The report urged Congress and the White House to seriously examine the mismatch between the tasks assigned to NASA and the resources that the agency has been provided to accomplish them.
"...Augustine acknowledged that they had not found any mismanagement nor any insurmountable technical obstacles to the completion of the current program."
Actually the data from weather research posts is freely available to the public.
Professor Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, says it's not. The full quote:
When challenged about the contents of one of the stolen e-mails in which Professor Jones told a critic of his work that he would not make information available because the data would only be used to undermine his findings, he admitted that he had written a number of "very awful e-mails". Professor Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, told the committee that it was not possible to make the entire international data set available because of a "commercial promise". He explained that a number of contributing nations - including Canada, Poland and Sweden - had refused to make their segments of data publicly available.
I still think AGW is most likely true, but UEA had some pretty sloppy practices with data.
Disclosure: I work at NASA.
To be fair, we areresearching self sufficient lunar habitats. I probably see an average of 6 papers a year on the topic at the ICES or COSPAR conferences. The real trick is making a compelling case that regenerative life support saves you ESM (Equivalent System Mass). Everything at NASA is reduced to the mass of the system, and thus how expensive it is to launch. Harry Jones, Alan Drysdale, and other big wig life support analysts aren't convinced complicated regenerative systems, especially crops, will actually make for a cheaper lunar or orbital system. The farther you are away from earth, however, the more sense it makes. One could make the argument that we should test crops on the moon for eventual deployment on Mars, but it would be a very expensive experiment.
Re:Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1, Informative
More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.
Happened to me after I signed up with a smaller ISP expecting more personal service. I got personal service alright after they threatened to cut off my service for exceeding their bandwidth "guarantee" of 500MB a month. I posted a review of the ISP and got a letter back threatening legal action. Even angrier that the company would attack me posting my opinions online, I decided to post a snippet of the threatening letter they sent on my website and the ISP backed off. Now I'm with SBC. 1.5 down, 365 up and they've never bothered me once.
Bilbo was more than "comfortable," or "well-to-do," he was the richest hobbit in the shire. He didn't have to work a day in his life. Granted he did noble things in his spare time, but I still don't see how either he or his nephew having anything like close to common lives.
In games, reality can seem beside the point. Carved boards, decorated cards, dotted cubes and colored pebbles become instruments of war. The fate of a bouncing spheroid determines one's fortunes. The more artificial an object is, the more arbitrary the restrictions are on its movements, the simpler the rules governing the play, the more powerful a game seems to become. A game establishes its own world.
Yet over the last two decades, the evolution of video games has involved a quest for the opposite. One of the major goals of video game systems has been to simulate the real, to create images so lifelike, and movements so natural that there is no sense of artifice. There really is a haunted house being explored, a football team arrayed on a field, a car racing at 150 miles an hour through a city street. In the early years of arcade games, invaders from space were squiggly white doodles arranged in rows, threatening a player with oblivion. Now they can speak, gush green blood and wield advanced weaponry.
During the last year or so technological realism has claimed its greatest triumph yet, as three major game systems made their debuts. Lives there an 8 to 18-year-old -- or an adult guiltily aspiring to that state of mind -- who has not yet heard about the technological accomplishments of Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube? Elaborate textures and sounds make earlier games seem like playthings. The humble controller that once maneuvered a diminutive and plump plumber named Mario across a television screen, allowing him to jump, bop and run, has now been pumped up like Lara Croft's bodice; the bloated Xbox controller has eight buttons, two triggers, three toggling switches and untapped possibilities. And the promise and threat of these systems caused sales of video game systems and games to jump 42 percent last year to $9.4 billion.
Now, as if sensing the power boost, the Rochester Institute of Technology has started the first master's program in computer game design. Carnegie Mellon University has an Entertainment Technology Center teaching game development techniques. Histories of the video game have also been accumulating, mixing serious analysis with fans' passions.
Yet something odd has taken place along with technological progress. Technology is not altogether welcomed by the games themselves. One of the new games for Xbox, "Dead or Alive 3" is a martial arts game in which processors give sheen to muscles and flesh and simulate icicles or marble, but the world itself is premodern and the combat hand to hand. In "Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee," also for Xbox, an endangered species is being rescued and medieval machines abound; power is won through communal chant.
One of Nintendo's major offerings, "Pikmin," actually discards technology from the start: a spaceship crashes. It can be rebuilt only with the help of pixyish creatures known as Pikmin; the crucial technology in "Luigi's Mansion" is a vacuum cleaner strapped to Luigi's back that can suck up ghosts in a haunted house. The ante- and anti-technological content of these games provides a peculiar counterpoint to the boasts of technological advancement made by the game systems.
There are, of course, games in which technology is required and complexity is part of the point. The daunting model is still Microsoft's "Flight Simulator 2002" for the PC, in which the challenge of learning to fly a plane may be matched by the challenge of learning to control a plane using a computer keyboard. But in many video games, the technology is put in service to creating a world that could do very well without it and doesn't exactly welcome technology to begin with.
This sentiment is often accompanied by nostalgia and affection for more "primitive," earlier-generation games. "The Ultimate History of Video Games," by Steven L. Kent (Prima Publishing, 2001) lovingly chronicles the pioneers and corporate battles behind the classics. And last year M.I.T. Press published a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tribute to arcade video, "Supercade," by Van Burnham and Ralph H. Baer. One of Nintendo's latest games, "Super Smash Brothers Melee," even gathers Nintendo's classic game characters, ranging from Mario and Pikachu to Zelda and Donkey Kong, for a reunion; in a meta-Nintendo joke, they all slug it out for the championship.
There may be, in fact, a tension in the video game universe: technological powers are courted for their possibilities and resisted for their fetishistic demands. Technology's greatest achievement may be in the improvements in racing games, shooting games and fighting games. There, the simulation of realism is most important because the very point of the games is to create a physical sensation, an anxiety, punctuated by shocks and cries. An advertisement for a game called "Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing" boasted about the game's sophisticated "facial damage engine," calling it "brutal beyond belief."
This is what arcade culture was about. The dark booth-stuffed arcade was, by tradition, a forbidding, seductive place. It was a world in which carnival-barker voices might boom from cubicles, while from others, surrounded by teenage voyeurs, would come screeching tires or grunts. Quick death at the console, fast quarters in the slots, territorial claims on booths -- the arcade was a dream world of preadult fantasy.
Originally, home video systems couldn't satisfy the technological demands of these games, let alone simulate an arcade atmosphere. Now their increasing muscular power may make the atmosphere unnecessary. But the real foundation of the home video game came from another sort of arcade game whose images spurred less angst and spurted less blood, games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, with their pleasing blurps, amusing images and teasing difficulties.
Indeed, the great achievement of Nintendo's game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was to create an entirely new genre based on his "Mario" games in which the thrill of the arcade was domesticated. The ambition of realism was put aside; instead the intention was to create an elaborate world with its own regulations and peculiarities that the player would probe, gradually discovering its secrets. These fantastical worlds of labyrinths, puzzles and confrontations tapped into the classic strength of games as abstract worlds of arbitrary rules.
These are the two poles of the video game, still evident in the latest systems. But however different in character, the games share important preoccupations. The classic board game or card game begins with the rules; then comes the play. In video games the play begins and only gradually do the rules emerge. Finding the rules is part of the game.
What powers do they provide and what do they forbid? Can those rules be violated at all? And is everything revealed or can something be found by testing those limits? The spirit of violation is built into the video game; so is a demand for submission.
In this struggle, technology is an emblem of both the game's limits and its promises; it helps determine what can and cannot be done. And game designers -- like game players -- keep exploring those boundaries. But through every gaming generation, no matter what the technology, the player is still the classic adolescent: at once uncertain and arrogant, proud and disgusted, resenting the demands being made and, finally, cherishing the ability to master them.
I've done my part!
I bought 4 "Fast and the Furious" soundtrack CD's at BestBuy. Returned them after showing clerk text on back.
Bought 4 more at Fry's, returned them after showing them the text on the back.
The text on the back says: "If you have playback problems, return the CD for a refund." It won't play in my car stereo (run of the mill one too!) so bam, returned with full refund.
Some Egyptians were certainly black!
I realize Cleopatra was greek (long descendant of Ptolemy), but Nefertiti among others were Nubian. Nubians (who live in southern Egypt) are sure as hell black.
No it's not, as quoted from here:
The code scheduling technique was developed for static compilation, and therefore the compilation time was not a major consideration. Even with the simple list scheduling technique for the basic block range, it is necessary to construct a dependence DAG. The worst-case running time is O(n2), where n is the number of machine instructions in the basic block.6 In the IBM JIT compiler, we have implemented a different way of scheduling code within a basic block, running in C * n, where C is the size of the lookahead to be scheduled, in view of the compilation time constraint.
Some of the optimizations CAN be quicker at runtime than statically compiled native code optimizations. A JIT, by definition, does not mean a degradation in performance.
Java being "a user's nightmare speed wise" is a oft repeated myth. Server stuff
(which the language is predominately used for now) is quite quick. The latest IBM
VM is as fast and sometimes faster than C++, not to mention infinitely more
maintainable. Plus, the Just-in-time compilers really zoom. The only area Java really
lags speedwise is in the GUI, something that seems to be getting considerable
attention at Sun.
I find it difficult to believe Internet C++ will go anywhere. C++'s syntax is clumsy
and pointers lead to truly hellish large coding projects.
Slashdot Mirror
The space program is funded. The reason for the gap isn't a lack of funding, its a matter of extremely poor management.
Not true. Both the NRC report
The report urged Congress and the White House to seriously examine the mismatch between the tasks assigned to NASA and the resources that the agency has been provided to accomplish them.
and the Augustine report:
"...Augustine acknowledged that they had not found any mismanagement nor any insurmountable technical obstacles to the completion of the current program."
contradict your statement. NASA has been perennially underfunded.
Actually the data from weather research posts is freely available to the public.
Professor Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, says it's not. The full quote:
When challenged about the contents of one of the stolen e-mails in which Professor Jones told a critic of his work that he would not make information available because the data would only be used to undermine his findings, he admitted that he had written a number of "very awful e-mails". Professor Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, told the committee that it was not possible to make the entire international data set available because of a "commercial promise". He explained that a number of contributing nations - including Canada, Poland and Sweden - had refused to make their segments of data publicly available.
I still think AGW is most likely true, but UEA had some pretty sloppy practices with data.
Unless it's tainted spinach. Or tainted peanuts. Or tainted organic eggs. Or tainted organic sesame seeds. Or tainted organic alfalfa....
Disclosure: I work at NASA.
To be fair, we are researching self sufficient lunar habitats. I probably see an average of 6 papers a year on the topic at the ICES or COSPAR conferences. The real trick is making a compelling case that regenerative life support saves you ESM (Equivalent System Mass). Everything at NASA is reduced to the mass of the system, and thus how expensive it is to launch. Harry Jones, Alan Drysdale, and other big wig life support analysts aren't convinced complicated regenerative systems, especially crops, will actually make for a cheaper lunar or orbital system. The farther you are away from earth, however, the more sense it makes. One could make the argument that we should test crops on the moon for eventual deployment on Mars, but it would be a very expensive experiment.
Well, at least for some of these, I still use Eclipse.
For Perl:
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/
For Ruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse
For Latex:
http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
For C++:
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.
Are you thinking of JEdit? http://www.jedit.org/>
Try Tortoise SVN. It's a pretty, integrated windows subversion client.
Happened to me after I signed up with a smaller ISP expecting more personal service. I got personal service alright after they threatened to cut off my service for exceeding their bandwidth "guarantee" of 500MB a month. I posted a review of the ISP and got a letter back threatening legal action. Even angrier that the company would attack me posting my opinions online, I decided to post a snippet of the threatening letter they sent on my website and the ISP backed off. Now I'm with SBC. 1.5 down, 365 up and they've never bothered me once.
Bilbo was more than "comfortable," or "well-to-do," he was the richest hobbit in the shire. He didn't have to work a day in his life. Granted he did noble things in his spare time, but I still don't see how either he or his nephew having anything like close to common lives.
Frodo the everyman who has a servent?
April 6, 2002
Realism May Be Taking the Fun Out of Games
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In games, reality can seem beside the point. Carved boards, decorated cards, dotted cubes and colored pebbles become instruments of war. The fate of a bouncing spheroid determines one's fortunes. The more artificial an object is, the more arbitrary the restrictions are on its movements, the simpler the rules governing the play, the more powerful a game seems to become. A game establishes its own world.
Yet over the last two decades, the evolution of video games has involved a quest for the opposite. One of the major goals of video game systems has been to simulate the real, to create images so lifelike, and movements so natural that there is no sense of artifice. There really is a haunted house being explored, a football team arrayed on a field, a car racing at 150 miles an hour through a city street. In the early years of arcade games, invaders from space were squiggly white doodles arranged in rows, threatening a player with oblivion. Now they can speak, gush green blood and wield advanced weaponry.
During the last year or so technological realism has claimed its greatest triumph yet, as three major game systems made their debuts. Lives there an 8 to 18-year-old -- or an adult guiltily aspiring to that state of mind -- who has not yet heard about the technological accomplishments of Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube? Elaborate textures and sounds make earlier games seem like playthings. The humble controller that once maneuvered a diminutive and plump plumber named Mario across a television screen, allowing him to jump, bop and run, has now been pumped up like Lara Croft's bodice; the bloated Xbox controller has eight buttons, two triggers, three toggling switches and untapped possibilities. And the promise and threat of these systems caused sales of video game systems and games to jump 42 percent last year to $9.4 billion.
Now, as if sensing the power boost, the Rochester Institute of Technology has started the first master's program in computer game design. Carnegie Mellon University has an Entertainment Technology Center teaching game development techniques. Histories of the video game have also been accumulating, mixing serious analysis with fans' passions.
Yet something odd has taken place along with technological progress. Technology is not altogether welcomed by the games themselves. One of the new games for Xbox, "Dead or Alive 3" is a martial arts game in which processors give sheen to muscles and flesh and simulate icicles or marble, but the world itself is premodern and the combat hand to hand. In "Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee," also for Xbox, an endangered species is being rescued and medieval machines abound; power is won through communal chant.
One of Nintendo's major offerings, "Pikmin," actually discards technology from the start: a spaceship crashes. It can be rebuilt only with the help of pixyish creatures known as Pikmin; the crucial technology in "Luigi's Mansion" is a vacuum cleaner strapped to Luigi's back that can suck up ghosts in a haunted house. The ante- and anti-technological content of these games provides a peculiar counterpoint to the boasts of technological advancement made by the game systems.
There are, of course, games in which technology is required and complexity is part of the point. The daunting model is still Microsoft's "Flight Simulator 2002" for the PC, in which the challenge of learning to fly a plane may be matched by the challenge of learning to control a plane using a computer keyboard. But in many video games, the technology is put in service to creating a world that could do very well without it and doesn't exactly welcome technology to begin with.
This sentiment is often accompanied by nostalgia and affection for more "primitive," earlier-generation games. "The Ultimate History of Video Games," by Steven L. Kent (Prima Publishing, 2001) lovingly chronicles the pioneers and corporate battles behind the classics. And last year M.I.T. Press published a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tribute to arcade video, "Supercade," by Van Burnham and Ralph H. Baer. One of Nintendo's latest games, "Super Smash Brothers Melee," even gathers Nintendo's classic game characters, ranging from Mario and Pikachu to Zelda and Donkey Kong, for a reunion; in a meta-Nintendo joke, they all slug it out for the championship.
There may be, in fact, a tension in the video game universe: technological powers are courted for their possibilities and resisted for their fetishistic demands. Technology's greatest achievement may be in the improvements in racing games, shooting games and fighting games. There, the simulation of realism is most important because the very point of the games is to create a physical sensation, an anxiety, punctuated by shocks and cries. An advertisement for a game called "Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing" boasted about the game's sophisticated "facial damage engine," calling it "brutal beyond belief."
This is what arcade culture was about. The dark booth-stuffed arcade was, by tradition, a forbidding, seductive place. It was a world in which carnival-barker voices might boom from cubicles, while from others, surrounded by teenage voyeurs, would come screeching tires or grunts. Quick death at the console, fast quarters in the slots, territorial claims on booths -- the arcade was a dream world of preadult fantasy.
Originally, home video systems couldn't satisfy the technological demands of these games, let alone simulate an arcade atmosphere. Now their increasing muscular power may make the atmosphere unnecessary. But the real foundation of the home video game came from another sort of arcade game whose images spurred less angst and spurted less blood, games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, with their pleasing blurps, amusing images and teasing difficulties.
Indeed, the great achievement of Nintendo's game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was to create an entirely new genre based on his "Mario" games in which the thrill of the arcade was domesticated. The ambition of realism was put aside; instead the intention was to create an elaborate world with its own regulations and peculiarities that the player would probe, gradually discovering its secrets. These fantastical worlds of labyrinths, puzzles and confrontations tapped into the classic strength of games as abstract worlds of arbitrary rules.
These are the two poles of the video game, still evident in the latest systems. But however different in character, the games share important preoccupations. The classic board game or card game begins with the rules; then comes the play. In video games the play begins and only gradually do the rules emerge. Finding the rules is part of the game.
What powers do they provide and what do they forbid? Can those rules be violated at all? And is everything revealed or can something be found by testing those limits? The spirit of violation is built into the video game; so is a demand for submission.
In this struggle, technology is an emblem of both the game's limits and its promises; it helps determine what can and cannot be done. And game designers -- like game players -- keep exploring those boundaries. But through every gaming generation, no matter what the technology, the player is still the classic adolescent: at once uncertain and arrogant, proud and disgusted, resenting the demands being made and, finally, cherishing the ability to master them.
I've done my part!
I bought 4 "Fast and the Furious" soundtrack CD's at BestBuy. Returned them after showing clerk text on back.
Bought 4 more at Fry's, returned them after showing them the text on the back.
The text on the back says: "If you have playback problems, return the CD for a refund." It won't play in my car stereo (run of the mill one too!) so bam, returned with full refund.
Some Egyptians were certainly black!
I realize Cleopatra was greek (long descendant of Ptolemy), but Nefertiti among others were Nubian. Nubians (who live in southern Egypt) are sure as hell black.
The same is often said about the Java Just-in-time compilers; that the dynamic emulation has to be slower than native static compilation. Urg.
Hear hear!
No it's not, as quoted from here: The code scheduling technique was developed for static compilation, and therefore the compilation time was not a major consideration. Even with the simple list scheduling technique for the basic block range, it is necessary to construct a dependence DAG. The worst-case running time is O(n2), where n is the number of machine instructions in the basic block.6 In the IBM JIT compiler, we have implemented a different way of scheduling code within a basic block, running in C * n, where C is the size of the lookahead to be scheduled, in view of the compilation time constraint. Some of the optimizations CAN be quicker at runtime than statically compiled native code optimizations. A JIT, by definition, does not mean a degradation in performance.
Java being "a user's nightmare speed wise" is a oft repeated myth. Server stuff (which the language is predominately used for now) is quite quick. The latest IBM VM is as fast and sometimes faster than C++, not to mention infinitely more maintainable. Plus, the Just-in-time compilers really zoom. The only area Java really lags speedwise is in the GUI, something that seems to be getting considerable attention at Sun. I find it difficult to believe Internet C++ will go anywhere. C++'s syntax is clumsy and pointers lead to truly hellish large coding projects.