Hardcode

I have no idea how Windows handles the clipboard data, however I'm stuck on the following issue: a 100MB bitmap is written to the clipboard but, while retrieving the data in another application, IDataObject::GetData throws E_OUTOFMEMORY - even if I have like 400MB physical RAM available. Crap - I'm ready to implement my own clipboard functions.

Oh I really hate advertisements - they are mostly lies etc  (well, nothing new). The only good reason for seeing ads is to discover new products that may be useful, however of course you still have to buy the goods to be sure of that.

I’m pretty sure the only way to defeat them is easy access to a database of reviews, either written by specialists or directly by consumers - in fact this already happens in USA, see the plethora of hardware reviews websites. While this is going strong in this domain, reviews for other consumer-oriented products are still missing. And, despite globalization, review sites still have to be localized for specific markets, countries, etc.

There's still the problem of buying positive reviews, but once there are multiple independent review sources this can stop beind an issue.

As presented here, it was not so difficult at all. I guess anyone with a somewhat advanced programming knowledge could have done it. Still, kudos to muslix64 for being the first to do it and good luck with Blu-ray :)

EXT_framebuffer_object has been supported for ages on ATI hardware, however stencil attachments do now work!

        glFramebufferRenderbufferEXT(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT,
                                     GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT_EXT,
                                     GL_RENDERBUFFER_EXT, stencil_rb);

throws GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNSUPPORTED_EXT. And, guess what, EXT_packed_depth_stencil is also unsupported.

Update: With a bit of performance loss, I managed to do render-to-texture with pbuffers, with a context switch but sharing all the textures with the new context.
 

I had a weird problem with a webserver running IIS 6 and RRAS NAT. So, if you happen to have entries ending with "200 0 64" or "200 0 1236" in IIS logs or the server has problems serving a basic file like a gif or png, try the following: have NAT forward 80 to 127.0.0.1 instead of the LAN ip.

And will instead process the sound in software, even if you have the super-duper sound card with hardware acceleration. Reasons cited are that: The Vista audio architecture changes the way per-stream audio processing works, which required us to write new software to support this.

However, OpenAL addresses the issue as it may talk directly to the hardware, bypassing DirectSound.

Via Radu.

Did you know that:

    - the kernel-mode code from the guest operating system is now run in user-mode ?

    - thus, VMWare dynamically rewrites code that would otherwise behave differently when run in user-mode ?

PageRank is so cool because it's easy to understand - you can explain its basics to pretty much everyone. Having an algorithm that is ingenious and can be described easily will certainly help spreading the word faster.

Also - people will feel in control by understanding the underlying stuff, especially if it gives the expected results quickly when playing with it :).

What it would be really neat is OSX to automatically optimize the interface based on an app's resources - for example convert the main menu items to icons on the bottom row that pop up full-screen lists corresponding to menu contents. This, coupled with the CPU to be PowerPC or x86 would be nothing short of impressive, giving the possibility to run all existing Mac apps.

On the other hand, existing OSX widgets will surely be able to run.

 

In the case you missed it, here's an excellent tutorial on how to code an website with the absolute latest technologies available from Microsoft. Unfortunately it's not as clean & simple as you may think - some nasty hacks are present and, guess what, ASP.NET is harshly criticized because of its speed & bandwidth usage.

A pretty much ok approximation for stencil shadows to render faster is to render the shadow volume of a low-detail model (even the bounding box). However this will darken the object as it will be in the shadow box - so you will have to start the volumes from the back faces of the box (so the object will be lit). There will be no self-shadowing but that's not really necessary, the lighting darkens enough.

Another point, this works only with the zpass algorithm and not with the zfail one.

Happy snowboarding!