|You’ve been in graphics too long if…by Chris ThornborrowMost of your friends can pronounce Gouraud first time. When you fist heard that some people used 16 million colours you wondered whatever for and continued to write colour-map tables for correct highlights on objects. You remember comp.graphics when there weren’t enough articles for you to read, none of them included the word PC and nobody ever asked the difference between raytracing and rendering. You insist that DOOM does not use raycasting. (Technically, as it was first introduced, and anyway, who plays games at your age?) Your partner knows the difference between scientific visualisation and photorealistic rendering, even though they wouldn’t know a polygon from a camel. You think an SGI Indy is OK for a quick hack but not a real graphics machine. You remember discussing how one day there would be graphics hardware to support rendering in desktop machines and people laughed. You watched the Last Starfighter in an empty theatre and marvelled thinking it was even better than TRON. You remember thinking that parallel computers would solve your graphics problems. You remember when you thought X was a high level graphics language. You get drunk and suddenly get really excited examining the light reflected through the whisky. You get despondent while walking in the woods and think „I’ll never be able to render this in real time.“ You once sat up all night watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200×200. You sat up the next night with colleagues watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200×200. Your address book has email entries for Benoit, James F, and Prof David R and Eric. You think being a computer geek is only half way there. You wonder how nature processes all those photons so quickly. When people mention the word graphics you really insist they are more accurate in their terminology. You get irritated by people who say, „Oh, graphics, that’s a solved problem“ (even if they then go on to be precise about what they mean by the term „graphics“). You own one or more of the following: a glass sphere, a prism, more then two copies of Foley and Van Dam, a computer which cost more than your car, a computer which cost more than your house, a pet named Phong, a graphics board from a defunct supercomputer (properly framed) or a Rubics Cube (original). You get 75% or more of these jokes.
