Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video Lee Hutchinson has a problem. My fellow Ars writer is a man who loves to watch YouTube videos—mostly space rocket launches and gun demonstrations, I assume—but he never knows when his home Internet service will let him do so. "For at least the past year, I've suffered from ridiculously awful YouTube speeds," Hutchinson tells me. "Ads load quickly—there's never anything wrong with the ads!—but during peak times, HD videos have been almost universally unwatchable. Hutchinson, a Houston resident who pays Comcast for 16Mbps business-class cable, is far from alone. Why does online video have such problems? But cynical types who suspect their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) intentionally degrade streaming video may be right as well. These business decisions involve "peering" agreements that Internet companies make to pass traffic from one to another and negotiations over caching services that store videos closer to people's homes so they can load faster in your browser.
CAGE Web Design | ColorHarmony - Processing Library - CAGE Web Design ColorHarmony is a Processing.org library developed by Rolf van Gelder, CAGE Web Design. With this library, you can generate so-called harmonized color palettes (also called color schemes), which means a set of colors that ‘look good together’. The generated palettes can be used, real-time, in Processing sketches. There are four types of palettes available: monochromatic, analogous, complementary and triads. Example of ColorHarmony palettes (see the palettes.pde example) Every palette is based on a base color. “Another important parameter of a color scheme is the base color. In the library, there is also an option to use a random base color for generating the palettes. Another option is to generate a fully random harmonized palette: the palette type and base color will be selected at random. The library contains a set of color conversion methods, which you, of course, also can use without generating the palettes. Check out the Javadocs for all the details and examples. Compatibility History
Essential Math for Games Programmers As the quality of games has improved, more attention has been given to all aspects of a game to increase the feeling of reality during gameplay and distinguish it from its competitors. Mathematics provides much of the groundwork for this improvement in realism. And a large part of this improvement is due to the addition of physical simulation. Creating such a simulation may appear to be a daunting task, but given the right background it is not too difficult, and can add a great deal of realism to animation systems, and interactions between avatars and the world. This tutorial deepens the approach of the previous years' Essential Math for Games Programmers, by spending one day on general math topics, and one day focusing in on the topic of physical simulation. Topics for the various incarnations of this tutorial can be found below. Current Materials Slides The latest available versions of the slides for the math tutorials at GDC 2015 are as follows: Past Materials Core Mathematics
PShape If you see any errors in this tutorial or have comments, please let us know. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Daniel Shiffman (The source code for this tutorial are in the Processing Examples. One of the very first things you learn when programming with Processing is how to draw "primitive" shapes to the screen: rectangles, ellipses, lines, triangles, and more. rect(x,y,w,h); ellipse(x,y,w,h); line(x1,y1,x2,y2); triangle(x1,y1,x2,y2,x3,y3); A more advanced drawing option is to use beginShape() and endShape() to specify the vertices of a custom polygon beginShape(); vertex(x1,y1); vertex(x2,y2); vertex(x3,y3); vertex(x4,y4); // etc; endShape(); And you can build more complex shapes by grouping a set of drawing functions together, even perhaps organizing them into a class. class MyWackyShape { // Some variables // A constructor // Some functions // Display the shape! PShape is a datatype for storing shapes. ArrayList
samsquire/ideas Math Types & Utilities (mathutils) — Blender 2.79b f4dc9f9d68b - API documentation This module provides access to math operations. Note Classes, methods and attributes that accept vectors also accept other numeric sequences, such as tuples, lists. Submodules: The mathutils module provides the following classes: import mathutilsfrom math import radians vec = mathutils.Vector((1.0, 2.0, 3.0)) mat_rot = mathutils.Matrix.Rotation(radians(90.0), 4, 'X')mat_trans = mathutils.Matrix.Translation(vec) mat = mat_trans * mat_rotmat.invert() mat3 = mat.to_3x3()quat1 = mat.to_quaternion()quat2 = mat3.to_quaternion() quat_diff = quat1.rotation_difference(quat2) print(quat_diff.angle) class mathutils.Color(rgb) This object gives access to Colors in Blender. copy() Returns a copy of this color. use this to get a copy of a wrapped color with no reference to the original data. freeze() Make this object immutable. After this the object can be hashed, used in dictionaries & sets. b Blue color channel. g Green color channel. h HSV Hue component in [0, 1]. hsv HSV Values in [0, 1]. is_frozen is_wrapped owner r s v x
Kim Jong-il's Sushi Chef Kenji Fujimoto: Newsmakers The sushi chef was leaving his apartment when he noticed the stranger outside. He could tell by the man's suit—black and badly made—that he was North Korean. Right away, the chef was nervous. Even in his midsixties, the chef is a formidable man: He has thick shoulders, a broad chest; the rings on his strong hands would one day have to be cut off. But he'd long since quit wearing his bulletproof vest, and the last time a North Korean made the journey to visit him in Japan, a decade ago, he was there to kill him. The stranger came closer. "This is about your family," the stranger said. "Go away," the chef told the man, and without another word the man disappeared. A month later, in early July, another North Korean in a black suit came to the chef's door. "Come with me, Fujimoto," the man said, and together they went to a bare-bones hotel near the Sakudaira train station. Luring people back to North Korea to be executed or dispatched to gulags was a favorite trick of the regime.
Flow Fields, Part II – Keith Peters In Flow Fields, Part I, we covered what a flow field is and looked at a few different formulas to create them. And we rendered flow fields in a various ways. We even animated particles being influenced by fields. In this article we’ll cover a couple more ways to generate flow fields and some new ways to render them. As I said in the first part, the possibilities are endless. Perlin Noise Using simple math and minimal trigonometry gave us some pretty interesting patterns, but they wound up being very regular and repeating. What would be nice is something complex but non-repeating. We can tap into Perlin noise to create a flow field that varies all over the place and never repeats. If you’re using Processing or some other platform, you may have a Perlin noise function built in. I’m going to start with the same basic HTML file as last time, and add the perlin.jslibrary in the script tag. And here’s the first script file: The first block is the same as before. Pretty cool, eh? What else?
Glass The hardware looks much better in person than I expected. In fact, I would even say it looks good. The industrial design is solid, and though it is being manufactured in small batches, it has the build quality you might expect from something being mass-produced. Glass is very clearly an early “alpha” product, and it’s only being sold to very few developers and invitees, so my thoughts below will focus mainly on the design challenges facing ambient computing in general and to point out some things I hadn’t thought about before actually wearing Glass. I was standing outside on a sunny day when I put on Glass for the first time. The software is very rudimentary, which is fine considering the “alpha” nature of the device, but I expected it to be smarter. While some of the human <=> computer interface design challenges facing ambient computers are obvious in theory, many of them are very hard to identify until you actually experience using the device as part of your life. Kudos
Download Spout to NDI | Spout The Spout to NDI installer will set up a folder on your system that contains all the files required. “Spout to NDI” is released under the Simplified BSD licence. Spout is open source software designed to help your own developments and applications and is integrated into many other applications which you may use regularly. Ongoing development, continued maintenance and support takes time and money, and there is no company or commercial income to support it. So please become a supporter and donate to help keep the project going. Donations are not for profit, and are used to offset time, development and web hosting costs. All donations lead to a ThankYou page with the main Spout installer as well as “SpoutControls” and “Spout to NDI”.Bonus programs are included exclusively for Spout supporters. No Thanks
Jurassic Hack Jurassic Hack Jurassic Park est sans aucun doute l'un de mes films préférés. D'ailleurs vous souvenez-vous de cette scène d'anthologie où Samuel L. Jackson (aka Ray Arnold) essaye de redémarrer le système piégé par Nedry ? Et bien ce que vous propose Jurassic Systems, c'est de revivre vous-même ce moment. Sachez aussi qu'il y a une fonctionnalité cachée dans le système... je pense que je l'ai trouvé (une photo) mais pas sûr. Source Vous avez aimé cet article ? Islamic Geometry Artists on Instagram I’m currently practising with watercolour paints. I’ve seen some great examples of Islamic geometric designs coloured using watercolour that are very inspiring. Below I am listing some examples of people that I follow on Instagram whose work I very much admire. Samira Mian (23k followers) runs workshops in Islington, Kingston and Harrow, and online courses www.samiramian.uk Jeea Mirza (16.6k followers) www.jeeamirza.com Regolo Bizzi (12.5k followers) Bryn Edmonston (4,014 followers) Dave Cathcart (634 followers) Josie Lewis (114k followers) www.josielewis.com This lady doesn’t do Islamic art, but I am including her on this list as she does some amazing geometric things with watercolour, also resin art with cut up magazines and collage with cut up paint charts.
The inside story of ESGN's fall In early 2013, a 32-year-old Brit named Rory Dickenson moved to Berlin to work a pair of short-term freelance jobs. But he hadn't been there long when he found an opportunity he couldn't ignore. A human resources service put Dickenson in touch with a company calling itself the Esports Global Network. Dickenson was pretty familiar with the growing competitive gaming, or esports, industry, and he could easily guess what this new online video network might be about. He knew about The International, a tournament for the game Dota 2 that the previous year had boasted a prize pool of $1.6 million. And he knew of the success that competitive gaming had seen in some countries, like Korea, where pro gamers were treated the way professional athletes are in other parts of the world. On October 2013, he went to the group's offices for an interview. From the outside, ESGN appeared to have everything going for it. In Korea, StarCraft is more than just a game with a rabid fanbase.
On Generative Algorithms: Introduction · inconvergent Sections Introduction I've always been fascinated with patterns. It doesn't really matter what kind of patterns; I've played with networks, leaves and leaf venation, branches, lightning, flocking, tracing outlines of shapes, river formation, rock sediments, landscapes, slime mold, lichens, reaction-diffusion, cellular automaton, some fractals, and a few other things. Recently I've been particularly interested in biological patterns, and differential growth. Sometimes I manage to recreate the phenomenon I set out to create, and sometimes not. A Confession In the interest of disclosure I should point out that I sometimes base my work on the ideas that I have seen done elsewhere by a number of other generative artists. I point this out because I have always found it hard to know where a piece of software—and in my particular case, the images generated by that software—is novel enough to be viewed as a separate work. Inconvergent Code I make almost all of my code available at Github.