondary school A-maths stuff of solving simultanaenous equations and doing calculus stuff all over again.....bah!
Over the Air: Variations on 'Ah Vous Dirai-Je Maman' - Mozart
No more cursing and swearing at the lousy security system where there's a 30 secs lag before you're BEEPED into the honours labs
No more speed walking up (yes UP!!) to school battling pesky flies and a returning stress fracture along the way.
The academic session (sans 3 exams, 2 assignments of course.....) ended with quite a good lecture, my pet subject this semester - COMP3511 Computer Graphics. We went through 3D graphics hardware today, Nvidia vs ATI, old school days of retro gaming with Alley Cat, Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry and Thexder.
He mentioned how archaic the olden days were with the little "turbo" button which actually was a "make-computer-slower-so-games-can-be-played" and how the turbo button "survived" for a few years even though it didn't do nuts anymore. How games last time were tied to the clock speed of the computer 8mhz for for the 8088 and the "turbo" 16mhz for your 80286.
It's a really interesting course which taught me the maths behind all the graphics stuff like textures, anti-aliasing, polygon rendering, lighting...etc that we just knew were there as things that "need to be" on the specs sheet but didn't actually know what they actually are....well at least not actually knowing the formula for calculating specular reflections on a scene.
How crazy it is now with graphics cards or GPU these days having a transisitor count larger than the CPU itself now. But it's necessary because in order to have a 8000+Megapixel count, all these algorithms need to be hard coded into the GPU itself.
Well, all I need to do now is mug, mug, mug and try to relearn secondary school A-maths stuff of solving simultanaenous equations and doing calculus stuff all over again.....bah!
Over the Air: Variations on 'Ah Vous Dirai-Je Maman' - Mozart
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