The term photorealistic is thrown around a lot and is often undefined. Although it seems obvious—photorealistic means something looks like a photo—the word requires a greater explanation. There are many facets to photorealism. This is true because as a CG artist, you have control over everything. Achieving 100 percent realism...

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Nginx is an open source high-performance web server, which has gained quite some popularity recently. Due to its modular architecture and small footprint, it has been the default choice for a lot of smaller Web 2.0 companies to be used as a load-balancing proxy server. It supports most of the existing backend web protocols such as FCGI,...

As we progress into the second decade of the 21st century, it’s becoming increasingly obvious how the computers of the previous 30 years have begun to look not just old but archaic. The massive CRT monitors of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to pencil-thin displays of the 2000s. The...

Think of all the popular data visualization works out there—the ones that you always hear in lectures or read about in blogs, and the ones that popped into your head as you were reading this sentence. What do they all have in common? They all tell an interesting story. Maybe the story was to convince you of something. Maybe it was to...

You’re here! You’ve made it! Welcome to the fourth edition of the best-selling book on eBay business: Starting an eBay Business For Dummies. This is the book you need to make that leap from casual seller to online mogul. You’ve probably been on eBay for a while and have seen that there really is a huge opportunity...

As I look back on my career at Microsoft, I feel fortunate to have had a front-row seat to witness an incredible shift in how people and organizations communicate and interact. I started at Microsoft in October 1994—about a year after America Online released AOL 1.0 for Windows. As early adopters of social media,...

This book is written for the “information worker” businessperson who already uses Microsoft Office applications such as Excel, Word, or Visio to accomplish his or her daily work. Today, information workers most often work in the collaboration environment of SharePoint, where their spreadsheets and documents are saved and...

My degree is in physics, but I also worked as a software...