Without using the cluster, for images larger than a postage stamp?
Robustly for just about all video streams you've tried, as opposed to special cases that work well?
The only way you could do this is with an (at worst) O(n log n) or O(n [log n]^2) algorithm for finding features present in multiple image frames and judging the correct transform to use, and being right _all_ the time. This would be quite the accomplishment....We should probably take this up in person. Look at the cube seating list in 2206 to find me (or just look for my name on a blackboard). I'll be in on Monday (no more paper means no more living at the university).
Not in real-time. -WRONG! I'll be presenting a paper which will demonstrate otherwise. Its based on research to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing ISWC2002.
it has been my understanding that fuel is the major cost of launching a space vehicle. Or at least the root of the problem. The shuttle itself is reusable, so a minimal amount of money is used to get it flight ready again. The SRB's are reuseable, but must be refueled with solid rocket fuel. However a new External Tank must be constructed for each launch. That is the biggest part of the assembly.
The problem is that because the shuttle is man-rated, they basically have to take it apart and put it back together again to make sure everything still works. This costs a _lot_. Fuel is cheap, but shuttle parts and skilled engineer time are not.
A secondary problem is that the cost of maintaining all of the facilities for servicing the shuttle must be amortized over the (relatively few) shuttle launches. This too is very expensive.
The main reason why finding more effective fuels is important is that they let you reduce the total craft size and weight for a given payload weight. This makes the craft much cheaper to build and maintain, reducing the cost of lifting the fixed-weight payload.
One of the ways around this is to use plasma. If you generate plasma ahead of an aircraft with a welding-torch type of thing, you can reduce the drag by as much as 30%. The Russians are using plasma in their next generation of MiGs. (BTW, plasma also absorbs radar)
You get the same effect with a gas blanket, which is a lot easier to produce than plasma. However, this is still a pain in the neck, making your craft vastly more complicated and requiring considerable fuel if the wings have any significant cross-sectional area at all (to spray the gas blanket [most likely an exhaust stream] forward fast enough to move the shockwave off the wing edge).
A better approach would be a) making the wing angle very small, so that you have a lot of leading-edge area per unit cross-sectional area, and b) only going at hypersonic speeds when you're in very thin atmosphere, reducing the amount of heating.
As for carbon composites, while graphite won't vapourize until about 4000 degrees C, it'll be rapidly etched away unless you coat it with something. "Something" is tungsten carbide, for the shuttle, at least. That has a melting point of around 3000 degrees C, and may or may not start degrading at a lower temperature (ask an aerospace engineer). Carbon composite shielding can take a lot of punishment, but _gliding_ at orbital velocity in an atmosphere overwhelms it unless you have a very light craft. (Important number is effective pressure exerted by the air you're plowing through, which is proportional to the craft mass, and which rate of heating is directly proportional to. You can play with the proportionality constants [by altering craft geometry and materials] to make the problem less severe, but a lighter craft will always help and the problem is always bad at high speeds).
The new method, which allows an image to be created by ``painting with video'' is used in conjunction with a wearable wireless webcam, so that image mosaics can be generated simply by looking around, in a sense, ``painting with looks''.
Just in case anyone was wondering - this wasn't being done in anything close to real-time the last time I checked. There's a cluster in Prof. Mann's lab which is dedicated to compositing these images (my cube is in the next room).
Still an interesting project. The affine transformation approach has been well-understood for some time (you do a brute force and ignorance test of promising-looking affine transformations [rotations and scalings] to find one that matches the new image to the old). As far as I can tell, he's doing the same thing with a different coordinate system that has a bit less distortion.
The simple fact of e-publishing is that it costs money. You can't publish a book wihout people buying them, and likewise you cant publish a web page without getting money from somewhere. We now know that most web advertising is a flop, so subscriptions seem unavoidable. But if i read 10 news sites a day, i dont want to pay even $4 for each one because that sure adds up. If you can think of a solution please let me know, cus there is money to be made there.
Solution number one is to read fewer than 10 news sites in a day. You'd end up with a multi-tiered system with news sources feeding various news web sites (for a fee), and you subscribing to the news web site (or two) that best matched your interests.
IMO, this is what web news is most likely to converge on. We have the "multi-tiered split production and distribution" thing going already between Slashdot and similar news distributors, and the original articles they reference. All that needs to change is the billing structure.
The other option is to have a massively distributed web-news system, such that everyone was hosting from their own cached copies (with outgoing traffic self-throttling to prevent hot spots). This would effectively double everyone's news bandwidth costs, by bundling the outgoing distribution costs with incoming distribution costs. Unfortunately, there are problems:
Everyone (or nearly everyone) has to be altruistic enough to host, and host fairly. If the ratio of downloaders to cachers/distributors gets too steep, costs for the distributors become prohibitive. Similar things happen if you have people spoofing the system to get around throttling, cheating somehow on throttling, etc.
Sharing comments in this distributed newslog would be a royal pain. The only practical way to do it would be to cache comments between trusted hosts. It would only take one idiot to poison an area's comment list. This is likely not a viable solution for a grass-roots system.
I'm blithely assuming there will be enough altruistic reporters (amateur or professional) supplying real news footage out of pocket to make this work. The official sources will likely end up mostly subscription-only for the good stuff. There will always be enough free material as a teaser to make an adequate free system, but it won't be great.
I'm blithely assuming that setting up a server for this cache isn't a problem. Even if you make a drool-proof server install package, you have the problem of most ISPs taking down anyone who hosts a server with significant outgoing traffic.
IMO if a distributed system happens at all, it won't be a massive grassroots effort - it'll be a franchise scheme of some sort. Or a corporation's distributed set of news nodes, but a) that happens already and b) that doesn't save money (money is only saved when you have small enough bandwidth load per node to piggyback on residential connections with flat rates).
We'll see what actually emerges in about a decade or so.
A similar idea was proposed many years ago (and used for one of the satellites studying the moon). Do a google search for "Earth-Moon fuzzy boundary" for references to that particular application.
The idea is that you can more or less coast through regions where the competing gravitational effects of many bodies cancel out, making part of your path from point a to point b less expensive than the standard transfer orbit.
So what I'm wondering is, wouldn't it be possible to invent a disk addressing scheme which basically self-extends, so that you would never really need to manually change things to support disk sizes beyond a certain size?
Finishing moving disk-related parameters to 64 bits makes this largely unnecessary. It is extremely unlikely that we'll have to worry about devices with more than 2^63 blocks for a very long time (with 1k blocks, this would be eight [us] billion terabytes).
Having the OS scale block size instead of just using a sane parameter width leads to much nastiness (remember how much fun FAT16 was).
I wouldn't hold your breathe for Motorola, not that I don't want them to be successful, but they just reported a loss of 2.3 billion dollars last quarter. That makes 6 quarters in a row where they have lost money. They just can't go on much longer losing that much money. Maybe if they can get a new Processor out the door....3 year old 800mhz processors aren't going to cut it too much longer.
Since when is Motorola's sole product line PPC chips? Motorola manufactures a vast range of semiconductor and consumer electronics products.
Whatever the source of Motorola's woes, I doubt it's the PPC.
Also, it's only the iMac that has an 800 MHz chip. The PowerMac G4 has 1 GHz chips. I'm sure there will be speed steppings down the road if Apple feels threatened by Intel and asks for them.
Are there any parts of SFX development that would strongly benefit from dedicated hardware that aren't already being served (be it in the rendering backend or the user tools)?
Is this plan really a better bet than electric cars with high density batteries and some type of remote hydrogen powerplant running the juice over cables?
Yes.
The energy storage density of batteries is horrible. Even for the strange and wondrous experimental designs that you won't ever see because they're expensive or run at 300 degrees C or what-have-you.
Fuel for fuel cells, on the other hand, has an energy storage density approaching that of gasoline (better by weight, considerably less by volume for hydrogen, which is a royal pain to store; comparable to gasoline on both counts for methanol, but that's a pain to re-form).
Fuel storage density has been the limiting factor for the design of electric cars, so this makes one heck of a difference.
As for faking his PhD, do the ends justify the means? I'm not trying to be flamebait, but if you say you are a PhD and the university hires you without checking, who is really at fault. Let me put it another way. I apply to U of X, saying I have my PhD, and work there for several years, doing a great job. If someone finds out, I agree, I should have to answer for my actions, but what if no one finds out and I am a great worker?
Independent of the job you're doing, you've still defrauded the university if you do this. You could make a hand-waving argument about denying legit candidates the job also.
In this case, it's moot point, as the hired "PhD" was *not* doing a good job. Profs, grad students, and post-docs are hired to do research. Teaching is a secondary task that is there to ensure a continued supply of grad students. If, as the original poster reported, this person's research at the university was complete drivel, then they are worse than useless to the university (not only not producing anything, but taking up resources legitimate producers could use).
Is it possible for elements to be "missing" actually. Like gaps in the chart? Do there have to be continuous numbers? Or can you count them... 114, 115, 117, 119???
The atomic number is just the number of protons in the atom, so you could in principle build all of them without gaps.
However, you can have gaps between stable (or almost-stable) elements, with only very-unstable elements in between. That's the whole idea of the "magic island of stability" mentioned in the articles.
Even-numbered heavy elements also tend to be more stable than odd-numbered elements (as even-numbered nuclei tend to be more energetically favourable, and there's an easy decay path that turns odd nuclei into even ones [beta decay]).
No, the model was supposed to separate from the rocket, at high altitude. Until that point, the rocket was the craft and if it failed, it had nothing to do with the viability of the jet or the model.
Catastrophic crashes like the one we saw here are caused by thruster imbalances, not flaps or fins.
While that could easily be the cause also, I respectfully disagree with your argument. If you build a model rocket and put the fins on at bizzare angles, it's going to crash. Similarly, if the control surfaces on the rocket or the plane were sufficiently far from where they were supposed to be, the rocket would crash. If they weren't able to adjust the craft's course that much, they wouldn't be very good control surfaces in proper operation, would they?
As another poster pointed out, it's unlikely that control surfaces were to blame (bad assumption on my part - I was assuming they'd use the plane's steering to help guide the launch, as opposed to being locked). I'm just taking issue with your (apparent) statement that it's impossible for you to steer a rocket-boosted plane into the ground.
have you seen the screenshots? They're *gorgeous*. The level of immersion in Doom3 will be crazy -- it's all about believing that you're really there. The lighting is really where Doom3 excels. It's able to do things we've never seen before. I have a feeling it'll be the first game to scare me since playing doom in the dark at 2am.
Again, how is this a _revolution_? It's more of the same at higher polycount and crunching power. _Yes_, it looks great and almost certainly plays great. That doesn't make it a fundamental _technological_ leap.
Sorry if I'm sounding cranky, but I'm tired of "revolutions" being touted every couple of years when a better-than-average game comes out.
After all this time, the only company to do anything to challenge id's throne has been Epic Megagames, but the best they've done is beat id to the punch with their unreal2 engine that is just an evolutionary step from Quake3, while Doom3's graphics appear to be revolutionary.
How, precisely, is *either* of these revolutionary?
We've had fully-3D environments with all degrees of freedom of viewing since Descent. We've also had environmental audio, smoke, and complex lighting for a few years now.
We've also had fully scriptable game engines for a while.
What will either of these engines bring beyond slightly more complex models and slightly more polished lighting and environment? We're at the point where there isn't much revolutionary to _add_.
Nobody seems to understand that it was the rocket booster that failed, not the test jet. The test jet wouldnt' be activated until something like 18 miles above the ground.
It could have been either the jet or the rocket that caused the failure, as both would need to use their control surfaces to keep the flight stable. Set a fin or a flap the wrong way, and you go spiralling into the ground. Which looks a lot like what happened.
Are they trying something really innovative, or did the technological knowledge from the 60's vanish??
Obviously they are not those who built the 60's version, but why do they encounter so much difficulties 40 years after a successful project?
What's the technological reason?
This plane is designed to be bigger, faster, and have far better fuel efficiency.
It's a very different design, and so of course has to go through a lot of testing. Even aircraft based on more conventional technology have to go through this (you don't think they'd put, say, a 747 on the runway without doing test flights to verify the design, right?).
The ony down side to this test is that they won't really learn much from it. The craft or booster failed while taking off, not when cruising under flight conditions.
It crashed a few seconds after takeoff - so it can only be the booster rocket that failed - right?
The booster rocket provided the thrust, but the plane was big enough to drastically affect the aerodynamics (it was bigger than the rocket). A control systems failure or mechanical failure on either vehicle could have caused the accident. I'm sure there will be a press release when they figure out what exactly went wrong.
Erm, it's possible to build a plane which is fundamentally stable. Anyone who's built a paper plane can show that But it is NOT possible to build a rocket that's fundamentally stable. A rocket is fundamentally UNSTABLE, and what keeps it stable is a complicated control system. That control system requires a whole lot of maths to get it right.
As long as you're in the atmosphere, it's trivial to build a stable rocket (just put fins near the back; check Estes' model rocket building guide for the detailed CP/CM explanation).
Outside the atmosphere (above a few tens of kilometres), it still doesn't take more than second-year engineering. You have a device to measure your angle off the vertical (be it a gyro, laser gyro, or a horizon-sensing camera), and you have a classic feedback control system that tries to make that angle zero.
Two op-amps and 50 cents worth of parts and you have your control system. The trick is making sure it's damped enough not to destabilize itself, but that's not horribly difficult either.
In summary, as long as you're not trying to do anything complicated, "Rocket Science" isn't as hard as you're painting it.
One microgram of antimatter (the amount needed for the spacecraft) would also make a pretty boring "boom". Yield is about 45 tons (not kilotons - tons). It's the gamma pulse you have to worry about.
Whoops; one milligram would have a yield of 45 tonnes. A microgram's yield is equivalent to 45 kilograms of TNT.
Until the electrical system powering your electrostatic field fails. BOOM! If your storage method became popular in urban industrial centers, imagine the destructive force that could be unleashed using an Electromagnetic Pulse in the city, disabling all the electrostatic confinement fields. BOOM!
Antimatter would never be stored in a city; there's no reason to (other power storage methods are far more efficient). It would only be used where power-to-weight ratio was critical - like in interstellar spacecraft.
One microgram of antimatter (the amount needed for the spacecraft) would also make a pretty boring "boom". Yield is about 45 tons (not kilotons - tons). It's the gamma pulse you have to worry about.
How were pirates prosecuted before then? I seem to recall that they busted hacker rings long before 1997.
Back in the days of pirate BBSs (up here in Canada, at least), they'd mostly ignore the pirated software and go after BBSs that were involved with carding (warezing stolen credit card information).
Most of the serious pirate boards did carding, so there was never a shortage of targets to keep the authourities busy.
Boards that just traded files weren't big enough targets.
I suppose they could have nailed boards on child porn charges too, as any large porn archive would likely have people of borderline age somewhere in it, but credit card takedowns were the ones I heard about.
Slashdot Mirror
without either.
...We should probably take this up in person. Look at the cube seating list in 2206 to find me (or just look for my name on a blackboard). I'll be in on Monday (no more paper means no more living at the university).
Without using the cluster, for images larger than a postage stamp?
Robustly for just about all video streams you've tried, as opposed to special cases that work well?
The only way you could do this is with an (at worst) O(n log n) or O(n [log n]^2) algorithm for finding features present in multiple image frames and judging the correct transform to use, and being right _all_ the time. This would be quite the accomplishment.
Not in real-time. -WRONG!
I'll be presenting a paper which will demonstrate otherwise. Its based on research to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing ISWC2002.
Without custom ICs or using the Transmogrifier?
it has been my understanding that fuel is the major cost of launching a space vehicle. Or at least the root of the problem. The shuttle itself is reusable, so a minimal amount of money is used to get it flight ready again. The SRB's are reuseable, but must be refueled with solid rocket fuel. However a new External Tank must be constructed for each launch. That is the biggest part of the assembly.
The problem is that because the shuttle is man-rated, they basically have to take it apart and put it back together again to make sure everything still works. This costs a _lot_. Fuel is cheap, but shuttle parts and skilled engineer time are not.
A secondary problem is that the cost of maintaining all of the facilities for servicing the shuttle must be amortized over the (relatively few) shuttle launches. This too is very expensive.
The main reason why finding more effective fuels is important is that they let you reduce the total craft size and weight for a given payload weight. This makes the craft much cheaper to build and maintain, reducing the cost of lifting the fixed-weight payload.
One of the ways around this is to use plasma. If you generate plasma ahead of an aircraft with a welding-torch type of thing, you can reduce the drag by as much as 30%. The Russians are using plasma in their next generation of MiGs. (BTW, plasma also absorbs radar)
You get the same effect with a gas blanket, which is a lot easier to produce than plasma. However, this is still a pain in the neck, making your craft vastly more complicated and requiring considerable fuel if the wings have any significant cross-sectional area at all (to spray the gas blanket [most likely an exhaust stream] forward fast enough to move the shockwave off the wing edge).
A better approach would be a) making the wing angle very small, so that you have a lot of leading-edge area per unit cross-sectional area, and b) only going at hypersonic speeds when you're in very thin atmosphere, reducing the amount of heating.
As for carbon composites, while graphite won't vapourize until about 4000 degrees C, it'll be rapidly etched away unless you coat it with something. "Something" is tungsten carbide, for the shuttle, at least. That has a melting point of around 3000 degrees C, and may or may not start degrading at a lower temperature (ask an aerospace engineer). Carbon composite shielding can take a lot of punishment, but _gliding_ at orbital velocity in an atmosphere overwhelms it unless you have a very light craft. (Important number is effective pressure exerted by the air you're plowing through, which is proportional to the craft mass, and which rate of heating is directly proportional to. You can play with the proportionality constants [by altering craft geometry and materials] to make the problem less severe, but a lighter craft will always help and the problem is always bad at high speeds).
The new method, which allows an image to be created by ``painting with video'' is used in conjunction with a wearable wireless webcam, so that image mosaics can be generated simply by looking around, in a sense, ``painting with looks''.
Just in case anyone was wondering - this wasn't being done in anything close to real-time the last time I checked. There's a cluster in Prof. Mann's lab which is dedicated to compositing these images (my cube is in the next room).
Still an interesting project. The affine transformation approach has been well-understood for some time (you do a brute force and ignorance test of promising-looking affine transformations [rotations and scalings] to find one that matches the new image to the old). As far as I can tell, he's doing the same thing with a different coordinate system that has a bit less distortion.
Solution number one is to read fewer than 10 news sites in a day. You'd end up with a multi-tiered system with news sources feeding various news web sites (for a fee), and you subscribing to the news web site (or two) that best matched your interests.
IMO, this is what web news is most likely to converge on. We have the "multi-tiered split production and distribution" thing going already between Slashdot and similar news distributors, and the original articles they reference. All that needs to change is the billing structure.
The other option is to have a massively distributed web-news system, such that everyone was hosting from their own cached copies (with outgoing traffic self-throttling to prevent hot spots). This would effectively double everyone's news bandwidth costs, by bundling the outgoing distribution costs with incoming distribution costs. Unfortunately, there are problems:
- Everyone (or nearly everyone) has to be altruistic enough to host, and host fairly.
- Sharing comments in this distributed newslog would be a royal pain.
- I'm blithely assuming there will be enough altruistic reporters (amateur or professional) supplying real news footage out of pocket to make this work.
- I'm blithely assuming that setting up a server for this cache isn't a problem.
IMO if a distributed system happens at all, it won't be a massive grassroots effort - it'll be a franchise scheme of some sort. Or a corporation's distributed set of news nodes, but a) that happens already and b) that doesn't save money (money is only saved when you have small enough bandwidth load per node to piggyback on residential connections with flat rates).If the ratio of downloaders to cachers/distributors gets too steep, costs for the distributors become prohibitive. Similar things happen if you have people spoofing the system to get around throttling, cheating somehow on throttling, etc.
The only practical way to do it would be to cache comments between trusted hosts. It would only take one idiot to poison an area's comment list. This is likely not a viable solution for a grass-roots system.
The official sources will likely end up mostly subscription-only for the good stuff. There will always be enough free material as a teaser to make an adequate free system, but it won't be great.
Even if you make a drool-proof server install package, you have the problem of most ISPs taking down anyone who hosts a server with significant outgoing traffic.
We'll see what actually emerges in about a decade or so.
A similar idea was proposed many years ago (and used for one of the satellites studying the moon). Do a google search for "Earth-Moon fuzzy boundary" for references to that particular application.
The idea is that you can more or less coast through regions where the competing gravitational effects of many bodies cancel out, making part of your path from point a to point b less expensive than the standard transfer orbit.
The article describes an extension of this idea.
So what I'm wondering is, wouldn't it be possible to invent a disk addressing scheme which basically self-extends, so that you would never really need to manually change things to support disk sizes beyond a certain size?
Finishing moving disk-related parameters to 64 bits makes this largely unnecessary. It is extremely unlikely that we'll have to worry about devices with more than 2^63 blocks for a very long time (with 1k blocks, this would be eight [us] billion terabytes).
Having the OS scale block size instead of just using a sane parameter width leads to much nastiness (remember how much fun FAT16 was).
I wouldn't hold your breathe for Motorola, not that I don't want them to be successful, but they just reported a loss of 2.3 billion dollars last quarter. That makes 6 quarters in a row where they have lost money. They just can't go on much longer losing that much money. Maybe if they can get a new Processor out the door....3 year old 800mhz processors aren't going to cut it too much longer.
Since when is Motorola's sole product line PPC chips? Motorola manufactures a vast range of semiconductor and consumer electronics products.
Whatever the source of Motorola's woes, I doubt it's the PPC.
Also, it's only the iMac that has an 800 MHz chip. The PowerMac G4 has 1 GHz chips. I'm sure there will be speed steppings down the road if Apple feels threatened by Intel and asks for them.
Are there any parts of SFX development that would strongly benefit from dedicated hardware that aren't already being served (be it in the rendering backend or the user tools)?
Is this plan really a better bet than electric cars with high density batteries and some type of remote hydrogen powerplant running the juice over cables?
Yes.
The energy storage density of batteries is horrible. Even for the strange and wondrous experimental designs that you won't ever see because they're expensive or run at 300 degrees C or what-have-you.
Fuel for fuel cells, on the other hand, has an energy storage density approaching that of gasoline (better by weight, considerably less by volume for hydrogen, which is a royal pain to store; comparable to gasoline on both counts for methanol, but that's a pain to re-form).
Fuel storage density has been the limiting factor for the design of electric cars, so this makes one heck of a difference.
As for faking his PhD, do the ends justify the means? I'm not trying to be flamebait, but if you say you are a PhD and the university hires you without checking, who is really at fault. Let me put it another way. I apply to U of X, saying I have my PhD, and work there for several years, doing a great job. If someone finds out, I agree, I should have to answer for my actions, but what if no one finds out and I am a great worker?
Independent of the job you're doing, you've still defrauded the university if you do this. You could make a hand-waving argument about denying legit candidates the job also.
In this case, it's moot point, as the hired "PhD" was *not* doing a good job. Profs, grad students, and post-docs are hired to do research. Teaching is a secondary task that is there to ensure a continued supply of grad students. If, as the original poster reported, this person's research at the university was complete drivel, then they are worse than useless to the university (not only not producing anything, but taking up resources legitimate producers could use).
So, it's pretty much "no" on both counts.
Is it possible for elements to be "missing" actually. Like gaps in the chart? Do there have to be continuous numbers? Or can you count them ... 114, 115, 117, 119???
The atomic number is just the number of protons in the atom, so you could in principle build all of them without gaps.
However, you can have gaps between stable (or almost-stable) elements, with only very-unstable elements in between. That's the whole idea of the "magic island of stability" mentioned in the articles.
Even-numbered heavy elements also tend to be more stable than odd-numbered elements (as even-numbered nuclei tend to be more energetically favourable, and there's an easy decay path that turns odd nuclei into even ones [beta decay]).
No, the model was supposed to separate from the rocket, at high altitude. Until that point, the rocket was the craft and if it failed, it had nothing to do with the viability of the jet or the model.
Catastrophic crashes like the one we saw here are caused by thruster imbalances, not flaps or fins.
While that could easily be the cause also, I respectfully disagree with your argument. If you build a model rocket and put the fins on at bizzare angles, it's going to crash. Similarly, if the control surfaces on the rocket or the plane were sufficiently far from where they were supposed to be, the rocket would crash. If they weren't able to adjust the craft's course that much, they wouldn't be very good control surfaces in proper operation, would they?
As another poster pointed out, it's unlikely that control surfaces were to blame (bad assumption on my part - I was assuming they'd use the plane's steering to help guide the launch, as opposed to being locked). I'm just taking issue with your (apparent) statement that it's impossible for you to steer a rocket-boosted plane into the ground.
have you seen the screenshots? They're *gorgeous*. The level of immersion in Doom3 will be crazy -- it's all about believing that you're really there. The lighting is really where Doom3 excels. It's able to do things we've never seen before. I have a feeling it'll be the first game to scare me since playing doom in the dark at 2am.
Again, how is this a _revolution_? It's more of the same at higher polycount and crunching power. _Yes_, it looks great and almost certainly plays great. That doesn't make it a fundamental _technological_ leap.
Sorry if I'm sounding cranky, but I'm tired of "revolutions" being touted every couple of years when a better-than-average game comes out.
After all this time, the only company to do anything to challenge id's throne has been Epic Megagames, but the best they've done is beat id to the punch with their unreal2 engine that is just an evolutionary step from Quake3, while Doom3's graphics appear to be revolutionary.
How, precisely, is *either* of these revolutionary?
We've had fully-3D environments with all degrees of freedom of viewing since Descent. We've also had environmental audio, smoke, and complex lighting for a few years now.
We've also had fully scriptable game engines for a while.
What will either of these engines bring beyond slightly more complex models and slightly more polished lighting and environment? We're at the point where there isn't much revolutionary to _add_.
Nobody seems to understand that it was the rocket booster that failed, not the test jet. The test jet wouldnt' be activated until something like 18 miles above the ground.
It could have been either the jet or the rocket that caused the failure, as both would need to use their control surfaces to keep the flight stable. Set a fin or a flap the wrong way, and you go spiralling into the ground. Which looks a lot like what happened.
Are they trying something really innovative, or did the technological knowledge from the 60's vanish??
Obviously they are not those who built the 60's version, but why do they encounter so much difficulties 40 years after a successful project?
What's the technological reason?
This plane is designed to be bigger, faster, and have far better fuel efficiency.
It's a very different design, and so of course has to go through a lot of testing. Even aircraft based on more conventional technology have to go through this (you don't think they'd put, say, a 747 on the runway without doing test flights to verify the design, right?).
The ony down side to this test is that they won't really learn much from it. The craft or booster failed while taking off, not when cruising under flight conditions.
It crashed a few seconds after takeoff - so it can only be the booster rocket that failed - right?
The booster rocket provided the thrust, but the plane was big enough to drastically affect the aerodynamics (it was bigger than the rocket). A control systems failure or mechanical failure on either vehicle could have caused the accident. I'm sure there will be a press release when they figure out what exactly went wrong.
This makes me wonder, how would they have prevented it from blowing when it reached the vacuum in outer space?
The same way you keep an ordinary balloon from exploding. Make sure that the balloon's materials can take the pressure difference.
There's nothing magical about vacuum.
Erm, it's possible to build a plane which is fundamentally stable. Anyone who's built a paper plane can show that But it is NOT possible to build a rocket that's fundamentally stable. A rocket is fundamentally UNSTABLE, and what keeps it stable is a complicated control system. That control system requires a whole lot of maths to get it right.
As long as you're in the atmosphere, it's trivial to build a stable rocket (just put fins near the back; check Estes' model rocket building guide for the detailed CP/CM explanation).
Outside the atmosphere (above a few tens of kilometres), it still doesn't take more than second-year engineering. You have a device to measure your angle off the vertical (be it a gyro, laser gyro, or a horizon-sensing camera), and you have a classic feedback control system that tries to make that angle zero.
Two op-amps and 50 cents worth of parts and you have your control system. The trick is making sure it's damped enough not to destabilize itself, but that's not horribly difficult either.
In summary, as long as you're not trying to do anything complicated, "Rocket Science" isn't as hard as you're painting it.
One microgram of antimatter (the amount needed for the spacecraft) would also make a pretty boring "boom". Yield is about 45 tons (not kilotons - tons). It's the gamma pulse you have to worry about.
Whoops; one milligram would have a yield of 45 tonnes. A microgram's yield is equivalent to 45 kilograms of TNT.
Until the electrical system powering your electrostatic field fails. BOOM! If your storage method became popular in urban industrial centers, imagine the destructive force that could be unleashed using an Electromagnetic Pulse in the city, disabling all the electrostatic confinement fields. BOOM!
Antimatter would never be stored in a city; there's no reason to (other power storage methods are far more efficient). It would only be used where power-to-weight ratio was critical - like in interstellar spacecraft.
One microgram of antimatter (the amount needed for the spacecraft) would also make a pretty boring "boom". Yield is about 45 tons (not kilotons - tons). It's the gamma pulse you have to worry about.
Ironically, what if this guy had been playing something like Rainbow 6 as his house was raided!
;).
Penny Arcade had an interesting take on that idea a few weeks ago
How were pirates prosecuted before then? I seem to recall that they busted hacker rings long before 1997.
Back in the days of pirate BBSs (up here in Canada, at least), they'd mostly ignore the pirated software and go after BBSs that were involved with carding (warezing stolen credit card information).
Most of the serious pirate boards did carding, so there was never a shortage of targets to keep the authourities busy.
Boards that just traded files weren't big enough targets.
I suppose they could have nailed boards on child porn charges too, as any large porn archive would likely have people of borderline age somewhere in it, but credit card takedowns were the ones I heard about.