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...after I read some Neal Asher books. Truly and utterly horrifying, and very believable.

"The abstract isn't saying the wave-function is real, if says if the wave-function isn't real than quantum theory is wrong. Since general theory of relativity and quantum theory are incompatible in some aspects we *know* quantum-theory is partially wrong (like Newtonian physics)."

No, we don't actually know that quantum mechanics is wrong until we have conclusive experimental demonstration thereof. More physicists are prone to believe that general relativity is the large-scale continuum description of Real Gravity than basic quantum mechanics.

The problem is that so far both quantum mechanics and general relativity have passed all sorts of experimental tests exceptionally well as competing theories fall down.

"So, while mathematically interesting, it's old news."

Really? Suppose Einstein and Schroedinger had this result in 1930?

BTW, I believe Einstein was closer to being right on this one. http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm
His instincts were right.

I think:

*) Quantum physics isn't mystical mumbo-jumbo the way Bohr thinks it is (only statements you can make at the fundamental level are statistical), it is physics like all physics since Newton. There's an equation of motion.

*) Yes, it's in an abstract Hilbert space, and that means that some effects really are non-local, but we have to live with that since it's experimentally true, and there are proper relativistically-transforming equations of motion, which is all that relativity really demands at the core.

Unless this has been explicitly contradicted by results, I also believe that moreover, the "observation" principle which has to be inserted by-hand as a magic-projection-operator in Bohr's world (where's the equation of motion for that?)---turns out to be nothing but an approximation to the effect of the continuous, deterministic and eternal evolution equations for a macroscopically large collection of atoms used as an "observer".

The Copenhagen procedure is a very useful calculational tool, like Fermi's Golden Rules. As fundamental physics, it is nonsensical mumbo-jumbo because there is no physical explanation for 'observation'.

The Link in the comment of the article was quite interesting.
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm
Basically stating that there is nothing statistical about quantum phenomenon and that Bohr got it wrong after all (to my limited understanding).

Wrong. Pentium 100MHz, 94 MFLOPS, double precision.

Even if a chip is capable of performing operations at a certain speed, it will slow down if starved of data.

That is primarily a software issue.

Prior to the release of the 68040 and 80486 chips, the floating point unit was strictly optional on Personal Computers.

The 486 came out in 1989. We're talking about PCs from 1994 like the second model Pentium. Not sure why you're bringing up hardware that was never used to produce the television show.

Considering that such materials were commonly sold for residential housing use back in the 70s and 80s, I'd say you were spot on.

2001: http://www.toolbase.org/Technology-Inventory/HVAC/phase-change-materials
1999: http://freespace.virgin.net/m.eckert/index.htm
1998: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040603198003682
1997: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890496000726

...Are in order for the web developer community; they've discovered Perlin Noise! Aww bless! Meanwhile, game developers everywhere have been using this technique to generate anything from planetary landscapes to entire galaxies for a while now. Baby steps guys.

Hmmm Virgin Media must have updated their T&Cs recently without notifying me.
They announced they're outsourcing all email to google.

"G. Your details and how we look after them
7. By having our services activated in your home and/or by using them you consent to our transferring your information to countries which do not provide the same level of data protection as the UK if necessary for providing the services. If we do make such a transfer, we will put a contract in place to ensure your information is protected."

(Virgin's T&Cs)

Fair enough. They appear to disclaim pretty much all responsibility:

http://www.virgin.net/terms/broadband_tc.html

So, short of looking into their obligations under U.K. law, they don't appear to have that obligation.

if you're into graphics algorithms you'll enjoy hugo's site

I suspect that the time-travel "paradox" being tested is akin to the famous "twin paradox" which goes like this:
We have two identical twins. One heads off into space, eventually reaching a relativistic speed (eg 99% of c). When the space-faring twin comes back to earth 50 years later, he will have aged only, say, 30 years.
See the "paradox"?
Neither do I.

Supposedly, the fact that the two men are of greatly different ages, while being identical twins, is described as a "paradox" although I don't see anything paradoxical about it. What we do have is a discrepancy between local time (both start off as the same age) and relativistic time (the 20-year difference).

Similarly, in Cramer's experiment, according to relativity the changes in the longer-path half-photon should be out of sync with the changes in the shorter-path half-photon, since it would take a measurable amount of time for one part to communicate its state to the other. But by QM, they should be in perfect sync, and that is what is "spooky" about it. Of course, relativity only applies to actual particles, and not to mathematical constructs that sometimes resemble particles. See http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/Ca rverMead.htm.

What does all of this have to do with causality and time travel?
The same as the vice-president's first name.

Hugo Elias has an excellent demo of this effect on his site. Check it out and tell me this spinning cube doesn't look more real with the motion blur. It's a little eerie. I've seen this effect in some footage for that new game Little Big World among others. It's a framebuffer effect I believe. I wonder if its inclusion in more game will have any effect on traditional framerate requirements for believable motion. Might get by with less as you say. Then again, to do it correctly I believe you have to render even more frames than are actually made visible. Much like good anti-aliasing requires oversampling the image, this temporal anti-aliasing would require oversampling frames for the objects at high velocities. And to the other reply, yes we want it to look like we're playing a recording. Reality is boring, the typical approach is to emulate a movie experience. Lens flares and high-dynamic range lighting. You view is referred to as a "camera" in most games. These aren't things you see in real-life. The object is to go theatrical.

Wow. Simply, wow. I mean, to each his own, I guess, but I would have thought the opposite (halo 1 multiplayer not being that great).

Of course the reason I disagree is because of things like the Rockslide Megabattle and others. Have you tried these? If not, I recommend trying them out. Even though they are not intentional parts of the gameplay designed by Bungie, they are some of the most intense single-player gameplay experiences I have ever had in a game.

It's a shame that they are not intentional and even the ability to do them disappeared in Halo 2, but here's to hoping that Bungie have noticed and will get this kind of gameplay back in Halo 3.

Then a small company called Bungie Software(now Bungie Studios, owned by Microsoft) came out with Marathon. It didn't look all that different (at a glance) to Doom (well, IMHO it looked better, and you actually had to aim your weapons with no reticle). You could still shoot anything that moved, even civilians with no consequences (it wasn't until Marathon 2 that the NPCs started shooting back if you killed too many of them). However, suddenly you were immersed in this incredibly awesome, intricate story. IMnsHO, it had one of the best balances of gameplay and story and actually made the game really worth playing and replaying(the Doom games were great for stress relief, but not much more).

I wasn't much of a gamer then, and still am not one (being a Mac user has its drawbacks), but that set the standard for gaming for me. Give me a good story AND good gameplay and I will buy your game. I have and still do follow Bungie, even after Microsoft bought them, becuase they have always focused on excellent gameplay combined with an interesting story, and usually excellent replayability. The Marathon series had both, the Myth series had both, Oni (though it was finished by...RockStar?) had it, Halo had it, Halo 2 had it (though not quite the replayability of Halo).

Anyway, like I said I am not much of a gamer, but, with the exception of the Dead or Alive series, story does matter (DoA is strictly for stress relief). And Bungie has done admirably in these respects.

BUT it is slow..

You are mistaken. Have you had a look at the bytes of a typical binary format such as MSDOC? It's mostly zeroes.

A text format with general purpose compression (as ODF is) can be considerably faster than a primitive binary "memory image". The reason is that that by far the biggest limiting factor is disk speed, not CPU, and if compression can reduce the disk size then the CPU needed to decode the text is not important. That's why read+decompress is often faster than read uncompressed.

M$ have highly optimized MSDOC read/write routines. OO's routines aren't highly optimized. The ODF document format is almost irrelevant.

Typical numbers. This is 719 pages. It's about 0.5MB in both sxw and odt forms. A typical disk drive can read 10MB/s (just measured it). The entire document can be read in 50ms. Modern PC's have memory speeds of typically 1GB+/s. The entire document can be read from memory in 500 microseconds.

This doesn't prove that the ODF document can be parsed quickly but unless the ODF document format is totally brain dead, it does strongly suggest that decoding is not a big deal time-wise. It's not as if serial decompression and parsing is a computationally challenging task. e.g. This XML parser read from disk cache the entire uncompressed 5MB (400KB compressed) content.xml from the above document and processed it in 0.7s.

So please, stop spreading the all too common student excuses about primitive binary formats being magically faster. They may be but it's not automatic.

---

Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.

Well, Tanenbaum was wrong about Sparc and GNU, but PCs shipping in 1996 did usually have 64MB and roughly 200 "VAX MIPS". So pretty good guess, I say.

http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/whetston e.htm

Yes, to one, no to the other. I'm admittedly overgeneralizing a bit here. But saying that the normal tools of drama an myth are distinct is to my mind certainly not a false dichotomy. They are distinct as oil and water. Combining them is not impossible, it's more like ... uh ... making mayonaise. There's an art to it. C.S Lewis, for example, combines symbolism and psychological insight, although I'm not sure he'd consider the latter a compliment.

What is impossible (in my opinion) is to alter the balance of the elements of fantasy and mimesis in a work without fundamentally altering it. You could not adapt the fairy tale "The Glass Coffin" for stage, because it is practically pure symbolism.

To me it seems like you are confusing message "myth" with the medium "drama." In fact, quite a bit of drama throughout history has been almost purely mythological. Take for example mummer's plays which come in some variations including:

* The hero combat play consisting of a hero, an antagonist, and a doctor.

* The fool play consisting of a fool, molly, the dancers, and a doctor.

The interesting thing about mummer's plays is that the hero and antagonist can be any hero and antagonist: St. George vs. The Moor is common, but you can also have Robin Hood vs. Galatians, or Alexander the Great vs. the King of Egypt. They meet, they fight, one dies, the quack doctor comes in to raise the dead, and they exit with a dance.

I don't see why "The Glass Coffin" is that much more difficult than "Swan Lake" (to pick a similar story with a very popular dramatic adaptation.)

As other examples of mythological drama, how about playing Santa and Kachina dancers? Or for that matter, "professional wrestling" which attempts to frame each matchup as a battle of good vs. evil? I think that if you look over multiple cultures and the vast timespan of history, the psychological drama is relatively recent and limited compared to mythic and ritual drama. Of course, most attempts to present mythic and ritual drama get criticized as simplistic and naive these days.

Different carrier signal?

Well, I'd go with Rose, but I'd be thinking of Leela.

Mr A.C.

I have seen similar results with a 3D Perlin noise generator -- I was comparing Intel vs MS, vs hand coded SSE assembler. For pure entertainment I tried a -clr build and it was quite alot slower. Another interesting point was that the newer compilers (both Intel and MS) generated code that was close to or better than the SSE assembler implementation.

(For those wondering what Perlin noise is and what it's good for, check out http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_pe rlin.htm )

Are you thinking of four corner?

HDR in computer graphics is typically a big deal as much research goes into mapping large range algorithms into graphics hardware that typically operates in the 0..255 range for each component. As hardware becomes more and more capable, floating point blending ops on 16-bit floats (which are capable of "high dynamic range"), an entire class of algorithms becomes unnecessary.

Enter the exposure function. Given an image of undefined range, map it into what is displayable. This is somewhat similar to how pictures of various brightness come out on film.

Here is a brief, almost layman description of what an exposure function does (I consider this a great intro on the subject).

http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_ posure.htm

The Spitfire didn't go mach 1, in fact it's best speed was a bit over half that:
Spitfire 24 - Max Speed 450 mph
Mach 1 - 761 mph at Sea Level

Spitfire - http://freespace.virgin.net/john.dell/overview.htm
Mach 1 - http://www.google.ca/search?hs=6np&hl=en&client=fi refox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=speed +of+sound+in+miles+per+hour&btnG=Search&meta=

Duct tape or Richard Gere not included but you can see Here

It's a state. There are only 4 commonwealths.

For those who feel like a snooze.

One thing I've learnde really matters is radiosity, practically no image without it can ever lock real, with exception of special cases like solarsystems and stuff. But the problem is that radiosity takes time to render, and often it aren't perfectly implemented in the renderer either.

But when it comes to faces only radiosity doesn't cut it, they also need Subsurface Scattering and that's even more time consuming than radiosity.

Note that both those techniques can sometimes be faked, but that often onvolves lots of manual tweaking on the behalf of the artist, it's often a balance between computer time and human time.

So the fact that NeXTStep releases an OS with a Dock in 1990 doesn't mean anything in your chronology?

The same Steve Jobs and NeXT that Apple 'acquired' in 1997 that becomes the core and basis of OS X in 2001?

The Taskbar was Windows, but the Dock is at least 15 years old now.

You can use Python instead of AppleScript via Appscript. I'm just learning Python at the moment and haven't tried this, but it looks interesting. You can also use PyObjC to combine the best of Python and Objective-C/Cocoa into a single app. And the excellent editors by Bare Bones Software, BBEdit and TextWrangler have great support for Python.

OS X 10.3 has Python 2.3 pre-installed. I'm not sure which version will be supplied with Tiger.

Overall Python support looks very strong on OS X, and with the number of FOSS developers giving the platform a try I think this will only get better.

Like Watcom compiler on Dhrystone benchmark?

Especially impressive work by the BBC restoration team involves the use of a process called VidFire http://freespace.virgin.net/mark.campbell10/vidfir e.htm Using a system of between-frame vector interpolation, it produces a pretty good imitation of video quality (at 50fps) in cases where only a telecine recording (25fps) of the original program exists. (Only works when the original material was shot in video) Some of those old '60s shows can end up looking eerilly contemporary!

See: http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/appsc ript.html

has

See: http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/appsc ript.html

has

AppleScript is object oriented, and as you can see, the "of" keyword behaves like the "." operator in Java, except that the arguments are swapped. The "the" keyword is always ignored, and plural words are lists (for example, the "windows" member of the Terminal application class. "first window" (i.e. "first" followed by the singular form of the list member) returns the first element in that list.

tell application "Terminal" to set background color of every window to "green"

tell application "TextEdit" to delete (every paragraph of every document where it = "\n")

tell application "Address Book" to get name of every person whose value of every email contains "someones@email.org"

Gensuitemodule is an ugly lump of clunky old junk that no self-respecting application scripter should go within 100 feet of. Here's your iTunes example written in its spanky new nemesis:

#!/usr/bin/pythonw

from appscript import *

library = app('iTunes').library_playlists[1]
print library.count(each=k.track)
print '\n'.join(library.file_tracks.name.get())

has

Gensuitemodule is an ugly lump of clunky old junk that no self-respecting application scripter should go within 100 feet of. Here's your iTunes example written in its spanky new nemesis:

#!/usr/bin/pythonw

from appscript import *

library = app('iTunes').library_playlists[1]
print library.count(each=k.track)
print '\n'.join(library.file_tracks.name.get())

has

Bungie had plans for simultaneous release of Halo on Windows and OS X to be followed soon by a Linux release. That all changed when Bungie was bought out.

Well, as usual, Microsoft demonstrates its magical ability to turn gold into feces. Buzz is, Halo 2 is a a big disappointment. Of course there's no need to trust just one opinion

Yes, and the 5th Anniversery of his unfortunate demise was 2 days ago. Since then they have been lead fearlessly by joint leaders Alan "Howling Laud" Hope and Cat Mandu, photographed here.

Unfortunately, Cat Mandu was found dead last year - the victim of a traffic accident, having ended his days as another road death statistic, renewing calls from Loony Party activists to introduce Cat crossings on main roads so that cats have the same chance of crossing the road as pelicans and Zebras.

... am I glad I'm flying Delta next Saturday :-) :-) :-)

Don't be so sure...

<a href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/ CTVNews/1089949545116_85358745/?hub=Canada">Quebec gov't happy with right-on-red law change</a> and <a href="http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/u sa_can/driving/right.htm">Right Turns On Red Lights</a>

The metric system is the tool of the devil!

But A4 paper has hidden biblical references... (From the pulling-numbers-out-of-my-butt dept.)

Hey, if pulp numerology is your thing, look here.

You've seen the movie, now buy the book: Gas Turbine Engines for Model Aircraft by Kurt Schreckling

What Kurt's design looks like when built per plans.

Gas Turbine Builders Association

Photos from the GTBA of various completed motors, note the small sizes.

The problem isn't raw materials for construction. We're literally swimming in 'em. The problem is going to be energy production. Oil and coal will be around for a little bit longer, but 50 years down the line when the rest of the 3rd world (and all of China) is turning on their lights at night, and you're talking about serious energy concerns. "Alternative" isn't an option, it's going to be a necessity.

The other problem is that NASA is dealing with space exploration in the completely wrong way. I wish they were bigger Sci-Fi geeks, because just about every single example of our future's spacecrafts are designed and built in space. It's stupid to be expending this much effort to go up and down when you could be having interstellar flights lasting months for the same amount of energy.

What the X-Prize is really all about is that we need to be able to get into space reliably and back again, it should be cheap, and it should be relatively safe. NASA has been spending a large part of its dough in past years to develop something that is fully capable of being produced by commercial interests today. But for real space travel, you need scientists on board for long periods to work "in-the-field" so to speak. If you need them to go to the surface of a planet, you just use shuttle craft.

What annoys me is that they (NASA) should be putting their cash in interstellar space vehicle design, in-space production, and power requirements for these ships. There's no reason we can't have people studying Mars while orbitting it -- if you need food for three months, you just tack on an extra cargo hold to your ship and have only the mass / energy considerations to think about.

Nowadays the primary concern is "I've only got so much payload because this thing has to break loose of the Earth's gravity intact." So they're flinging satellites to the far edges of our solar system, keeping their fingers crossed for the sometimes decade-long wait to find out if their fragile, expensive equipment functions correctly.

Why does NASA ignore what is so obvious to the rest of the imaginative world? Most sci-fi and anime fans already knows there are escape velocity/atmosphere vehicles, and interstellar vehicles (and know that the two don't mix very well with each other).

I hope Microsoft aren't taking inspiration from the British comedy show "The Fast Show"'s 'Channel 9' sketches.... :o)

For those of you who are wondering what I'm on about... see here, and here, and here, and here, and here....... Scorchio!

Could you wear this thing, and still get a date?

yes, but only with Leela, from Futurama.

Am I the only one who read the first half of that sentence, and thought "Leela" from Dr. Who?

Of course, that was filmed back in the 70s. So ya gotta figure that today, she'd be older than my mom...

Some would even argue about their competency to judge films.

I seem to remember that a few years ago there was some artsy type film that involved some females talking to each other about their sex lives. No actualy sex, just talking about it, and the MPAA wanted to rate it NC-17.

Ok, after five minutes of Googling i think i have it narrowed down:

"And some suspect that the MPAA rates films about female sexuality tougher than those focusing on men. For example, an independent teen comedy called Coming Soon that was a hit at the Seattle International Film Festival has had trouble finding a domestic distributor (20th Century Fox bought international rights) after being rated NC-17. The film, which is about three teenage girls who talk frankly about sex and their interest in it, contains no nudity and no violence. The filmmaker has said that when she accused the board of having a gender-based double standard she was told that the board was merely reflecting the mores of the nation."

(Excerpt from this site)

So if we can't even trust the review boards to judge movies fairly, how can we expect them to judge video games?

The first time I saw Tcl was in the Alpha editor under MacOS 7, so it was available there. Wether or not Tcl would have been a good choice for a system-wide scripting language is another arguement.

Note that there are now AppleScript libraries for Python, and Perl has Mac::AppleScript and Mac::Glue modules, among others, so it's fairly easy to trigger AppleScript events from something other than applescript. In fact with the PerlObjCBridge it's possible to make Perl the data model for an objective-C gui.

Hate to burst your bubble, but the concept of 'species' is simply a human idea to help us look at life.

Nature simply doesn't bother with such distinctions. The fact that mules occur at all says that, (Some details) Horses and donkeys aren't that closely related, they don't even have the same number of chromosomes, and yet it is still possible for mules to reproduce!

Also a Ducati 748R with Termis at Donnington Park, complete with downshifts into Redgate.

For my personal favourite listen to this one of the Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike. More of the same here.

I took a look at the radiosity tutorial from which those pictures come, and it's really well written. It's clear that raytracing is better than nothing, but that other techniques will yield even more realistic images.