Is that a port of a Ruby web application framework to an open-source reimplementation of a (possibly patent-encumbered) proprietary common language runtime?
The rear limbs are a bit dog-like, but the forelimbs are the same only turned the other way around. That's why it doesn't seem doglike to me.
If you took two dogs and strapped them together, facing each other, with their forelimbs in the air and only their rear limbs on the ground... and made them telepathic... they might move a bit like that!
I find the part where it slips on the ice particularly impressive - although BigDog seemed to come perilously close to a broken limb in the incident! I think most humans faced with that kind of situation would end up sitting on their rears with a rueful expression.
Thank you! I've long felt that that analogy is not nearly as bad as the mockers make it out to be. Of course, the internet is a network of "tubes" rather than a series of them, but that's just arguing over formal language which is missing the point again.
That said, I'm still bamboozled by the attempt to compare the internet to a "big truck"...
GTA has been a good franchise, but it is all TT has.
Hardly. You may or may not be aware that Take Two owns 2k Games and 2k Sports. Thus, all of the following have been published by Take Two. Any of it familiar?
Bioshock
Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
Civilization IV
In fact, not only were Civ IV and Bioshock published by Take Two, they were developed by studios that are currently owned by Take Two (Firaxis and the creatively-named 2K Boston/2K Australia, formerly Irrational Games).
Which is nice in theory, but the energy cost of putting an installation in orbit tends to make the already-unattractive ROI for solar completely unacceptable.
At the risk of being modded down, isn't that distinction the whole point of the IEC's "zebibyte" proposal?
Anyway, most measurements of mass storage (bandwidth quotas, hard disk capacity etc) seem to measured in actual megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB) etc, as opposed to binary megabytes (MiB), binary gigabytes (GiB) and so on. Binary byte prefixes only seem to be used for RAM and flash these days, presumably because of the convenient manufacturing realities involved - and I really wish that manufacturers of those products would get with the program and label their products with unambiguous units.
Games, of course, package both the data and the player as a unit. The game developers have complete control over both, so it's easy for them to choose a free, unencumbered and arguably technically superior solution. They don't have to compatible with anything but their own code and general purpose computers!
Unfortunately, manufacturers of portable music players, especially ones that aren't Apple, don't have the luxury of dictating the form of the user's data. Their hardware has to be compatible with people's collections if they want to sell any units. So they have to implement mp3 support, whether or not they implement Ogg/Vorbis support. And if they don't want to pony up to Fraunhofer and the other mp3 patent holders... well, you get situations like this.
Is it even possible to buy a chip that decodes Ogg/Vorbis but *doesn't* decode mp3? I wouldn't be surprised if a stand-alone Ogg/Vorbis decoder just isn't on the market.
Then there is the issue of working speed - what it has taken three years for Spirit to accomplish would have taken a human geologist a mere three days.
Let's assume that sending humans to Mars, and sustaining them on the surface, would require a certain "budget" in terms of energy availability and potential payload lift from Earth to Mars.
The current Mars rovers are indeed slow. One reason why they're slow is that their energy budgets are tiny. Speed machines they are not! And their comms links back to Earth aren't exactly high bandwidth either. (It's not the only reason of course. Latency in command & control is another factor which means that it's not safe to drive 'em fast.)
However, if you already have the capability to send the mass & energy required for humans to Mars... why not use that *immense* mass and energy budget for hugely superior robot explorers? They wouldn't be so limited as the current generation then. And I think they'd be much more competitive with a human geologist. And you wouldn't need to waste payload on low energy density consumables like food, water & O2. Nor would you need to worry about hauling back a few hundred kilos of meatbag scientists; the return trip payload can be 100% valuable samples.
Anyway, it's a bit unfair to compare Spirit & Opportunity's efficiency to that of a human geologist (aresologist?) when the investment in sending them is such a trivial fraction of that required for a human.
It's a shame about the comms lag interfering with telepresence, though. I think improved autonomy is going to be a requirement for more efficient robotic exploration, but that will never be a substitute for Being There.
That said, I think that we have not yet scratched the surface of what can be done with hardware & software. Deploying wetware to Mars should probably wait till we've gathered up more of that tasty, tasty low-hanging fruit.
I heard a story once about a company that sold airport support vehicles to an airport in China. (I believe they were fire tenders but I could easily be misremembering).
Anyway, a few years later, the company received some requests for technical support. The airport was apparently having some problems with the vehicles' equipment, and since these are very expensive specialist vehicles, the company sent out an engineer to take a look under warranty.
However, during the investigation, the engineer noticed that several of the vehicles were identical. Down to the serial numbers on the id plates.
Yes, the vehicles the company sold had been broken down and copied to the level of detail that the knockoffs had identical serial numbers engraved on them!
Naturally, the company that sold the vehicles told their engineer to come on home. They were under no contractual obligation to support vehicles that they had never sold to the airport!
For extra credit: why does the universe have all this angular momentum to begin with? Where did that come from? Why doesn't a proto-solar system just collapse into a sphere?
My comment wasn't just based on these Acid3 results, but also on WebKit's excellent Java/ECMAScript benchmarking results and other general positive press.
Well, I'm looking forward to Firefox 3 getting out of beta, anyway. A new version of Gecko will be nice.
So, WebKit is pretty clearly a very superior rendering engine for the web. Fast & accurate.
But I love my Firefox chrome & extensibility so very, very much. Safari for Windows is Not That Great by all accounts and I'm not aware of any other decent Windows WebKit-based browsers. Gecko's a pretty good rendering engine and I imagine it will continue to improve... but WebKit's reported performance is very tempting.
Would it be technically feasible to create a version of Firefox that uses WebKit as a rendering engine rather than Gecko, or is that a nonsensical suggestion? I'm not sufficiently familiar with Firefox's internal structure to know. I do know that the IETab extension allows the IE rendering engine to be embedded into Firefox, but the integration is not perfect.
From what I've heard, there's no such thing as a "full attack" in 4th Ed - characters do not automatically get multiple attacks as they advance in levels. Presumably multiple attacks would still be available via feats/talents however.
Slashdot Mirror
But does it have less space than a Nomad?
At least it has wireless!
Monorails?
;)
Is that a port of a Ruby web application framework to an open-source reimplementation of a (possibly patent-encumbered) proprietary common language runtime?
No wonder it sucks compared to a Honda!
The rear limbs are a bit dog-like, but the forelimbs are the same only turned the other way around. That's why it doesn't seem doglike to me.
If you took two dogs and strapped them together, facing each other, with their forelimbs in the air and only their rear limbs on the ground... and made them telepathic... they might move a bit like that!
I find the part where it slips on the ice particularly impressive - although BigDog seemed to come perilously close to a broken limb in the incident! I think most humans faced with that kind of situation would end up sitting on their rears with a rueful expression.
But is the fungus among us humongous?
I think it just did.
Your post was the equivalent of opening Schrodinger's cat-box...
Nice synergy between your username and post, there... O_o
Thank you! I've long felt that that analogy is not nearly as bad as the mockers make it out to be. Of course, the internet is a network of "tubes" rather than a series of them, but that's just arguing over formal language which is missing the point again.
That said, I'm still bamboozled by the attempt to compare the internet to a "big truck"...
- Bioshock
- Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
- Civilization IV
In fact, not only were Civ IV and Bioshock published by Take Two, they were developed by studios that are currently owned by Take Two (Firaxis and the creatively-named 2K Boston/2K Australia, formerly Irrational Games).Which is nice in theory, but the energy cost of putting an installation in orbit tends to make the already-unattractive ROI for solar completely unacceptable.
:)
We need space elevators for cheap orbital lift.
At the risk of being modded down, isn't that distinction the whole point of the IEC's "zebibyte" proposal?
Anyway, most measurements of mass storage (bandwidth quotas, hard disk capacity etc) seem to measured in actual megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB) etc, as opposed to binary megabytes (MiB), binary gigabytes (GiB) and so on. Binary byte prefixes only seem to be used for RAM and flash these days, presumably because of the convenient manufacturing realities involved - and I really wish that manufacturers of those products would get with the program and label their products with unambiguous units.
So I assume the estimate means 10^15 bytes.
You know, running a penetration testing firm sounds like an excellent cover for black-hat hackers.
Nothing gives you plausible deniability for your data heists like being paid to try stealing it in the first place...
Well, it's sure not on a telco monopoly!
Ericsson isn't a telco, and has far from a monopoly on mobile telecomms gear.
Games, of course, package both the data and the player as a unit. The game developers have complete control over both, so it's easy for them to choose a free, unencumbered and arguably technically superior solution. They don't have to compatible with anything but their own code and general purpose computers!
Unfortunately, manufacturers of portable music players, especially ones that aren't Apple, don't have the luxury of dictating the form of the user's data. Their hardware has to be compatible with people's collections if they want to sell any units. So they have to implement mp3 support, whether or not they implement Ogg/Vorbis support. And if they don't want to pony up to Fraunhofer and the other mp3 patent holders... well, you get situations like this.
Is it even possible to buy a chip that decodes Ogg/Vorbis but *doesn't* decode mp3? I wouldn't be surprised if a stand-alone Ogg/Vorbis decoder just isn't on the market.
Let's assume that sending humans to Mars, and sustaining them on the surface, would require a certain "budget" in terms of energy availability and potential payload lift from Earth to Mars.
The current Mars rovers are indeed slow. One reason why they're slow is that their energy budgets are tiny. Speed machines they are not! And their comms links back to Earth aren't exactly high bandwidth either. (It's not the only reason of course. Latency in command & control is another factor which means that it's not safe to drive 'em fast.)
However, if you already have the capability to send the mass & energy required for humans to Mars... why not use that *immense* mass and energy budget for hugely superior robot explorers? They wouldn't be so limited as the current generation then. And I think they'd be much more competitive with a human geologist. And you wouldn't need to waste payload on low energy density consumables like food, water & O2. Nor would you need to worry about hauling back a few hundred kilos of meatbag scientists; the return trip payload can be 100% valuable samples.
Anyway, it's a bit unfair to compare Spirit & Opportunity's efficiency to that of a human geologist (aresologist?) when the investment in sending them is such a trivial fraction of that required for a human.
It's a shame about the comms lag interfering with telepresence, though. I think improved autonomy is going to be a requirement for more efficient robotic exploration, but that will never be a substitute for Being There.
That said, I think that we have not yet scratched the surface of what can be done with hardware & software. Deploying wetware to Mars should probably wait till we've gathered up more of that tasty, tasty low-hanging fruit.
I heard a story once about a company that sold airport support vehicles to an airport in China. (I believe they were fire tenders but I could easily be misremembering).
Anyway, a few years later, the company received some requests for technical support. The airport was apparently having some problems with the vehicles' equipment, and since these are very expensive specialist vehicles, the company sent out an engineer to take a look under warranty.
However, during the investigation, the engineer noticed that several of the vehicles were identical. Down to the serial numbers on the id plates.
Yes, the vehicles the company sold had been broken down and copied to the level of detail that the knockoffs had identical serial numbers engraved on them!
Naturally, the company that sold the vehicles told their engineer to come on home. They were under no contractual obligation to support vehicles that they had never sold to the airport!
Good explanation. Most illuminating!
For extra credit: why does the universe have all this angular momentum to begin with? Where did that come from? Why doesn't a proto-solar system just collapse into a sphere?
Very interesting links, thanks!
My comment wasn't just based on these Acid3 results, but also on WebKit's excellent Java/ECMAScript benchmarking results and other general positive press.
Well, I'm looking forward to Firefox 3 getting out of beta, anyway. A new version of Gecko will be nice.
So, WebKit is pretty clearly a very superior rendering engine for the web. Fast & accurate.
But I love my Firefox chrome & extensibility so very, very much. Safari for Windows is Not That Great by all accounts and I'm not aware of any other decent Windows WebKit-based browsers. Gecko's a pretty good rendering engine and I imagine it will continue to improve... but WebKit's reported performance is very tempting.
Would it be technically feasible to create a version of Firefox that uses WebKit as a rendering engine rather than Gecko, or is that a nonsensical suggestion? I'm not sufficiently familiar with Firefox's internal structure to know. I do know that the IETab extension allows the IE rendering engine to be embedded into Firefox, but the integration is not perfect.
A laudable project indeed. However everytime I look at that "UNdata" project name, I can't help but think of it as a data source for Uncyclopedia.
Ugh, GMPCs :)
Nah, he just got involved in a game of Alternity.
Or played a Psion, or used non-weapon proficiencies, in a game of AD&D2E.
Where a natural 20 is a critical failure...
From what I've heard, there's no such thing as a "full attack" in 4th Ed - characters do not automatically get multiple attacks as they advance in levels. Presumably multiple attacks would still be available via feats/talents however.
Intelligent Climate Control? Sounds like a feature on a home AC unit, heh.