It's not "free". You have to build a huge amount of industrial plant. Inefficient industrial plant.
Which you have to build and maintain.
It's possible to do the same thing with solar power. You build solar collectors, heat up a working fluid, and run an engine with it. This has been tried many times, but not profitably.
The biggest installation,
Solar Two, near Barstow, CA, was operational in 1996, but couldn't even cover its own maintenance costs.
This is the basic problem with low-density energy sources. You have to build too much equipment to get useful amounts of energy out.
Air conditioning for volcanic Pacific islands, sure. Substantial power generation, probably not.
Extracting power from a difference of 4C and 24C just isn't that productive. 20/277 = 0.07. So there's a 7% upper limit on efficiency. Realistically, you can get about half that out of a good Sterling cycle engine. Heat efficiency for a modern steam power plant is in the 50-70% range.
So you need ten to twenty times as much plant to get the same power output.
Yes, it does. There's the terrain engine, and the foliage engine, and the physics engine, and the AI engine, and the sound engine...
And as a game developer, you have to make it all play together.
That's the reason for RenderWare, which is basically a collection of mediocre middleware for all of the above. For everything RenderWare does, there's something else that does it better. But RenderWare has it all in one expensive box, and it sort of plays together.
RenderWare is that it has been bought by Electronic Arts. Other game developers are reluctant to get their crucial middleware from a direct competitor. Yet it gets you onto a new platform faster. Tough decisions lie ahead for game developers, and many of them have little to do with the game itself.
Re:Procedural scenery is not new
on
Inside the Xbox 360
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Games have been using "real time tesselation" for years. It's part of subdivision surface and level of detail processing.
Here are some
background papers. Or see these course notes on subdivision surfaces. This technology appeared first in animation rendering, and it's been in games for several years now.
There are many approaches. A big problem has been avoiding "popping", when an area suddenly is rendered with more detail.
Again, this is well understood. It just takes plenty of computer power to drive it.
Microsoft seems to be paving the way for game developers to use their specialized hardware. When the PS2 first came out, the development tools were weak, and it took about two years for developers to get the tools in place to use it effectively. The original XBox is basically a PC;
you can develop, test, and debug on Win2K, then rebuild for the XBox target. The new XBox won't be like that; the target is drastically different from the development environment. So Microsoft has to do and promote more middleware development.
Procedural scenery is not new
on
Inside the Xbox 360
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Procedural synthesis" has been around for a while. First came fractal synthesis of mountain ranges and clouds, then came L-system for trees and shrubbery. SpeedTree has been doing this for years, and has the best production system. Here are
high resolution screenshots. "Windblown trees and grass, subtle lighting effects and hundreds of thousands of trees, plants, palms, cacti, grasses, spread across vast terrains covering hundreds of square miles." One of their older demos is the "million tree forest". The grass, trees, and leaves sway in the wind, just like the claims for the new Xbox.
Yes, this is real time. You can download the demo.
That demo requires a high-end PC, and will give you a sense of what SpeedTree will look like on the new XBox.
Such apps exist. See Storyboard Quick, which is a cross between PowerPoint and Poser used to make movie storyboards. This is an unusual tool, not widely used outside the film industry. It comes with a good supply of canned characters, props, and backgrounds. (There are add-on libraries, like "Twentysomething" and "Law and Order").
If you're going to make an animated film, first you need a story and a script. A good storyboard is the next big step. It's customary to then make the storyboard into a timed slideshow with placeholder dialog and music. At that point, you and others can tell if the film is going to be any good.
When Steve Jobs went back to Apple, he killed off the sale of the MacOS for third party machines. Motorola top management didn't like that. Apple was the only vendor still buying their parts for desktops, and Apple didn't sell very many. So Motorola decided to put their resources into cell phones. Eventually, they sold off the Motorola semiconductor operation as Freescale.
That site seems to be aimed at low end and clueless spammers.
Further up the food chain, we have Black Box Hosting. "Fully featured bullet proof dedicated server. Allows direct mailing and website hosting. All our plans allow Adult, Gambling and Pharmacy Content." They also offer "Mailing Servers". You have to supply your own list of proxies, and your own bulk mailing program. They recommend DarkMailer.
So you go on Specialham and rent some open proxies. Then order a mailing server and a web server from Black Box Hosting.
Run your scam.
Launder the money through an offshore credit card processor. Profit!
What we really need in honeynets is for about 10% of these support operations to be sting operations run by law enforcement. That would make phishing and spamming a much higher risk operation.
There are so many scams associated with eBay, PayPal, and Washington Mutual that it's not worth dealing with any of them. Until those big companies figure out a way to stop this stuff, take your business elsewhere. That will create political pressure to fix the problem. Let their lobbyists on K street work the problem.
There are thousands of viruses all around and most of them are so benign.
Yeah. Just annoying enough to sell anti-virus software, but not dangerous enough to force people to get a more secure operating system. I've always suspected a covert connection between the anti-virus makers and the virus creators. It looks too much like the connection between organized crime protection rackets and the low-end street gangs they paid to do their vandalism.
Google has people coding in something new, which they aren't saying much about. It's then compiled to Javascript and DHTML. They're not just writing Javascript by hand.
Hearing music on my phone!
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Some years ago, I started hearing music on my phone, even when no call was in progress.
Of course, I just waited for station identification and found out which AM station I was getting. It turned out that the 50KW AM station nearby away had one of their three towers collapse in the 1989 California earthquake. Until they replaced it, their output pattern was distorted.
I was in a really strong lobe.
Adding a small bypass cap across the phone line helped the problem.
But it took more filtering to completely cure it.
I had to have the telco guys add some filtering on their side of the demark. And, years later, when I got DSL, that had to come out. Huge hassle. Three telco visits with test gear to get DSL working properly.
Until those guys make a unit that detects obstacles before it crashes into them, I can't take them too seriously. And if it runs over a cord, it winds the cord around its working parts, then jams.
Yes, they sell a reasonable number of them. But then, the Sharper Image makes most of its profits from an air cleaner that doesn't work.
The sad thing is that this has nothing to do with energy production. It's intended to substitute for nuclear weapons testing.
Worse, if you need something this big for single-shot tests, pulsed fusion as a power source does not look promising. DoE was talking up pulsed fusion as a power source in the 1970s, and it turned out to be a scam. It was a cover story for a predecessor to this project.
COMPSTAT has been doing this for years for the NYPD.
They sometimes run the last month as a movie, looped, and watch it for a while. Trends pop out. Patterns appear. Crooks aren't that tactically creative.
The trick is to come up with a visual representation so that if some crook is hitting South Side liquor stores about once a week, somebody sees it. In classical policing, that's not likely to be noticed unless the crook commits all their crimes in the same precinct on the same shift.
stories set in the Old West just didn't seem to connect to people anymore
A studio head once remarked that the successor to the Western was "Dukes of Hazzard".
There was a "last Western picture" that officially ended the genre. "Suddenly the West was over" was its tag line. Some young hood robs a train in 1886 or so. It's a little wood-burning train, with wooden cars, plugging along at horse speed. He gets caught and goes to jail, and gets out 20 years later, in 1906. And he tries to rob the train again.
So he gets some guys together. They wait alongside the tracks. A monster locomotive pulling a big train comes zooming along, doing about 60MPH. The horses spook and he gets dumped.
I'm in Silicon Valley, where, surprisingly, cell phone coverage sucks. In the expensive neighborhoods, residents bitch about cell towers, so coverage is lousy. There are many big trees, so PCS frequencies are attenuated. Stanford University only allows one cell phone vendor on campus (Cingular) so they can add their own fees. And coverage in the hills west of I-280 is spotty.
I'd rather have decent voice coverage than tiny-screen video.
Motorola had this years ago
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 1
I have a Motorola phone for Sprint that's very much like that. Target sold them for under $100.
Voice dialing, too.
I'd like a phone with more voice-activated features and less (or no) screen stuff. Orange offered this using the Wildfire service for years, but they've recently shut down Wildfire and forced everyone back to dumb voicemail.
That makes sense for a Harrier. The Harrier family is one of the very few successful VTOL aircraft, with a 30+ year history. It's a unique aircraft, with four vectored thrust nozzles and a reaction jet control system for use in hover. Stabilizing the beast has always been tough. It has the highest crash rate of all US military aircraft.
The basic problem is that a Harrier has more major flight controls than the pilot has hands. There's a nozzle angle control and a throttle control, along with the usual stick and rudder pedals. VTOL operation requires coordinated operation of the nozzle and throttle controls.
Both have significant lag. That's a tough control problem, worse than a helicopter.
Everything has been tried. Better pilot training. New flying approaches. Simulator training. A redesign (the Harrier II). Stability augmentation systems. Avoiding VTOL whenever possible. Harriers still crash a lot. (The Harrier has a good ejection system, so the pilots usually survive.)
One of the stability augmentation systems was the VAAC Harrier Study. This was an experimental effort to use computer control to get the three inputs that affect longitudinal stability (stick, throttle, and nozzle angle) down to two. This was supposedly successful but was not deployed.
This new thing seems to be a further step in that direction.
IBM's "Academic Initiative" is just a scheme for getting IBM software into universities. "Offerings range from no-charge licenses for IBM software (including WebSphere, DB2, Lotus and cluster software), to academic discounts for IBM eServers, to ready-to-use curriculum."
Universities that sign up can let students download WebSphere Studio, DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Application Server, Rational XDE and Lotus Domino. You don't even get the boxed product. It's IBM's answer to MSDN, with a big tilt towards web-oriented middleware.
This is not "computer science". This is vocational training. This is material IBM used to teach new hires in-house. Now they're dumping their product-specific training requirements on universities.
And then they whine that they're not getting "the best and the brightest".
The "Internet thing" finally works. Web sites stay up and look reasonable in almost all browsers. Order processing over the Internet actually works. The catalogs work, the shopping cards that remain work reasonably well, and most sites have proper integration with credit card and shipping processing. Backbone bandwidth is plentiful, and last-mile bandwidth isn't too bad either. You can buy all the necessary parts off the shelf, and they're mature enough that you can find out if they'll work before buying.
Remember how crappy it used to be? Catalog pages didn't match the shopping cart, credit card processing involved ICVerify emulating a 1200 baud card swipe terminal, and half the time you had to call up to find out where your order went. On the merchant side, banks didn't have good online integration, half the transactions were bogus, and there was no way to get UPS and FedEx directly connected to your own systems. There were days when the Internet backbones would choke, and you'd go online to read the Internet weather report and see that MAE-WEST was dropping more than half its packets. And you needed an army of semi-competent people to glue it all together.
The on-line businesses that are still around have all this stuff working smoothly now. (Many of the ones that couldn't make it work are listed here.)
For most businesses, once you have all the basics working, you've achieved most of the benefits IT can provide. There's endless stuff you can waste money on.
There's "data mining" and "profiling" and "customer relationship management" and "personalization", but it turns out that what works is telling existing customers of products related to
stuff they already bought. Which isn't hard. Microsoft is pushing "synchronization", or "change the spreadsheet and your PowerPoint presentation changes to match", but most those bells and whistles don't really help productivity.
If you're a user of IT, this is great. If you're an "IT guru", this can be bad news.
Once I built a railroad, made it run,
made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it's done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible to do the same thing with solar power. You build solar collectors, heat up a working fluid, and run an engine with it. This has been tried many times, but not profitably. The biggest installation, Solar Two, near Barstow, CA, was operational in 1996, but couldn't even cover its own maintenance costs.
This is the basic problem with low-density energy sources. You have to build too much equipment to get useful amounts of energy out.
Extracting power from a difference of 4C and 24C just isn't that productive. 20/277 = 0.07. So there's a 7% upper limit on efficiency. Realistically, you can get about half that out of a good Sterling cycle engine. Heat efficiency for a modern steam power plant is in the 50-70% range.
So you need ten to twenty times as much plant to get the same power output.
Yes, it does. There's the terrain engine, and the foliage engine, and the physics engine, and the AI engine, and the sound engine... And as a game developer, you have to make it all play together.
That's the reason for RenderWare, which is basically a collection of mediocre middleware for all of the above. For everything RenderWare does, there's something else that does it better. But RenderWare has it all in one expensive box, and it sort of plays together.
RenderWare is that it has been bought by Electronic Arts. Other game developers are reluctant to get their crucial middleware from a direct competitor. Yet it gets you onto a new platform faster. Tough decisions lie ahead for game developers, and many of them have little to do with the game itself.
There are many approaches. A big problem has been avoiding "popping", when an area suddenly is rendered with more detail.
Again, this is well understood. It just takes plenty of computer power to drive it.
Microsoft seems to be paving the way for game developers to use their specialized hardware. When the PS2 first came out, the development tools were weak, and it took about two years for developers to get the tools in place to use it effectively. The original XBox is basically a PC; you can develop, test, and debug on Win2K, then rebuild for the XBox target. The new XBox won't be like that; the target is drastically different from the development environment. So Microsoft has to do and promote more middleware development.
Yes, this is real time. You can download the demo. That demo requires a high-end PC, and will give you a sense of what SpeedTree will look like on the new XBox.
Because that's what the somewhat clueless original article is about. SpeedTree will be available for the new XBox. This was announced back in March.
The trick is cramming something like SpeedTree into a wierd architecture like the new XBox. That's a headache, but not a breakthrough.
If you're going to make an animated film, first you need a story and a script. A good storyboard is the next big step. It's customary to then make the storyboard into a timed slideshow with placeholder dialog and music. At that point, you and others can tell if the film is going to be any good.
When Steve Jobs went back to Apple, he killed off the sale of the MacOS for third party machines. Motorola top management didn't like that. Apple was the only vendor still buying their parts for desktops, and Apple didn't sell very many. So Motorola decided to put their resources into cell phones. Eventually, they sold off the Motorola semiconductor operation as Freescale.
If you right-click on the Google logo and select "block images from this server", Google ads go away. Nice.
Yes, "Specialham", the spammer hangout, is back! "SpecialHam is the premier online destination for email marketing professionals." With great new topics like "What are the most anonymous ways to transfer money".
That site seems to be aimed at low end and clueless spammers.
Further up the food chain, we have Black Box Hosting. "Fully featured bullet proof dedicated server. Allows direct mailing and website hosting. All our plans allow Adult, Gambling and Pharmacy Content." They also offer "Mailing Servers". You have to supply your own list of proxies, and your own bulk mailing program. They recommend DarkMailer.
So you go on Specialham and rent some open proxies. Then order a mailing server and a web server from Black Box Hosting. Run your scam. Launder the money through an offshore credit card processor. Profit!
What we really need in honeynets is for about 10% of these support operations to be sting operations run by law enforcement. That would make phishing and spamming a much higher risk operation.
There are so many scams associated with eBay, PayPal, and Washington Mutual that it's not worth dealing with any of them. Until those big companies figure out a way to stop this stuff, take your business elsewhere. That will create political pressure to fix the problem. Let their lobbyists on K street work the problem.
Yeah. Just annoying enough to sell anti-virus software, but not dangerous enough to force people to get a more secure operating system. I've always suspected a covert connection between the anti-virus makers and the virus creators. It looks too much like the connection between organized crime protection rackets and the low-end street gangs they paid to do their vandalism.
Google has people coding in something new, which they aren't saying much about. It's then compiled to Javascript and DHTML. They're not just writing Javascript by hand.
Of course, I just waited for station identification and found out which AM station I was getting. It turned out that the 50KW AM station nearby away had one of their three towers collapse in the 1989 California earthquake. Until they replaced it, their output pattern was distorted. I was in a really strong lobe.
Adding a small bypass cap across the phone line helped the problem. But it took more filtering to completely cure it. I had to have the telco guys add some filtering on their side of the demark. And, years later, when I got DSL, that had to come out. Huge hassle. Three telco visits with test gear to get DSL working properly.
Yes, they sell a reasonable number of them. But then, the Sharper Image makes most of its profits from an air cleaner that doesn't work.
Worse, if you need something this big for single-shot tests, pulsed fusion as a power source does not look promising. DoE was talking up pulsed fusion as a power source in the 1970s, and it turned out to be a scam. It was a cover story for a predecessor to this project.
The trick is to come up with a visual representation so that if some crook is hitting South Side liquor stores about once a week, somebody sees it. In classical policing, that's not likely to be noticed unless the crook commits all their crimes in the same precinct on the same shift.
A studio head once remarked that the successor to the Western was "Dukes of Hazzard".
There was a "last Western picture" that officially ended the genre. "Suddenly the West was over" was its tag line. Some young hood robs a train in 1886 or so. It's a little wood-burning train, with wooden cars, plugging along at horse speed. He gets caught and goes to jail, and gets out 20 years later, in 1906. And he tries to rob the train again.
So he gets some guys together. They wait alongside the tracks. A monster locomotive pulling a big train comes zooming along, doing about 60MPH. The horses spook and he gets dumped.
And there the Western ended.
I'm in Silicon Valley, where, surprisingly, cell phone coverage sucks. In the expensive neighborhoods, residents bitch about cell towers, so coverage is lousy. There are many big trees, so PCS frequencies are attenuated. Stanford University only allows one cell phone vendor on campus (Cingular) so they can add their own fees. And coverage in the hills west of I-280 is spotty.
I'd rather have decent voice coverage than tiny-screen video.
I thought we were rid of this bozo.
Voice dialing, too.
I'd like a phone with more voice-activated features and less (or no) screen stuff. Orange offered this using the Wildfire service for years, but they've recently shut down Wildfire and forced everyone back to dumb voicemail.
The basic problem is that a Harrier has more major flight controls than the pilot has hands. There's a nozzle angle control and a throttle control, along with the usual stick and rudder pedals. VTOL operation requires coordinated operation of the nozzle and throttle controls. Both have significant lag. That's a tough control problem, worse than a helicopter.
Everything has been tried. Better pilot training. New flying approaches. Simulator training. A redesign (the Harrier II). Stability augmentation systems. Avoiding VTOL whenever possible. Harriers still crash a lot. (The Harrier has a good ejection system, so the pilots usually survive.)
One of the stability augmentation systems was the VAAC Harrier Study. This was an experimental effort to use computer control to get the three inputs that affect longitudinal stability (stick, throttle, and nozzle angle) down to two. This was supposedly successful but was not deployed.
This new thing seems to be a further step in that direction.
This movie may burn out fast.
Universities that sign up can let students download WebSphere Studio, DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Application Server, Rational XDE and Lotus Domino. You don't even get the boxed product. It's IBM's answer to MSDN, with a big tilt towards web-oriented middleware.
This is not "computer science". This is vocational training. This is material IBM used to teach new hires in-house. Now they're dumping their product-specific training requirements on universities.
And then they whine that they're not getting "the best and the brightest".
Watch the MPAA blame this on "piracy".
Remember how crappy it used to be? Catalog pages didn't match the shopping cart, credit card processing involved ICVerify emulating a 1200 baud card swipe terminal, and half the time you had to call up to find out where your order went. On the merchant side, banks didn't have good online integration, half the transactions were bogus, and there was no way to get UPS and FedEx directly connected to your own systems. There were days when the Internet backbones would choke, and you'd go online to read the Internet weather report and see that MAE-WEST was dropping more than half its packets. And you needed an army of semi-competent people to glue it all together.
The on-line businesses that are still around have all this stuff working smoothly now. (Many of the ones that couldn't make it work are listed here.)
For most businesses, once you have all the basics working, you've achieved most of the benefits IT can provide. There's endless stuff you can waste money on. There's "data mining" and "profiling" and "customer relationship management" and "personalization", but it turns out that what works is telling existing customers of products related to stuff they already bought. Which isn't hard. Microsoft is pushing "synchronization", or "change the spreadsheet and your PowerPoint presentation changes to match", but most those bells and whistles don't really help productivity.
If you're a user of IT, this is great. If you're an "IT guru", this can be bad news.
Once I built a railroad, made it run,
made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it's done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?