I personally can't stand those little thumb joysticks.
Why? Because they have no precision. Your thumb is very poor at making small changes, especially when targeting someone. Try playing Unreal Tournament for instance on a console and then with a mouse. Your thumb also doesn't move in all directions as easily, so there's another problem.
There's a reason all of the serious online gamers use PCs - a console controller won't cut it. When the difference between headshotting someone is 3-4 pixels in hi-def, well, good luck on a PS3.(note all PC games and monitors are already more than 720P capable unless the programmers sucked) 1280*1024 is considered medium resolution in fact by most PC gamers.
I have dozens of games that require a joystick - a real one. I also have a dedicated steering wheel. They have specific uses that can't be replicated with any other controller. Need for Speed alone is night and day on the console versus a good force feedback wheel with a clutch pedal and shifter. Yes, there are two wheels that have an optional clutch pedal.
You also can't possibly play a game like Mechwarrior or X3 without one. Not unless you want to die over and over again. There's a reason why fighter planes use them and it's also why even 50 years from now, there still will be games that require them.
I personally hate articles like this. Maybe to the author it seems like they are outdated technology, but they still exist and there is no substitute for them, just like there isn't a good one for the mouse on your PC. Each serves a specific role that's not going to be served by another device.
A quick search Best Buy turned up 5 models alone. Dead and gone? Hardly.
P.S. I just played Tie Fighter in XP last night for some nostalgia. LucasArts released a patch in 2004 that makes all of the old games work perfectly with XP and 2K. You need the latest versions of the game(X-Wing Trilogy) and a patch, but it all works perfectly.
I got a copy myself so that my son could play the Star Wars titles to get up to speed as it were.
Here's the patch. Technically it will work with the W95 collector's editions, but they aren't as polished and the 3D engine they added to the trilogy edition makes it actually look good - perfectly playable, in fact. 640*480*32bit color with texture mapping. If you never saw the original X-Wing with the rendering engine from Alliance, do yourself a favor and check it out.
The obvious punative reason to do this to people in Iran is to make the people unhappy with the current leadership. That's exactly the sort of reasoning our government believes will work with Cuba as well. As insane as it is, they still think that making the people unhappy will somehow make the people blame Iran's government instead of the U.S.
Well, you do need at least a bit of plausible deniability. ie - "This happens all the time..."
You also can't just yank it or else get slammed by the press and the U.N. for it - and that's a lot of negative publicity our government doesn't want right now.
So you cut it and conveniently offer to route traffic through other systems(which you control of course). Message sent, offer to help them, and legal (thanks to U.K. laws) means to look at the traffic.
Re-routing the traffic all through the U.K. means that it is all being monitored. The U.K. analyzes and filters all(100%. Not 90 or 99%, but 100%) information that goes in and out(and has laws it's written to make it legal to do so) through email and the web and so on.
The U.S. is working on such a system but it's only partially implemented.
Even 3-4 months of monitoring all of the traffic in and out of Iran is golden from an information gathering/spying perspective. The U.S. just took advantage of the first two breaks. (breaking Iran's cable also sends a "we own you" message to Iran, make no mistake about it) - All it would take is a SEAL team or similar in such shallow waters and a few minutes to cut.
Why it think this is because of the stupidly simple ease in which you can knock out half of Iran's bandwidth for a month or two. One group of demolition divers and a few hours of work(most of that being decompression). That's nothing compared to thousands of other more nefarious deeds done during the Cold War.
That this is targeting a specific region of the world and that we have the technology to tap into these cables, it's quite obvious to me what's going on here(as well as many others).
To install a tap on a circuit, you need to first cut or break into it if it's a fiber-optic cable. Then you go in and "repair" it the tap is still in place.
Not tinfoil hat time, either. Just the U.S. government doing what it does best - tapping into and monitoring our enemies'(and everyone else's) communications. Just one more reason to not use the Net for anything that requires secrecy.
If you look at the sales data, the PS3 is right on track with the 360 in terms of sales versus the amount of time it has been in production.(virtually identical in fact).
That's close to 10 million worldwide sales for Blu-Ray players on top of the marketing data at most sites. Unlike the 360, that's 100% Hi-Def format as well. If you add the two together, it's a starker picture.
*** HIGH-DEF MARKET SHARE - BRD VS HD-DVD SOFTWARE SALES (1/13/08 - Nielsen/VideoScan): Week End. 1/13 Blu-ray Disc: 85 HD-DVD: 15 Year to Date Blu-ray Disc: 74 HD-DVD: 26 Since Inception Blu-ray Disc: 63 HD-DVD: 37 ***
No Brainer here - this is similar to the total sales if you add in consoles. Blu-Ray is clearly winning by an almost 2:1 margin in both sales and titles. So it's really over. This news piece was just the final confirmation to what most of us already knew.
$200 players are still having a hard time compared to the new and finally coming into its own PS3s for $399. Yes, it took a long time, but the PS2 also took about a year or two to really take hold as well, if you remember. As it is, you can have your HDTV compatible player and a gaming box all in one package. Plus, the resale value on a PS3 is also surprisingly high, often 75% of what they sold for new.
And there's talk of a PS3 without a hard drive and a few less features for even less money in the future(reminds me of the PS2 "slim" model release). Sony ended up making the right choice here as it forced people to buy the player as well with the console and lock millions of people into Blu-Ray.
IMO, it was the computer crowd that finally pushed it over the edge to win it. Blu-Ray burners and media can be found fairly easily, and with the backing of most of the computer giants as well, it was only a mater of time before it won out.
P.S. The actual laser assembly itself, which is what makes the drive different than a DVD drive aside from a few basic decoding chips and such *retails* for about $70. A $100 Blu-Ray reader should be no problem at all.(once analog TV is dropped in a year, it'll happen for sure)
Scaled Composites thinks that if they build a gradual business that provides enough excitement and entertainment that people want more then they might be able to use that ground infrastructure to build something better. They think that the next logical step after that, perhaps, will be sub-orbital hops to Europe and Japan. Imagine that - sub-orbital flights AND you can go safely from Los Angeles to say, New Zealand or Tokyo in an hour or less. Even doing this would be a huge benefit as the mighty Concorde won't do close to SS2s speed. Carrying ten or twenty people eventually halfway around the globe in an hour... "When you gotta be there in an hour, there's Scaled Composites!(sm)":)
Even being able to cross the Atlantic for a couple of cents on the dollar compared to current supersonic passenger jets(what's the planned Condorde's replacement going to cost? A few billion?) is astounding. Building a craft like that out of common materials and making it work is something almost everyone in the industy is amazed at and a bit proud of.
I know, because I have friends and family in the aerospace industry and they love the small guy maverick approach to it, because that's where most of the big companies they work for started 30-50 years earlier. No red tape, no tax dollars, no security clearances or big brother breathing down your neck over everything, and low cost.
Yes, it's a big deal. Nobody cares if it's getting into orbit anytime soon, because it doesn't have to. All it has to do is get people interested in space again to have been worth it many times over to the rest of the industry.
Other than contributions like feathered reentry I agree that it does very little to advance the state of the art. This of course is huge. The safety of not needing heat shielding alone is such a groundbreaking and novel development that NASA itself took notice. If we can eventually make even escape pods/re-entry vehicles that don't require head shielding, that alone would be worth the money Scaled Composites spent a hundred times over.
Plus, it all costs us none of our tax dollars. Imagine that. Their first entire PROGRAM that got them up to the edge of space cost about what TWO M1 tanks do. (insert picture of thousands of M1s in rows out in Texas for those who don't get it.) Virgin can't hardly sneeze without spending ten million by comparison.
***This was a very good point, IMO*** **quote** As I mentioned before, I was in error about how much delta v it takes, including gravity losses, to get in orbit, 9500 m/s instead of 11km/s. So about a quarter of the necessary delta v was provided by the motor and a further 300 or so m/s by the plane. Given that SpaceShipTwo goes a bit higher and has more downrange than SpaceShipOne, it probably has a little more delta v. So you're too low by at least a factor of 2 in your delta v estimate. And there's still higher ISP fuels. For example, they can use liquid oxygen in their hybrid to boost ISP. And higher mass ratios will obviously be needed. But I see no reason orbital delta v can't be reached. **** Twice the thrust is probably attainable with more engines(check) and a little more fuel that has a higher energy output(I hate acronyms - a pet peeve of mine). The ship itself that launches them can also without a doubt be made to go faster, especially not IF, but WHEN we get scramjets and similar technologies working. 4000m/sec from the module and 1-2000m/sec from the booster/plane/etc is suddenly not so far off the mark.
IME, when you start talking about engineering problems and the difference between making it happen and the prototypes is a matter of 2-3x the test results, it's a matter of figuring it out more than being in the realm of "not possible". I don't think Scaled Composites second design can get into orbit, but it's a good step in the right direction, make no mistake about it.
I have to give them props for trying at least. Their goal is to get into space and not just give joy-rides, after all.
According to all the major sources out there, they made it into space, though obviously at the very very bottom edge of it. It's not hard to imagine applications for this, either - possibly using the craft as a reusable booster stage for a smaller rocket strapped to its underside. The fuel requirements to lift 100kg from the lower edge of space to orbit are much less, obviously.
It's amazing in any case, and to be honest, I'll leave the determination as to whether it can be scaled up or not to the real scientists. People said we couldn't fly, couldn't exceed Mach 1, couldn't... I'm sure a way will be found to get the payloads and materials into space for less money by them if there's any way to make it happen.
Exactly right. The advantage of the SS1 was that it was the very first craft in human history to get into orbit and come back while being fully self-contained. No booster rockets the size of an apartment building. No heat shielding to fail. Cheap, reusable, and NOT under 4500 layers of Government security clearances and red tape.
If they can even get 100Kg up into orbit for under a hundred thousand dollars per launch, it's an astounding level of economy that we've never seen before. SS2 looks to be leading to a SS3 which would possibly be able to do 1000kg loads for about the same cost. $100 per Kg into orbit is a huge difference.
And one that we NEED if we are to get into space and do things like make a base on the moon, because it's not the big things that make it difficult. It's things like food and water and spare parts.
P.S. Suddenly being able to build a satellite based upon normal hardware and not having to shave every gram makes it an entirely new ball game. Most satellites if they were made from off the shelf components would weight 4-5 times as much but cost literally tens of thousands of dollars to make. And that's just one area where low cost per pound makes all the difference.
First the DTrace nonsense and then not 48 hours later, presto - something that does what we all feared... Jobs put Microsoft levels of DRM on the machine once most users, who sadly aren't smart enough to know how to fix the DTrace limitation and then hack the QuickTime to turn the DRM off, have "upgraded". And, no, this isn't even typical computer geek level of fixing - it's technical, so 95%+ of Macs are just not going to be fixed by the average user.
Don't forget that Apple is exactly like Microsoft except that Jobs has ten times the charisma of Gates.
Yet another reason to move to something else. Forced upgrades, DRM, spy and nanny-ware... It's becoming painful to deal with either of them at this point.
I just don't see what the big deal with all of this is. Smart people don't touch ITunes, because it's just going to help feed the beast. People seem to have forgotten how Jobs ran Apple the last time he was in charge. He's merely a lot more charismatic than Gates. But they are both equally self-serving.
Thankfully there are options which involve neither company.
Everything you ever do online or on a computer outside of your home isn't possibly... it's DEFINITELY going to be read by someone in the future. I know - I work in the litigation support field and trust me - you need to learn to keep stuff business-like and teach new employees that email at work isn't YouTube or AIM on steroids.
I have to give credit to the PS3's recent $399 price drop for getting the last few studios to move to BR. This is a full blown console and a BR player in one. And they give you several free movies with the purchase as well. The vast, vast majority of people shopping for BR players are buying the 40GB PS# instead. Backwards compatibility is moot to them. they got their 5 free DVDs
That's retail. Basically it costs Sony $50 plus some chips and licensing more to put BR into a PS3 than it would have to put a DVD drive in it. A $150 player would be a snap to do if they really wanted to stop charging insane profit levels.
We'll see $150-$200 BR players shortly in response. In a year standard definition TVs aren't being offered. Suddenly *everyone* will have a HD set whether they want it or not, if they get a new TV, and players will be cheap.
But in terms of usability, the Atari 400 was by far the worst. I had one and the lack of ANY feedback as well as the fact that speeds of typing over 5wpm were impossible rendered it the single hardest computer to EVER type on.
Oh - and the delete key didn't have a repeat function. And they annoying fake click was like some water torture. click click click click click click click.(souded a lot like a beep actually). Imagine your PC speaker's startup beep at half volume every time you press a key.
It wasn't the keyboard itself so much as the entire package - AND that the Atari 800's keyboard was one of the best at the time. The panalty yo paid for buying a 400 over an 800 was even more severe than the PC Jr was compared to the PC.
That's absolutely true. And, books can be bought and scanned/typed in/whatever and distributed 10 or 20 at a time.
My son goes to a school where they custom design his curriculum. They have four people on staff who make the monthly work for every student(2-3 inch thick binder every month). There are no textbooks - it's all based upon the student and their capacity to learn.
I've seen this sort of thing in practice and it works - as well as saves enormous amount of money. Just OLPC makes it electronic for places where they obviously don't have copiers. The new semester starts? Load in new books and curriculum and go.
As for the OLPC project itself, they can make various forms of UNIX run on PDAs currently(The Zaurus was a good recent example), so they'll find a way to get around Intel and AMD I'm sure. You don't need dual cores and the ability to play Halflife 2 on these things.
Bomb Proof Fabric to the Rescue?
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Flying Humans
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· Score: 1
Bomb Proof Fabric and a reinforced carbon fiber bodysuit/skid plate would make landing on your stomach doable I bet. If they can get the speed down from 75mph(half terminal velocity) to 50mph with enough technology, well, people survive that all the time with airbags and other safety devices.
In fact, this fabric might be the answer to a lot of similar applications, since its fibers expand under stress and get stronger(plus ripping looks to be nearly impossible). Even sailboat sails would be improved I bet. rip resistant and they get stronger and stiffer the more wind hits them.
I thought that this needed to be repeated: "In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is broad enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety, and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional."(By "Court" they mean the Supreme Court of the U.S.)
So what we should be looking at is $750 or 4 times the actual damages, whichever is greater(plus legal fees). This still protects the law like it currently does for commercial interests, but for the small time file-sharer, it's a reasonable punitive damage. Note - 1000 songs at 50 cents a song lost actual revenue times 4(2.00 per song) is $2000. It's enough to dissuade a lot of people from sharing since the amounts are small enough to not warrant fighting it. Many people with IPods and such have 5000-10,000 songs, though, so the deterant factor still still there.
Very much like, say, a credit card or other debt. $2000 in music fines isn't going to be worth fighting and no judge will bother even probably taking up your case(or university will protect you). You broke the law, such as it is, and you got fined.
Note - the RIAA would make a fantastic amount of money this way I bet, since virtually everyone who they caught would be forced to settle/pay up. It's not too much unlike what the SPA/etc does with software. They catch your business, you pay up, plain and simple. There is no discussion other than maybe to haggle a bit over the amount.
Re:It'll suck as bad, or worse, then then 2nd did.
on
Deus Ex 3 Announced
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Probably so. The levels in the original are not merely large. They are a "You are here... what you going to do next, punk?".
Hong Kong in the original was excellent. You had an entire section of the city to explore and when you got there, you had no real idea where to go. "find person X" as opposed to "here's a glowing dot on the GPS". Hitman does this well, especially in the later levels. Your target is in this hotel or other large structure. Find him, get out undetected. That's ALL you know the first time playing.
And the skills were trainable. It had RPG elements and paths and options that forced you to not change. It was common to hold onto an upgrade or even half a dozen of them in order to modify and use that new weapon you knew was coming (Sniper Rifle usually). And if you wanted to say, jump a mile high and do levels easier and in unique ways, well, stealth was forever not an option.
But this is lost in designers from what I can tell. Looks great and less filling? We can't survive on light beer forever. We also need some real thinking games in our diet.
The two biggest problems with Deus Ex 2 were the levels and the perspective.
- The levels were cramped and very much like Doom 3. You didn't get the feeling that you got in the original, where long-range sniping and so on was possible as well as being way out of the hearing range of others. The original also had a lot of locations, almost reminiscent of Hitman. Multiple ways to get places and do things(and screw up as well), and a dead-simple interface.
We would rather figure out our levels and make things happen and have a lot less DOOM push the button, go through the twisty maze. Otherwise, I might as well play MYST. Pretty pictures... find the button in the room...
- The perspective in the second game as a disaster. It made everything look oddly semi-first person, but not really. So distance and movement was just off. A good example is to compare it to the original Halo. If you get this wrong, you end up with something that feels like you're playing in a PS 1 game instead of a simulation.
- #3 (there are way more than two things wrong with the second game)- The graphics in the original were fantastic. They had a simplicity and a lot less eye-candy, but game designers need to understand that raytracing and applying visual effects to everything just doesn't cure poor design. A good example of this is to compare Halflife 2 to FEAR. HL2 has a look and feel that is crisp and clean and low on silly blooming and effects, and FEAR is a CPU destroyer despite having tiny levels - because they put four tons of eye-candy in it. A good example of this is a game like Gran Turismo. Our eyes don't change how they operate short of silly speeds and acceleration, yet if you compare this to Need for Speed, where they artificially introduce motion blur...
Well, you see my point.
#4 - make it for PC only and THEN port it. Console games that end up on PC are essentially crippled right from the start.
I've noticed that under Windows, applications tend to not release their virtual memory/swap file allocation. As in hardly ever.
I can run a firewall or AV program, for instance, and short of rebooting, there's just no way to reclaim it. Hence the memory leaks. ie - it's a glitch in Windows itself that so far I haven't been able to find a way around. Even memory manager programs won't free or touch this. So you get into silly situations where you have 1 gig virtual and 200 megs physical despite having 1 gig of ram.
Here is a better rig: ASRock 4core motherboard. Your choice - they're all pretty much it for inexpensive and works.
Zalman 9500 cooler.
Intel e2180 cpu. Overclock to 3.2 Ghz.
This gets you screaming $600 CPU performance for good value.(MB and CPU is $160 total - with ram and the fan, $250)
Memory - Geil or OCZ or whomever is running the weekly rebate at NewEgg. $50 after rebate.
With a little scrimping and looking around, $300 so far.
That leaves the GPU. I vote for a 7950GT. ~150 used. Let's face it, you're not going to be running at silly resolutions, or running vista(given that this is an upgrade and a P4 era box won't have been running Vista most likely) so this works well. Buying a $250 video card is silly. (It's $200 new if you hate used, but used is fine, IME, for video cards and such)
The advantage here is that not only will you be able to toss in a quad core later on, but the e2160 pushed to 3Ghz absolutely slaughters the AMD they picked. It's literally 1/2 to 2/3 as fast as the overclocked 2180. Saving $50 on the video card actually results in a massive improvement.
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I personally can't stand those little thumb joysticks.
Why? Because they have no precision. Your thumb is very poor at making small changes, especially when targeting someone. Try playing Unreal Tournament for instance on a console and then with a mouse. Your thumb also doesn't move in all directions as easily, so there's another problem.
There's a reason all of the serious online gamers use PCs - a console controller won't cut it. When the difference between headshotting someone is 3-4 pixels in hi-def, well, good luck on a PS3.(note all PC games and monitors are already more than 720P capable unless the programmers sucked) 1280*1024 is considered medium resolution in fact by most PC gamers.
I have dozens of games that require a joystick - a real one. I also have a dedicated steering wheel. They have specific uses that can't be replicated with any other controller. Need for Speed alone is night and day on the console versus a good force feedback wheel with a clutch pedal and shifter. Yes, there are two wheels that have an optional clutch pedal.
You also can't possibly play a game like Mechwarrior or X3 without one. Not unless you want to die over and over again. There's a reason why fighter planes use them and it's also why even 50 years from now, there still will be games that require them.
I personally hate articles like this. Maybe to the author it seems like they are outdated technology, but they still exist and there is no substitute for them, just like there isn't a good one for the mouse on your PC. Each serves a specific role that's not going to be served by another device.
A quick search Best Buy turned up 5 models alone. Dead and gone? Hardly.
P.S. I just played Tie Fighter in XP last night for some nostalgia. LucasArts released a patch in 2004 that makes all of the old games work perfectly with XP and 2K. You need the latest versions of the game(X-Wing Trilogy) and a patch, but it all works perfectly.
I got a copy myself so that my son could play the Star Wars titles to get up to speed as it were.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000050I88?tag=thearmchairem-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B000050I88&adid=1KBTT1SXX3J1M796A6WE&
Worth every penny.
http://www.lucasfiles.com/index.php?action=file&id=653
Here's the patch. Technically it will work with the W95 collector's editions, but they aren't as polished and the 3D engine they added to the trilogy edition makes it actually look good - perfectly playable, in fact. 640*480*32bit color with texture mapping. If you never saw the original X-Wing with the rendering engine from Alliance, do yourself a favor and check it out.
The obvious punative reason to do this to people in Iran is to make the people unhappy with the current leadership. That's exactly the sort of reasoning our government believes will work with Cuba as well. As insane as it is, they still think that making the people unhappy will somehow make the people blame Iran's government instead of the U.S.
Well, you do need at least a bit of plausible deniability. ie - "This happens all the time..."
You also can't just yank it or else get slammed by the press and the U.N. for it - and that's a lot of negative publicity our government doesn't want right now.
So you cut it and conveniently offer to route traffic through other systems(which you control of course). Message sent, offer to help them, and legal (thanks to U.K. laws) means to look at the traffic.
Re-routing the traffic all through the U.K. means that it is all being monitored. The U.K. analyzes and filters all(100%. Not 90 or 99%, but 100%) information that goes in and out(and has laws it's written to make it legal to do so) through email and the web and so on.
The U.S. is working on such a system but it's only partially implemented.
Even 3-4 months of monitoring all of the traffic in and out of Iran is golden from an information gathering/spying perspective. The U.S. just took advantage of the first two breaks. (breaking Iran's cable also sends a "we own you" message to Iran, make no mistake about it) - All it would take is a SEAL team or similar in such shallow waters and a few minutes to cut.
Why it think this is because of the stupidly simple ease in which you can knock out half of Iran's bandwidth for a month or two. One group of demolition divers and a few hours of work(most of that being decompression). That's nothing compared to thousands of other more nefarious deeds done during the Cold War.
That this is targeting a specific region of the world and that we have the technology to tap into these cables, it's quite obvious to me what's going on here(as well as many others).
To install a tap on a circuit, you need to first cut or break into it if it's a fiber-optic cable. Then you go in and "repair" it the tap is still in place.
Not tinfoil hat time, either. Just the U.S. government doing what it does best - tapping into and monitoring our enemies'(and everyone else's) communications. Just one more reason to not use the Net for anything that requires secrecy.
http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=PS3®1=All&cons2=X360®2=All&cons3=X360®3=------&start=38676&end=39467&weekly=1
If you look at the sales data, the PS3 is right on track with the 360 in terms of sales versus the amount of time it has been in production.(virtually identical in fact).
That's close to 10 million worldwide sales for Blu-Ray players on top of the marketing data at most sites. Unlike the 360, that's 100% Hi-Def format as well. If you add the two together, it's a starker picture.
***
HIGH-DEF MARKET SHARE - BRD VS HD-DVD SOFTWARE SALES (1/13/08 - Nielsen/VideoScan):
Week End. 1/13 Blu-ray Disc: 85 HD-DVD: 15
Year to Date Blu-ray Disc: 74 HD-DVD: 26
Since Inception Blu-ray Disc: 63 HD-DVD: 37
***
No Brainer here - this is similar to the total sales if you add in consoles. Blu-Ray is clearly winning by an almost 2:1 margin in both sales and titles. So it's really over. This news piece was just the final confirmation to what most of us already knew.
$200 players are still having a hard time compared to the new and finally coming into its own PS3s for $399. Yes, it took a long time, but the PS2 also took about a year or two to really take hold as well, if you remember. As it is, you can have your HDTV compatible player and a gaming box all in one package. Plus, the resale value on a PS3 is also surprisingly high, often 75% of what they sold for new.
And there's talk of a PS3 without a hard drive and a few less features for even less money in the future(reminds me of the PS2 "slim" model release). Sony ended up making the right choice here as it forced people to buy the player as well with the console and lock millions of people into Blu-Ray.
IMO, it was the computer crowd that finally pushed it over the edge to win it. Blu-Ray burners and media can be found fairly easily, and with the backing of most of the computer giants as well, it was only a mater of time before it won out.
P.S. The actual laser assembly itself, which is what makes the drive different than a DVD drive aside from a few basic decoding chips and such *retails* for about $70. A $100 Blu-Ray reader should be no problem at all.(once analog TV is dropped in a year, it'll happen for sure)
Even being able to cross the Atlantic for a couple of cents on the dollar compared to current supersonic passenger jets(what's the planned Condorde's replacement going to cost? A few billion?) is astounding. Building a craft like that out of common materials and making it work is something almost everyone in the industy is amazed at and a bit proud of.
I know, because I have friends and family in the aerospace industry and they love the small guy maverick approach to it, because that's where most of the big companies they work for started 30-50 years earlier. No red tape, no tax dollars, no security clearances or big brother breathing down your neck over everything, and low cost.
Yes, it's a big deal. Nobody cares if it's getting into orbit anytime soon, because it doesn't have to. All it has to do is get people interested in space again to have been worth it many times over to the rest of the industry.
Plus, it all costs us none of our tax dollars. Imagine that. Their first entire PROGRAM that got them up to the edge of space cost about what TWO M1 tanks do. (insert picture of thousands of M1s in rows out in Texas for those who don't get it.) Virgin can't hardly sneeze without spending ten million by comparison.
***This was a very good point, IMO***
**quote**
As I mentioned before, I was in error about how much delta v it takes, including gravity losses, to get in orbit, 9500 m/s instead of 11km/s. So about a quarter of the necessary delta v was provided by the motor and a further 300 or so m/s by the plane. Given that SpaceShipTwo goes a bit higher and has more downrange than SpaceShipOne, it probably has a little more delta v. So you're too low by at least a factor of 2 in your delta v estimate. And there's still higher ISP fuels. For example, they can use liquid oxygen in their hybrid to boost ISP. And higher mass ratios will obviously be needed. But I see no reason orbital delta v can't be reached.
****
Twice the thrust is probably attainable with more engines(check) and a little more fuel that has a higher energy output(I hate acronyms - a pet peeve of mine). The ship itself that launches them can also without a doubt be made to go faster, especially not IF, but WHEN we get scramjets and similar technologies working. 4000m/sec from the module and 1-2000m/sec from the booster/plane/etc is suddenly not so far off the mark.
IME, when you start talking about engineering problems and the difference between making it happen and the prototypes is a matter of 2-3x the test results, it's a matter of figuring it out more than being in the realm of "not possible". I don't think Scaled Composites second design can get into orbit, but it's a good step in the right direction, make no mistake about it.
I have to give them props for trying at least. Their goal is to get into space and not just give joy-rides, after all.
According to all the major sources out there, they made it into space, though obviously at the very very bottom edge of it. It's not hard to imagine applications for this, either - possibly using the craft as a reusable booster stage for a smaller rocket strapped to its underside. The fuel requirements to lift 100kg from the lower edge of space to orbit are much less, obviously.
It's amazing in any case, and to be honest, I'll leave the determination as to whether it can be scaled up or not to the real scientists. People said we couldn't fly, couldn't exceed Mach 1, couldn't... I'm sure a way will be found to get the payloads and materials into space for less money by them if there's any way to make it happen.
Exactly right. The advantage of the SS1 was that it was the very first craft in human history to get into orbit and come back while being fully self-contained. No booster rockets the size of an apartment building. No heat shielding to fail. Cheap, reusable, and NOT under 4500 layers of Government security clearances and red tape.
If they can even get 100Kg up into orbit for under a hundred thousand dollars per launch, it's an astounding level of economy that we've never seen before. SS2 looks to be leading to a SS3 which would possibly be able to do 1000kg loads for about the same cost. $100 per Kg into orbit is a huge difference.
And one that we NEED if we are to get into space and do things like make a base on the moon, because it's not the big things that make it difficult. It's things like food and water and spare parts.
P.S. Suddenly being able to build a satellite based upon normal hardware and not having to shave every gram makes it an entirely new ball game. Most satellites if they were made from off the shelf components would weight 4-5 times as much but cost literally tens of thousands of dollars to make. And that's just one area where low cost per pound makes all the difference.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426676&cid=22146228
First the DTrace nonsense and then not 48 hours later, presto - something that does what we all feared... Jobs put Microsoft levels of DRM on the machine once most users, who sadly aren't smart enough to know how to fix the DTrace limitation and then hack the QuickTime to turn the DRM off, have "upgraded". And, no, this isn't even typical computer geek level of fixing - it's technical, so 95%+ of Macs are just not going to be fixed by the average user.
Don't forget that Apple is exactly like Microsoft except that Jobs has ten times the charisma of Gates.
Yet another reason to move to something else. Forced upgrades, DRM, spy and nanny-ware... It's becoming painful to deal with either of them at this point.
I just don't see what the big deal with all of this is. Smart people don't touch ITunes, because it's just going to help feed the beast. People seem to have forgotten how Jobs ran Apple the last time he was in charge. He's merely a lot more charismatic than Gates. But they are both equally self-serving.
Thankfully there are options which involve neither company.
I'd give you points, but you're already at +5.
Everything you ever do online or on a computer outside of your home isn't possibly... it's DEFINITELY going to be read by someone in the future. I know - I work in the litigation support field and trust me - you need to learn to keep stuff business-like and teach new employees that email at work isn't YouTube or AIM on steroids.
I have to give credit to the PS3's recent $399 price drop for getting the last few studios to move to BR. This is a full blown console and a BR player in one. And they give you several free movies with the purchase as well. The vast, vast majority of people shopping for BR players are buying the 40GB PS# instead. Backwards compatibility is moot to them. they got their 5 free DVDs
BTW, a replacement BR lens assembly:
http://www.gameasylum.us/ps3lalemokec.html
That's retail. Basically it costs Sony $50 plus some chips and licensing more to put BR into a PS3 than it would have to put a DVD drive in it. A $150 player would be a snap to do if they really wanted to stop charging insane profit levels.
We'll see $150-$200 BR players shortly in response. In a year standard definition TVs aren't being offered. Suddenly *everyone* will have a HD set whether they want it or not, if they get a new TV, and players will be cheap.
http://www.vintage-computer.com/sharppc1251.shtml
Dreadful in the extreme.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=987
Pretty bad as well, since it is alphabetically arranged.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=560
This is quite possibly the worst color combination in human history.
But in terms of usability, the Atari 400 was by far the worst. I had one and the lack of ANY feedback as well as the fact that speeds of typing over 5wpm were impossible rendered it the single hardest computer to EVER type on.
Oh - and the delete key didn't have a repeat function. And they annoying fake click was like some water torture. click click click click click click click.(souded a lot like a beep actually). Imagine your PC speaker's startup beep at half volume every time you press a key.
It wasn't the keyboard itself so much as the entire package - AND that the Atari 800's keyboard was one of the best at the time. The panalty yo paid for buying a 400 over an 800 was even more severe than the PC Jr was compared to the PC.
That's absolutely true. And, books can be bought and scanned/typed in/whatever and distributed 10 or 20 at a time.
My son goes to a school where they custom design his curriculum. They have four people on staff who make the monthly work for every student(2-3 inch thick binder every month). There are no textbooks - it's all based upon the student and their capacity to learn.
I've seen this sort of thing in practice and it works - as well as saves enormous amount of money. Just OLPC makes it electronic for places where they obviously don't have copiers. The new semester starts? Load in new books and curriculum and go.
As for the OLPC project itself, they can make various forms of UNIX run on PDAs currently(The Zaurus was a good recent example), so they'll find a way to get around Intel and AMD I'm sure. You don't need dual cores and the ability to play Halflife 2 on these things.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/06/1625216
Bomb Proof Fabric and a reinforced carbon fiber bodysuit/skid plate would make landing on your stomach doable I bet. If they can get the speed down from 75mph(half terminal velocity) to 50mph with enough technology, well, people survive that all the time with airbags and other safety devices.
In fact, this fabric might be the answer to a lot of similar applications, since its fibers expand under stress and get stronger(plus ripping looks to be nearly impossible). Even sailboat sails would be improved I bet. rip resistant and they get stronger and stiffer the more wind hits them.
I thought that this needed to be repeated:
"In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is broad enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety, and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional."(By "Court" they mean the Supreme Court of the U.S.)
So what we should be looking at is $750 or 4 times the actual damages, whichever is greater(plus legal fees). This still protects the law like it currently does for commercial interests, but for the small time file-sharer, it's a reasonable punitive damage. Note - 1000 songs at 50 cents a song lost actual revenue times 4(2.00 per song) is $2000. It's enough to dissuade a lot of people from sharing since the amounts are small enough to not warrant fighting it. Many people with IPods and such have 5000-10,000 songs, though, so the deterant factor still still there.
Very much like, say, a credit card or other debt. $2000 in music fines isn't going to be worth fighting and no judge will bother even probably taking up your case(or university will protect you). You broke the law, such as it is, and you got fined.
Note - the RIAA would make a fantastic amount of money this way I bet, since virtually everyone who they caught would be forced to settle/pay up. It's not too much unlike what the SPA/etc does with software. They catch your business, you pay up, plain and simple. There is no discussion other than maybe to haggle a bit over the amount.
Probably so. The levels in the original are not merely large. They are a "You are here... what you going to do next, punk?".
Hong Kong in the original was excellent. You had an entire section of the city to explore and when you got there, you had no real idea where to go. "find person X" as opposed to "here's a glowing dot on the GPS". Hitman does this well, especially in the later levels. Your target is in this hotel or other large structure. Find him, get out undetected. That's ALL you know the first time playing.
And the skills were trainable. It had RPG elements and paths and options that forced you to not change. It was common to hold onto an upgrade or even half a dozen of them in order to modify and use that new weapon you knew was coming (Sniper Rifle usually). And if you wanted to say, jump a mile high and do levels easier and in unique ways, well, stealth was forever not an option.
But this is lost in designers from what I can tell. Looks great and less filling? We can't survive on light beer forever. We also need some real thinking games in our diet.
The two biggest problems with Deus Ex 2 were the levels and the perspective.
- The levels were cramped and very much like Doom 3. You didn't get the feeling that you got in the original, where long-range sniping and so on was possible as well as being way out of the hearing range of others. The original also had a lot of locations, almost reminiscent of Hitman. Multiple ways to get places and do things(and screw up as well), and a dead-simple interface.
We would rather figure out our levels and make things happen and have a lot less DOOM push the button, go through the twisty maze. Otherwise, I might as well play MYST. Pretty pictures... find the button in the room...
- The perspective in the second game as a disaster. It made everything look oddly semi-first person, but not really. So distance and movement was just off. A good example is to compare it to the original Halo. If you get this wrong, you end up with something that feels like you're playing in a PS 1 game instead of a simulation.
- #3 (there are way more than two things wrong with the second game)- The graphics in the original were fantastic. They had a simplicity and a lot less eye-candy, but game designers need to understand that raytracing and applying visual effects to everything just doesn't cure poor design. A good example of this is to compare Halflife 2 to FEAR. HL2 has a look and feel that is crisp and clean and low on silly blooming and effects, and FEAR is a CPU destroyer despite having tiny levels - because they put four tons of eye-candy in it. A good example of this is a game like Gran Turismo. Our eyes don't change how they operate short of silly speeds and acceleration, yet if you compare this to Need for Speed, where they artificially introduce motion blur...
Well, you see my point.
#4 - make it for PC only and THEN port it. Console games that end up on PC are essentially crippled right from the start.
I've noticed that under Windows, applications tend to not release their virtual memory/swap file allocation. As in hardly ever.
I can run a firewall or AV program, for instance, and short of rebooting, there's just no way to reclaim it. Hence the memory leaks. ie - it's a glitch in Windows itself that so far I haven't been able to find a way around. Even memory manager programs won't free or touch this. So you get into silly situations where you have 1 gig virtual and 200 megs physical despite having 1 gig of ram.
I agree completely.
Here is a better rig:
ASRock 4core motherboard. Your choice - they're all pretty much it for inexpensive and works.
Zalman 9500 cooler.
Intel e2180 cpu. Overclock to 3.2 Ghz.
This gets you screaming $600 CPU performance for good value.(MB and CPU is $160 total - with ram and the fan, $250)
Memory - Geil or OCZ or whomever is running the weekly rebate at NewEgg. $50 after rebate.
With a little scrimping and looking around, $300 so far.
That leaves the GPU. I vote for a 7950GT. ~150 used. Let's face it, you're not going to be running at silly resolutions, or running vista(given that this is an upgrade and a P4 era box won't have been running Vista most likely) so this works well. Buying a $250 video card is silly. (It's $200 new if you hate used, but used is fine, IME, for video cards and such)
The advantage here is that not only will you be able to toss in a quad core later on, but the e2160 pushed to 3Ghz absolutely slaughters the AMD they picked. It's literally 1/2 to 2/3 as fast as the overclocked 2180. Saving $50 on the video card actually results in a massive improvement.
I noticed that it has a 2GB flash drive. I wonder how long it will take for windows to burn it out with with its swap file.