Do you feel lucky to be in the age of computers?

Impressive! Makes my particle simulations look pretty lame. Though admittadly, my field is somewhat different. However, I may borrow the idea of particle distribution based on images, I hadn’t thought of that. Mine are explosions not gravity models, but I could use prior images to adjust initial velocity models rather than my current vector addition with random distribution and last velocity. I’d be interested to see the difference in my code.

Originally posted by knackered:
Have any of you done something like write a newtonian simulation of galaxies?

I haven’t worked on that problem, but there is a famous algorithm for the N-body problem which allows efficient simulation of galaxy formation.
The basic idea is that faraway objects can be grouped and handled as a single mass. Error bounds can be computed to determine when it’s valid to do this, so it’s theoretically sound.

Originally posted by knackered:
Have any of you done something like write a newtonian simulation of galaxies.

This is exactly like writing a map of the earth assuming that the earth is flat ! Newtonian physics is just a local approximation of the physical world. The larger the distances and/or the masses involved, the lesser the accuracy. What’s more, many galaxies (maybe most? astrophysicists still don’t know) have a black hole in their center. A black hole is a place of extreme curvature. So it’s impossible to get anything realistic with newtonian mechanics.

Am I the only one who dream about being born 10 year earlier or 30 years later ??
I’m arrived just few year late in early 80’s, just to smell the end of the “real” pioneer era.
I prefer more those years when ppl REALLY had to be genius to achieve just one “sprite” moving on screen.
And I’m arrived to early to see those “brain computer implantation” seen in cyberpunk litherature.

It doesn’t matter what period of computing you’re in, the important point is you’re in the era of computers - tools that can do many computations in a second and display the results graphically. Whether you’re doing it in the early 80’s (as I was with the BBC micro), or now (with > 2ghz) it doesn’t matter - you’re still lucky!

RIO, there is always a pioneer area. True, your “real” pioneer era was sprites on a computer screen in 1980s… However, that was the pioneering era of 2D graphics. The pioneering efforts in 3D graphics is right now (in my humble opinion). We have gone from wireframe 3D graphics in the late 70s, to solids in the 80s, simple shaded models to advanced pixel shaders now. Every 6 months is a new developement in 3D graphics just as in computers. I like this age for me, however, I will be honest, had I been born in any other age… if at all possible, I would want to be on the edge again, whatever that pioneering effort is. I don’t have to be on the “bleeding edge” so to speak, but I like working with the new stuff, new ideas, finding new ways of working with things. For me, this is fun. And I get paid for doing it!

I think the 70’s and 80’s were the golden era of computers.
Now everything is dull and boring, canned and strict.

For example,
Bill gates wrote the entire language of Basic in a few days. Now if you wanted to write basic you would need a team of 10 and 2 years, even then you would probably be behind schedule.

The day of the thinking programmer are over. Now everything is just process. Each programmer can be replaced by another.

Computers are boring.

And further, they wont live up to what they hyped. The smartest computer ever will probably not be one billionth as smart as a microbe. AI is a wet dream.

Computers are just glorified shovels (moving data instead of dirt). At least with a shovel you would get some excercise.

(Is it obvious someone has burned out on programming??)

Still love programming some stuff, though; but for work, maybe 2% of computers jobs are interesting, the rest are dull as night.

You need to get your CV out, mate
I wouldn’t recommend pouring out that trash in your next interview, though. You have lost your soul to… database programming? (at a guess)…

It is time for the CV. Actually I got all my old transcripts out and am back to school in the fall for the Ph.D in math. Doing math simulations on computers is very fun, but hard to get a job doing.

Of the 4 computing jobs 1 has been interesting --writing simulators for aircraft–. The other three were tough; too much process, not enough coding. Wrote more code in one evening at home that in 6 months at work!!

Computers are great, but they seem to have reached a point where there are less new ideas. Instead, the emphasis is bigger and faster, not totally new ways of doing things, as it was in the beginning. The science must evolve into something new or stagnate…

There is also a lot of talk that programming is for 25-40 year olds. After that the profession is kind of a dead end, since companies prefer to hire people with 4-5 years of experience over someone with 5+ because they can pay them less. Since I am 30+ this is something to think about…

Interesting to see how the next few years treats the profession…

[This message has been edited by nickels (edited 06-10-2002).]

for vigeo games to me the golden age was 1977/78 in my town (3000ppl) we had 4 videogame parlours total about 40 machines and every single one (no exceptions) was space invaders, over the weekend i went to one town of 110,000 ppl and there was 1 videogame palour! 1977-1980 was like the beatles era WRT music

Hi

I feel lucky to be alive at this time, especially as realtime computer graphic proceeds in a rapid way. Im doing OpenGL since the end of 2000, mainly I wanted to visualize myself some vector operations as cross product …, and now I’m playing with
vertex programs and register combiners, I’m amzed… And my heart beats when I think about the upcoming GL2.0 and the next generations of graphics hardware. I like the highway of new toys

I think it is useful to learn as much as possible about 3d stuff like algorithms/hardware even when in perhaps 2 years nobody talks about fixed function or non high-order primitives.

I especially feel lucky that my first programming experiments were in the time as a 386 with 4mb ram was state of the art, because with pascal doing little nice experiments was easy and you learned things just by doing,as basic control flow, file io …(when I look at my co-students, some of them have problems with just splitting a small project into some procedures )
You did not to struggle with windows creation, windows messages … when first encountering with programming. It was easy just to draw with BGI (you know ) some lines and some circles without device contexts …

I think there is always the chance to learn and utilitize new technologies while still using knowledge learned some time (and tech-generation before)

But sometimes I feel that I wish I would be born 5 years ago, because then I would have had the chance to do asm stuff to write VGA mode apps, but every generation has its frontier, the before-born had to fight against 64k segments, we have to fight against fill-rate limitations and insufficient texture memory and perhaps the next will struggle against correct shader setup…

Bye
ScottManDeath

We are living in the golden age? Not quite, but we are definatly on its event horizon. Moving faster and faster the further we move. I am patiently awaiting 1 thing, that will take computers to the step that Color took the TV. Light proccessors. They are comming, and FAST, they have been indevopment for years, and are finaly making head way. Were talking about speed of light computing with NO heat issues. But mostly, I am excited about the GRAPHICS. No graphic programers will not simply die off like the dinasaurs, but evolve. I envision a new gaming demention. One of wich rivals the quality of Cinema. People will no longer we watching movies, They will play them. The poly count will become so high, it would require a thousand gforces to equal the output power needed to see them. No more QUICK short cuts, with lightmapping, or faking, some collisions with bounding spheres. No my friend were talking about down to the hairs on the characters head, brushing against the banaster as they fall to the ground. THAT will be the evolution of gaming. And that is wave i want to be on. Strike that, thats the wave i want to be leading. One day our children will see a battered old copy of Doom 3 and go, man those graphics SUCKED. Now that will be GAMING.

Memory bandwidth is going to be the biggest problem.

->Nickels, sounds like you lost your dreams, boy. If you think it’s all too canned, go solo and do your own thing. Look at the demo scene - they won’t agree with you.

Besides, anyone wanting to pick up their love for computing? Unplug totally (bring the computer into the basement) and head to the book store, picking up Jean Hegland - Into the Forest. Do not use the computer at all while reading.