teh Forum

Posting has slowed to a boring trickle. Bleh...

Well, it looks like a company has figured out a way to convert audio into color data, send it to a GPU (I think only Nvidia right now,) run shader fragment programs on it and spit it back out as audio. Why? you may ask. Well, those fragment programs can do things like reverb processing and other fancy-scmanse effects, so basically you can use your graphics card as a high-end DSP for effects processing. People like me who use a lot of software synthesizers will benefit from a huge reduction in CPU usage. Since a 3D chip is going completely to waste while using 2D music composition software, this is an excellent idea.

(resorting to replying to my own threads)

Wow, that is a really cool technology. Surely someone like you could use this. Do you have a link to the article?

I'll have to look around. Can't remember where I found the link.

Here it is: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 832,00.asp

Thanks!

No problem.

You can do funny stuff like that manually by transfering sound/image files back and forth between photoshop and sound forge in raw format... It usualy sounds like noisy garbage, but if you start with an image, bring it into sound forge and run some filters on it, then bring it back into photoshop, some interesting stuff can be achieved....

I've done that before. I find that if you add a really subtle ripple of wave effect over it, that it's a little less crunchy than some of the other effects. That's also how I made that little "water mark" sound that I used to stick on my CDs. I wrote my name, saved it as a raw file, loaded it into soundforge, and saved it as a WAV. You could then open it back up in PS, and see my name. HEE HEE

I actually saw the audio dsp via gpu the other day. What a good idea, that power is pretty much wasted, when not playing games.

When are they going to switch the windows interface to 3d, like jurassic park?

I don't want the Jurassic Park OS, but I would like something like Irix where you click on an icon, and it rotates and scales in 3D to become the window that the app runs in. That was so cool. It was fast, and didn't become distracting. Click little box, box rotates, gets bigger, then there's your app. Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

Either that or I'll revert to DOS and Direct Access 5.

I was just kidding about Jurassic 5.0, that would be the sux.

But i would like a 3d desktop, with subtle 3d effect things.

Isnt longhorn going to have a 3d gui, or did they rip that out as well to get it out earlier?

Can't talk about it.

There is this 3D windows animation from what I've read. Alt+Tab will rotate the window or something. But I don't think it is really much of a UI thing.

Other than the fact that rotating windows would be directly related to the UI?

What I meant was that it was all visual, like "oooh, those windows rotate in 3D... but it doesn't affect the way I use Windows."

That's how Irix was. It didn't change how you used X-Windows, but it was cool, and unintrusive. I like things like that if they don't get in the way of what you're doing. Having the windows rotate in Irix, was fast, and it was cool to watch. It wasn't something that I'd disable because it slowed me down or something. I don't want the way I use my OS to change drastically. I think the way Windows, MacOS/OSX, X-Windows are set up, are fairly optimal as far as what they are intended to do. If they changed them drastically, I think it would take a lot longer to get things done.

I concur.

I think I have a good idea for a new UI. It will be based on Asteroids. Each asteroid will be the equivalent of an icon in Windows. It will have a text name in the middle. You fly your spacecraft around the "desktop" and blast the one you want to open. Once open you use the mouse and keys as you usually would. It won't be good for productivity, and it will make multitasking a bit of a chore, but I think it would be good. Now get to work!!!

I'll only be happy Alt+Tab leads to a star wipe between windows...

That's fine. Maybe it will have star wipes, nebula wipes, galaxy wipes, planet wipes, and will randomly interchange between them for each task-swap.

Or maybe if it uses the transition thingy from Superfriends....

As long as it has the wacky sound that goes with it.

Outside the Hall of Justice... is this hole... of Justice...

Hey Snakefish! I know you didn't ask me to, but I mowed the lawn.

Yeah, that's what I said. Here's ten dollars...

... here, let me get you some chang... Hey! look at that, I turned invisible!

We can all do this...