The harddrive on my main computer died, which has the odd effect of making me have more time for blogging (and less for screwing around on random stuff). So, seven things:
- First, if you’re going to HPG 2011, I’ll save you five minutes of searching for where it is: it’s at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Google map here. Note also that things don’t start until 1:30 on Friday.
- SIGGRAPH parties? I know nothing, except that the official SIGGRAPH reception is 9 to 11 PM Monday at the convention center, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters Party is 8:30 PM to 2 AM on, oh, Monday again. Odd scheduling.
- Timothy Lottes cannot be stopped: FXAA 3.11 is out (with improvements for thin lines), and 3.12 will soon appear. Note that the shader has a signature change, so your calling shader code will have to change, too.
- At the Motorola developer site there’s a quick summary of various image compression types used for mobile phones and PCs.
- Sebastien Hillaire implement the God Rays effect from GPU Gems 3, showing results and problems. Code and executable available for download.
- I’ve been enjoying some worthwhile articles on patents and copyrights lately, both new and old. Worth a mention: Myrhvold madness; a comic (a bit old but useful) on copyright – a good overview; The Public Domain, a free book by a law professor who helped establish Creative Commons; the July 2011 CACM (behind the paywall, though) had a nice article on why the U.S. dropped “opt-in” copyright back in 1989 (blame Europe). Best idea gleaned, from The Public Domain: the length of copyright is meant to motivate people to create works for payment, so a retroactive increase in the length of copyright (e.g., to protect Mickey Mouse) makes no sense – it creates no motivation for works already created.
- Polygon Pictures’ office corridor would be a bad place to be if you worked way too many hours. Otherwise, nice!