Actually, you're somewhat in luck in that vein. If you don't already know about it, there's a project called Privateer Remake, it might satisfy your WC cravings. It's actually a pretty good remake in my opinion, and it's in the Wing Commander universe. I didn't play the real Privateer, and only played the original WC a few times because it sucked ass on the computer I had at the time; so YMMV, but it's basically like I remembered, sans a few things.
FWIW, most init scripts I've seen recently already background DHCP and stuff like that, so they are parallel to a point. So, if DHCP fails, it just doesn't sit there for minutes on end. As far as kernel modules and stuff like that... There's probably good reason they're checked/loaded in serial fashion, but you're right, it would be nice. The closer to instant-on we get, the better.
Here's the thing: Isn't the quality of sound ultimately limited by the quality of the components and processes used to record the sound? Do studios and recording engineers subscribe to the $7k cable philosophy? HELL NO: Even a modest rig would rack up a cost comparable to the GDP of a small country.
Supposing that these super duper cables actually do something even 0.5% better (which, is undoubtedly 100% more than any real effect, if it's even measurable, no less perceivable to human ears) than a much cheaper cable--the studios don't use them. The engineers don't use them. Nobody in the whole line of people who are responsible for making music use the cables. Classic case of GIGO, even if 0.5% extra precision was worth the money, it's a moot point because that level of precision doesn't exist in the production work flow.
So, you're saying that you needed replace a ~1700 lumen bulb with five CFL bulbs, that on their own, each produce similar brightness to that one incandescent bulb for greater than 90% of its service life? Right.
Is your house in the twilight zone or something? You might want to get the voodoo curse or demons (or whatever) expunged from your house and/or yourself, 'cause that just ain't right.
CFLs? A big problem? What about the other billions of fluorescent tube lamps, (which incidentally, continue to contain quite a bit more mercury than your average CFLs), that have been produced and used in industrial, commercial, institutional, government, and school buildings (did I miss anything?) for, oh, the about the last SEVENTY years?
Oh yeah. People forget that this technology has been around for-freaking-ever; and just because a few wannabe greenies (which happen to be too stupid for their own good) are completely ignorant about the facts. The big problem is that these people are more vocal, and so, are decreasing the signal to noise ratio with their chicken little--the sky is falling--banter and false-fact slinging, resulting in the negative influence of people even more stupid than they are.
If your CFLs are failing quicker than incandescents, it's probably because they just weren't manufactured well. It's a shame that bad bulbs are disparaging the name of a good and beneficial technology.
Note: I'm all for keeping mercury out of our environment, and that's why I support fluorescent technology--and education. If you educate people not to toss their used up bulbs and save them for recycling, it's going to have a big impact. Put a big green label on the bulb that reminds them to do so. Combined with the lower power consumption of fluorescents, it will help keep coal plants from blowing even more mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and CO2 into the atmosphere, in a naturally uncontrollable fashion--which is, as far as I'm concerned, the worst possible situation.
Just make the fucking box compatible with whatever is most prevalent in the computer world at the time, and let the gamer decide what he wants. That's the problem, they never make anything compatible with anything else, and they charge at least double for the pleasure.
Can the goddamned proprietary connectors and protocols, and make mouse and keyboard compatibility mandatory in games where it makes sense to have a keyboard and mouse, and by golly, you'll see people with keyboards and mice! It'll even open up some room for third party manufactures to design new and nifty controller features--but the console developer wouldn't be likely to make money on it, like they undoubtedly have done in the past.
You misunderstand the function of the flywheel. It's not to store energy that's going to the wheels, and the fact that torque going to the wheels often goes through the flywheel (or flexplate) is merely incidental, but it makes the best sense from a design aspect. It serves a dual purpose, as an interface to the clutch, but...
More importantly, the flywheel is there primarily to store enough energy to power the following compression strokes of the engine, and other design features are tangential to that function. This is why gasoline engines have wimpy little flywheels, and diesel engines of the same size have have honking heavy ones compared to the gasoline cousin. Higher compression==needs more power to do the job==needs a bigger flywheel. This is also why some early engines, (or indeed some large, modern, industrial diesel engines) have flywheels that are not in series with the rest of the power train.
The effect of the relatively tiny amount of energy stored in even a fairly massive flywheel, attached directly to an engine, is simply not enough to move a light car appreciably--unless, for instance you rev'd the engine up to redline, and somehow managed to disconnect the flywheel from the crankshaft, and then somehow managed to dump the clutch. You might be able to get the car to move a few feet on level surface by doing that, with a standard automotive flywheel--if that were even possible. This should demonstrate the idea that a flywheel doesn't quite do what you thinks it does.
Similarly, the flywheel doesn't smooth the power out that much. I build performance cars, and when I do so, I frequently reduce the mass of a flywheel, for one purpose: lower moment of inertia. This allows the engine to accelerate and deaccelerate more quickly, which is handy for performance driving, for a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. The one side affect is that the car becomes a little easier to stall, which makes it a little less friendly to drive on the street, and can make it a lot less friendly to people who aren't used to said vehicles. To my ears and my pants, there has never been a discernible difference in the smoothness of either the engine or the smoothness of its power delivery when the flywheel is significantly lightened.
Isn't it kinda sad that people on a site which is supposedly for nerds can't naturally grasp the idea of waves, pulse-width, modulation, duty cycle, and psychophysical thresholds?
Exactly what kind of nerds are they cranking out these days?
Exactly. I recently installed Ubuntu on my dad's computer because I finally got tired of reinstalling Windows because he downloaded some virus/trojan/worm, and having the anti-virus shit not work time again. After going through the install, I know he (a mostly computer illiterate old fart who can e-mail and readily find virus laden porno sites--and not much else) could have installed it on a fresh drive, but I did it because I wanted to make sure his Windows partition was preserved, and because I was putting Ubuntu on a second drive.
It has been a long time since I tried any of the more user friendly distros, I was surprised at how easy and straight forward it was, and that most of the good stuff was there by default. Linux newbies don't really know what they need, so why bother confusing them with five (or more) different, but vaguely related apps that all do basically the same thing? If they want, they can use the add/remove programs dialogs to search for what they need, after the install is complete. After a few minutes of moving his Thunderbird and Firefox profiles over, it was done.
He's loving it, and he rants and raves to his friends about how easy Ubuntu is--even though he can't pronounce the name. I for one think the Ubuntu guys have done an excellent job. The one thing I think they could have done is made firestarter a default app, configured to get the firewall running by default. Come to think about it, I'm not sure if the firewall is enabled and working before installing and using firestarter; could be for all I know, I didn't test it. If it's not, I think a firewall rule or two should be default.
It's a fucking lightsaber, for Pete's sake! It goes througheverythinglike butter!
Seriously, if it were a real lightsaber simulator, it would also have olfactory feedback, so that it would squirt out a puff of eau de burning hair whenever you cut down a wookie, ewok, or exceptionally hairy Sith Lord.
Huh... Well, I should think you would be shocked that identical material pressed onto a plastic disc, wrapped up in a nearly identical plastic and paper shell, with no other tangible difference or discernible added value (nor greater cost of production, distribution or apparent cost of promotion) would be priced nearly 200% higher than an alike product, anywhere else, let alone in a country with currency only 20% more valuable than the country where the material was originally produced.
I think his point is, at least in part, that the pricing of his album in Australia is actually limiting the profit potential for himself and the label, but they're greedy little shits.
I heard that Australians are paying around 30 US dollars for the latest album, whereas in the US it's somewhere around 15 dollars. How does that make sense? The label is raking his fans over the coals, because they're going to pay up anyway, but at the same time they're raising the price so high that people who are moderately interested in the band and the album are turned off because they aren't willing to shell out that kind of green on music... In that case, they'll probably download the music anyway.
To me, it all seems like a Frankenstein application of profit maximization.
ASUS=Taiwan. Where do you think the OLPC will be made? Taiwan--just like everything else! The manufacturer makes just about every other damned laptop, too. So, how, precisely, do you believe inflation of the U.S. dollar (currently 2.5%) is strongly related to third party prices from a foreign manufacturer, who is in an country with an inflation rate one fifth of that of the US? Put the facts where your mouth is.
Secondly, contrary to what you're blathering on about earlier, the ASUS EEE and the OLPC are hardly comparable. They don't target the same users or market. The OLPC is designed to be eminently durable (it's well sealed against dust and water), to last a long time on battery (it gets 2000mAh more than the OLPC to get 3 hours run time vs 5+ the OLPC offers), it has a monitor that's better suited to reading textbook style information on the computer, and is designed to have incredible wireless range, so it can serve as a mesh network node. And the ASUS recently became more expensive-$199 to $250.
You need to learn that "better" is a subjective metric when you're comparing stuff like this. Is a Cray faster at computing stuff than the computer on your desk? Absolutely--but that doesn't mean that a Cray makes a good desktop machine, any more than a desktop makes a good super computer. Each is completely unfit for the other's job. Apple and oranges.
Well, I for one would be intimidated by someone wielding a 500 degree capacitor. If they can hold that, they probably have no pain receptors, so what could you do short of fatally wounding 'em?
Oh yeah, I get your point, and of course I thought of that. Most any such device would go unnoticed in most people's places, even if it were in plain sight. I was going more for the funny point than the informative point. Seriously, whoever modded me informative needs to be smacked.
Yeah, trouble is, it's a little more obvious when you trip over a foreign CAT 5 cable at 2:00 AM, just to find it leading over to your neighbor's house. It's also a lot easier to wire said cable up to a 110v plug...
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Actually, you're somewhat in luck in that vein. If you don't already know about it, there's a project called Privateer Remake, it might satisfy your WC cravings. It's actually a pretty good remake in my opinion, and it's in the Wing Commander universe. I didn't play the real Privateer, and only played the original WC a few times because it sucked ass on the computer I had at the time; so YMMV, but it's basically like I remembered, sans a few things.
Gorilla influenced plug in hybrid SUV?
Alright, so long as it doesn't climb to the top of the Empire State Building to tap power off of that big light bulb up there.
FWIW, most init scripts I've seen recently already background DHCP and stuff like that, so they are parallel to a point. So, if DHCP fails, it just doesn't sit there for minutes on end. As far as kernel modules and stuff like that... There's probably good reason they're checked/loaded in serial fashion, but you're right, it would be nice. The closer to instant-on we get, the better.
Holy hell, that looks nasty. You didn't say what caused your fire, though. Just curious.
Here's the thing: Isn't the quality of sound ultimately limited by the quality of the components and processes used to record the sound? Do studios and recording engineers subscribe to the $7k cable philosophy? HELL NO: Even a modest rig would rack up a cost comparable to the GDP of a small country.
Supposing that these super duper cables actually do something even 0.5% better (which, is undoubtedly 100% more than any real effect, if it's even measurable, no less perceivable to human ears) than a much cheaper cable--the studios don't use them. The engineers don't use them. Nobody in the whole line of people who are responsible for making music use the cables. Classic case of GIGO, even if 0.5% extra precision was worth the money, it's a moot point because that level of precision doesn't exist in the production work flow.
So, you're saying that you needed replace a ~1700 lumen bulb with five CFL bulbs, that on their own, each produce similar brightness to that one incandescent bulb for greater than 90% of its service life? Right.
Is your house in the twilight zone or something? You might want to get the voodoo curse or demons (or whatever) expunged from your house and/or yourself, 'cause that just ain't right.
CFLs? A big problem? What about the other billions of fluorescent tube lamps, (which incidentally, continue to contain quite a bit more mercury than your average CFLs), that have been produced and used in industrial, commercial, institutional, government, and school buildings (did I miss anything?) for, oh, the about the last SEVENTY years?
Oh yeah. People forget that this technology has been around for-freaking-ever; and just because a few wannabe greenies (which happen to be too stupid for their own good) are completely ignorant about the facts. The big problem is that these people are more vocal, and so, are decreasing the signal to noise ratio with their chicken little--the sky is falling--banter and false-fact slinging, resulting in the negative influence of people even more stupid than they are.
If your CFLs are failing quicker than incandescents, it's probably because they just weren't manufactured well. It's a shame that bad bulbs are disparaging the name of a good and beneficial technology.
Note: I'm all for keeping mercury out of our environment, and that's why I support fluorescent technology--and education. If you educate people not to toss their used up bulbs and save them for recycling, it's going to have a big impact. Put a big green label on the bulb that reminds them to do so. Combined with the lower power consumption of fluorescents, it will help keep coal plants from blowing even more mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and CO2 into the atmosphere, in a naturally uncontrollable fashion--which is, as far as I'm concerned, the worst possible situation.
Just make the fucking box compatible with whatever is most prevalent in the computer world at the time, and let the gamer decide what he wants. That's the problem, they never make anything compatible with anything else, and they charge at least double for the pleasure.
Can the goddamned proprietary connectors and protocols, and make mouse and keyboard compatibility mandatory in games where it makes sense to have a keyboard and mouse, and by golly, you'll see people with keyboards and mice! It'll even open up some room for third party manufactures to design new and nifty controller features--but the console developer wouldn't be likely to make money on it, like they undoubtedly have done in the past.
You misunderstand the function of the flywheel. It's not to store energy that's going to the wheels, and the fact that torque going to the wheels often goes through the flywheel (or flexplate) is merely incidental, but it makes the best sense from a design aspect. It serves a dual purpose, as an interface to the clutch, but...
More importantly, the flywheel is there primarily to store enough energy to power the following compression strokes of the engine, and other design features are tangential to that function. This is why gasoline engines have wimpy little flywheels, and diesel engines of the same size have have honking heavy ones compared to the gasoline cousin. Higher compression==needs more power to do the job==needs a bigger flywheel. This is also why some early engines, (or indeed some large, modern, industrial diesel engines) have flywheels that are not in series with the rest of the power train.
The effect of the relatively tiny amount of energy stored in even a fairly massive flywheel, attached directly to an engine, is simply not enough to move a light car appreciably--unless, for instance you rev'd the engine up to redline, and somehow managed to disconnect the flywheel from the crankshaft, and then somehow managed to dump the clutch. You might be able to get the car to move a few feet on level surface by doing that, with a standard automotive flywheel--if that were even possible. This should demonstrate the idea that a flywheel doesn't quite do what you thinks it does.
Similarly, the flywheel doesn't smooth the power out that much. I build performance cars, and when I do so, I frequently reduce the mass of a flywheel, for one purpose: lower moment of inertia. This allows the engine to accelerate and deaccelerate more quickly, which is handy for performance driving, for a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. The one side affect is that the car becomes a little easier to stall, which makes it a little less friendly to drive on the street, and can make it a lot less friendly to people who aren't used to said vehicles. To my ears and my pants, there has never been a discernible difference in the smoothness of either the engine or the smoothness of its power delivery when the flywheel is significantly lightened.
I'm not sure that I consider the negligence of personal hygiene and social life a "perk" of being a geek. I just thought it was a side affect... :(
Isn't it kinda sad that people on a site which is supposedly for nerds can't naturally grasp the idea of waves, pulse-width, modulation, duty cycle, and psychophysical thresholds?
Exactly what kind of nerds are they cranking out these days?
Huh, I'm an Ubuntu newbie, didn't know that. I guess that's just as good. Thanks for the info.
Exactly. I recently installed Ubuntu on my dad's computer because I finally got tired of reinstalling Windows because he downloaded some virus/trojan/worm, and having the anti-virus shit not work time again. After going through the install, I know he (a mostly computer illiterate old fart who can e-mail and readily find virus laden porno sites--and not much else) could have installed it on a fresh drive, but I did it because I wanted to make sure his Windows partition was preserved, and because I was putting Ubuntu on a second drive.
It has been a long time since I tried any of the more user friendly distros, I was surprised at how easy and straight forward it was, and that most of the good stuff was there by default. Linux newbies don't really know what they need, so why bother confusing them with five (or more) different, but vaguely related apps that all do basically the same thing? If they want, they can use the add/remove programs dialogs to search for what they need, after the install is complete. After a few minutes of moving his Thunderbird and Firefox profiles over, it was done.
He's loving it, and he rants and raves to his friends about how easy Ubuntu is--even though he can't pronounce the name. I for one think the Ubuntu guys have done an excellent job. The one thing I think they could have done is made firestarter a default app, configured to get the firewall running by default. Come to think about it, I'm not sure if the firewall is enabled and working before installing and using firestarter; could be for all I know, I didn't test it. If it's not, I think a firewall rule or two should be default.
...then we nuke the entire graveyard from space. It's the only way to be sure.
It's a fucking lightsaber, for Pete's sake! It goes through everything like butter!
Seriously, if it were a real lightsaber simulator, it would also have olfactory feedback, so that it would squirt out a puff of eau de burning hair whenever you cut down a wookie, ewok, or exceptionally hairy Sith Lord.
(Hint: ICBMs and SLBMs use inertial and stellar navigation for this reason.)
Well, it's not like they have to be very accurate...
Huh... Well, I should think you would be shocked that identical material pressed onto a plastic disc, wrapped up in a nearly identical plastic and paper shell, with no other tangible difference or discernible added value (nor greater cost of production, distribution or apparent cost of promotion) would be priced nearly 200% higher than an alike product, anywhere else, let alone in a country with currency only 20% more valuable than the country where the material was originally produced.
I think his point is, at least in part, that the pricing of his album in Australia is actually limiting the profit potential for himself and the label, but they're greedy little shits.
I heard that Australians are paying around 30 US dollars for the latest album, whereas in the US it's somewhere around 15 dollars. How does that make sense? The label is raking his fans over the coals, because they're going to pay up anyway, but at the same time they're raising the price so high that people who are moderately interested in the band and the album are turned off because they aren't willing to shell out that kind of green on music... In that case, they'll probably download the music anyway.
To me, it all seems like a Frankenstein application of profit maximization.
ASUS=Taiwan. Where do you think the OLPC will be made? Taiwan--just like everything else! The manufacturer makes just about every other damned laptop, too. So, how, precisely, do you believe inflation of the U.S. dollar (currently 2.5%) is strongly related to third party prices from a foreign manufacturer, who is in an country with an inflation rate one fifth of that of the US? Put the facts where your mouth is.
Secondly, contrary to what you're blathering on about earlier, the ASUS EEE and the OLPC are hardly comparable. They don't target the same users or market. The OLPC is designed to be eminently durable (it's well sealed against dust and water), to last a long time on battery (it gets 2000mAh more than the OLPC to get 3 hours run time vs 5+ the OLPC offers), it has a monitor that's better suited to reading textbook style information on the computer, and is designed to have incredible wireless range, so it can serve as a mesh network node. And the ASUS recently became more expensive-$199 to $250.
You need to learn that "better" is a subjective metric when you're comparing stuff like this. Is a Cray faster at computing stuff than the computer on your desk? Absolutely--but that doesn't mean that a Cray makes a good desktop machine, any more than a desktop makes a good super computer. Each is completely unfit for the other's job. Apple and oranges.
Oh, your sarcasm wounds me so...
*weeps*
Well, I for one would be intimidated by someone wielding a 500 degree capacitor. If they can hold that, they probably have no pain receptors, so what could you do short of fatally wounding 'em?
Who said anything about a "she"?
Oh yeah, I get your point, and of course I thought of that. Most any such device would go unnoticed in most people's places, even if it were in plain sight. I was going more for the funny point than the informative point. Seriously, whoever modded me informative needs to be smacked.
Yeah, trouble is, it's a little more obvious when you trip over a foreign CAT 5 cable at 2:00 AM, just to find it leading over to your neighbor's house. It's also a lot easier to wire said cable up to a 110v plug...
Pownd Uholot... Classic!