This approach doesn't scale well. There are cheaper ways to focus light. Try a search on 'nonimaging solar collectors' on google.
Even with a stock fresnell lens, it's possible that an array of smaller lenses would work better. It's also possible that the focal spot of this giant lens is just *too* hot for practical use, and the array of smaller lenses would be better.
It's pitifully small compared to this one, but I once managed to get a defective fresnel lens from an overhead projector. The fan failed, and heat of the bulb made a 1" distortion a little off-center. Makes it useless for imaging, but doesn't hurt it's energy concentration much.
Of course it's only 1/9 the area, but cost me $99 less. I haven't used for decades, since my brother-in-law and I were snapping ants on the sidewalk. (First thing I thought of, first time I played Ant City.) But it's still down in the basement, ready for the sun.
Somewhere, someone confused the mission of news reporting with revenue generation. This is nothing new, and goes back at least as far as the Spanish-American War, no doubt much further.
As long as making money conflicts with honest, objective new reporting, we'll have these problems. I just wish we as a society would recognize this, and do something about it.
...value is more important than what gets created.
You have simply defined why so much of what is made by ??AA members in recent years is a bunch of drek. I'll add my pet theory - that too many of the *who* you talk about are money people first, and not movie or music people.
So once again the basis is to reduce every aspect of gaming to a commodity - except theirs. In this case, I'm sure Microsoft wants to make sure *every* aspect of gaming hardware becomes a commodity, and avoid repeating this mistake of allowing Intel to be so pesky and uppity. (I know, it wasn't a case of 'allowing' because Microsoft and Intel became pesky and uppity together. But this is Microsoft's chance/attempt to fix that situation.)
L2 cache is also memory, and any memory of that size will have redundant elements. Therefore, even though it's a lot of area, it's fixable area, and will yield higher than an equivalent area of logic. Plus, though SRAM design may not be 'easy', expanding a cache is one of the easier things you can do to enhance performance.
For some problems, cache will never be big enough, for others it will. Unfortunately for the P4, it's architected as a bandwidth hog, and the core excels at streaming media processing - precisely where a bigger cache tends to fall down.
I believe you're unfortunately wrong on this one, under the DMCA. There is some work underway to fix this to work as you say, but I'm under the impression that it's going to get buried by the best legislators the ??AA can buy.
Except the story I keep hearing from Win-types is that the NT kernel is rock solid, and that crashes are due to bad drivers, and that Microsoft is fixing this by placing tougher quality requirements on drivers, etc.
Perhaps a Universal Driver Apstraction Layer would be a good idea - if it could be done right. The first part of being done right would be some form of OS-neutral approach rooted in basic concepts. Unfortunately what's real to day is, "How can we reuse Windows drivers?" for a starting point. This exposes us to the same buggy drivers Win-types talk about, and probably exposes us to Microsoft's Patent Weapon, at some point. I'm sure it exposes us to relatively toothless license terms - "used ONLY to develop Windows..." that never seem to have been enforced against WINE or CygWin users.
In a different note, perhaps we need to EXPECT more out of hardware suppliers. Before buying computing equipment, I research it pretty carefully for Linux compatibility. Maybe instead, I need to just buy and try, the RETURN it if it isn't Linux compatible, and make sure I TELL the retailer why. Maybe if more of us did that, the message would get through. (Naaaah)
My daughter and I are folding@home, I started her on it a week or two back. IMHO, she's a born scientist - she likes to write her observations and how she does things. She took quite an interest in biological sciences after reading "The Hot Zone" in middle school, and recently in freshman biology they were talking about prions being misfolded proteins responsible for Mad Cow. All stuff well-known to/.ers, but new to her.
So I pounced on her new exposure to protein folding, and we signed up for folding@home. I figure this will amplify her interest in biological sciences, either upward or down. It's worth the electricity to let her learn more about her own interests.
Incidentally, folding@home has quite a bit more information on their web site, that I'm deliberately avoiding. I hope that after school's out, she'll lead on this - or not. At a strategic time, I may well mention climate@home.
You're right, in considerably more detail than me.
But my argument is still that behind those septic - or many (*but not all) other regulations - is someone who did it wrong in the first place, and stuck others with the consequences.
*I suspect another source of regulations is a friend of a friend of an official, trying to protect his business from competition.
From what I remember, which may be defective, Linux put out the first Linux kernel as a 'Minix-like' OS kernel, not that there was any shared code at all. More like an inspiration or comparison point than a starting point.
Think government regulations would be stupid if some incompetent idiot tried an X Prize launch too close to a populated area, and crashed it on your house?
I won't defend what government regulations have become, but I can understand how they got to where they are.
Example: Guys at work were griping about septic systems, and how it takes an engineer to "certify" that the thing is correctly done. Yet the septic system isn't really "designed", but rather taken from some tables out of a book. X type of soil, household for Y people, therefore use Z sized tank and W feet of leach line.
But the regulation, engineer, and inspector most likely (IMHO) have their roots in an unscrupulous builder who put in an undersized tank, then ran the output into an arbitrarily-sized pit filled with some gravel - no leach lines at all. After selling houses in the neighborhood, the contracting company reorganized, or otherwise became 'unavailable' by the few years afterward when the homeowner discovered he didn't even really have a septic system, but a fake.
There will always be people trying to sleaze others. Sometimes they can be caught through the Law, but (IMHO) as often as not those sleazy people know how to sleaze the Law, too. Hence new regulations.
Sometimes you can substitute incompetent or thoughtless for sleazy. From what I've read of the X-Prize contestents, non of them are any of the above. But remember that they ARE playing with high explosives.
Finding the comfortable middleground for regulations is difficult, perhaps impossible, considering the way the sleazes try to game the system. Again, I realize that the sleazes are not currently a factor in the X-Prize, but just wait until the concept is proven, and space tourism becomes a growth industry. Then you'll seem them crawling out of the woodwork.
...is that they sort of leaked the information about this in mid-April, when the college selection process is supposed to be nearly done. As a result, we're thrown into another round of decision turmoil, with a deposit at one university and an acceptance at Champlain.
It sounds as if Champlain is working with industry on this program, and will certainly do all they can to help their first graduating classes get placed. But aren't game jobs pretty much game-to-game, like the Star Trek: Elite Force 2 folks who got laid off at Raven right after the game went gold?
How generally versatile will a game design degree be, anyway. I suspect careful choice of electives will be the key.
While the educational system may not be perfect, IMHO the real fault lies within the HOME.
My cousin sent me a humor quip, 'No tooth left behind' about a fictional dental equivalent to 'No child left behind'. It held dentists responsible for kids' cavities, *regardless* of the kids' diets at home, or their parents' enforcement of dental hygeine.
It was meant as a simily for teaching, and how education begins in the home. My wife has spend quite a bit of time subbing, so she sees what these teachers are coping with. By and large, the kids who do well, have support at home. What's even worse, are kids who *should* be doing well, and come from what *seem* like good homes, but to say it mildly, the parents' attitude is 'counterproductive'.
Examples: Kid acts up, kid gets disciplined, parent backs kid and gives school a rough time. (Kid was caught drinking alcohol on a school trip, btw) Male teachers afraid to enforce dress code against girls - what are YOU doing ogling me! Then there are the kids who 'merely' need support at home, and don't get it.
There are (at least) two potential explanations for this:
First is that employers are entrenched in the Prisoner's Dilemna - each assumes that other employers will furnish high-paying jobs so that the other guy's employees can buy this employers products.
Second is that employers are in the process of losing any concern/regard for the US market, and are planning on expanding into India and China. One could look at this as a form of 'crop rotation', where the crop being harvested is the workers' output. As a labor market unionizes and becomes expensive, move to a labor market where they'll work absurd hours for peanuts. Then as that market 'matures' move to the next. Eventually the first labor market will have become so depressed that they'll work absurd hours for peanuts, and the cycle starts over. Not only that, but the cyclic standards of living implied also imply a wave of new sales as you rotate your workers.
One thing worth mentioning about 'measurement' that I saw a few years back.
Sometimes people want consciousness to be involved in measurement, and that makes an absolutely stunning comment about the universe and our place in it. But a few years back, I read about an experiment involving interferometry, and placing a detector where it would destroy the wave nature. There have been numerous experiments involving this 'illegal' measurement, including 'destroying' the measurment and getting the wave nature back.
In this case, they simply unplugged the detector, leaving it in-place. The wave nature was still missing, the experiment still showed particles. The physical presence of the detector was sufficient for 'measurment', and the universe left more physically consistent, though less mystical.
Did anyone else see this line and immediately think of the actor who played the mad hermit Adam (his wife was named Eve, of course) in Northern Exposure, or who played the doctor in Chicago Hope, the one who wasn't played by Mandy Patinkin, and didn't look like Vlad Lenin. What the heck is an actor doing involved with medicine at this level - he only *played* a doctor on TV.
Actually, the way I heard it, altitude is only 1/25 the trick to orbit. The other 24/25 is speed. I might presume that the kinetic energy necessary for LEO isn't really 24X the potential energy of that altitude, but perhaps that rather reflects hauling the fuel up there to build up the velocity. I need to sit down and do some math on this.
Slashdot Mirror
This approach doesn't scale well. There are cheaper ways to focus light. Try a search on 'nonimaging solar collectors' on google.
Even with a stock fresnell lens, it's possible that an array of smaller lenses would work better. It's also possible that the focal spot of this giant lens is just *too* hot for practical use, and the array of smaller lenses would be better.
It's pitifully small compared to this one, but I once managed to get a defective fresnel lens from an overhead projector. The fan failed, and heat of the bulb made a 1" distortion a little off-center. Makes it useless for imaging, but doesn't hurt it's energy concentration much.
Of course it's only 1/9 the area, but cost me $99 less. I haven't used for decades, since my brother-in-law and I were snapping ants on the sidewalk. (First thing I thought of, first time I played Ant City.) But it's still down in the basement, ready for the sun.
Bingo.
Somewhere, someone confused the mission of news reporting with revenue generation. This is nothing new, and goes back at least as far as the Spanish-American War, no doubt much further.
As long as making money conflicts with honest, objective new reporting, we'll have these problems. I just wish we as a society would recognize this, and do something about it.
How much less scientific than the ingrown assumption that Microsoft and Windows are on top, and will stay there forever?
Past trends can indicate near and mid term events, but in the long run, things change.
I wonder if/when Java will be out and .net will be in. How would the same VB/Java arguments play wrt Java/.net?
...value is more important than what gets created.
You have simply defined why so much of what is made by ??AA members in recent years is a bunch of drek. I'll add my pet theory - that too many of the *who* you talk about are money people first, and not movie or music people.
So once again the basis is to reduce every aspect of gaming to a commodity - except theirs. In this case, I'm sure Microsoft wants to make sure *every* aspect of gaming hardware becomes a commodity, and avoid repeating this mistake of allowing Intel to be so pesky and uppity. (I know, it wasn't a case of 'allowing' because Microsoft and Intel became pesky and uppity together. But this is Microsoft's chance/attempt to fix that situation.)
Not necessarily so.
L2 cache is also memory, and any memory of that size will have redundant elements. Therefore, even though it's a lot of area, it's fixable area, and will yield higher than an equivalent area of logic. Plus, though SRAM design may not be 'easy', expanding a cache is one of the easier things you can do to enhance performance.
For some problems, cache will never be big enough, for others it will. Unfortunately for the P4, it's architected as a bandwidth hog, and the core excels at streaming media processing - precisely where a bigger cache tends to fall down.
I believe you're unfortunately wrong on this one, under the DMCA. There is some work underway to fix this to work as you say, but I'm under the impression that it's going to get buried by the best legislators the ??AA can buy.
Except the story I keep hearing from Win-types is that the NT kernel is rock solid, and that crashes are due to bad drivers, and that Microsoft is fixing this by placing tougher quality requirements on drivers, etc.
Perhaps a Universal Driver Apstraction Layer would be a good idea - if it could be done right. The first part of being done right would be some form of OS-neutral approach rooted in basic concepts. Unfortunately what's real to day is, "How can we reuse Windows drivers?" for a starting point. This exposes us to the same buggy drivers Win-types talk about, and probably exposes us to Microsoft's Patent Weapon, at some point. I'm sure it exposes us to relatively toothless license terms - "used ONLY to develop Windows..." that never seem to have been enforced against WINE or CygWin users.
In a different note, perhaps we need to EXPECT more out of hardware suppliers. Before buying computing equipment, I research it pretty carefully for Linux compatibility. Maybe instead, I need to just buy and try, the RETURN it if it isn't Linux compatible, and make sure I TELL the retailer why. Maybe if more of us did that, the message would get through. (Naaaah)
My daughter and I are folding@home, I started her on it a week or two back. IMHO, she's a born scientist - she likes to write her observations and how she does things. She took quite an interest in biological sciences after reading "The Hot Zone" in middle school, and recently in freshman biology they were talking about prions being misfolded proteins responsible for Mad Cow. All stuff well-known to /.ers, but new to her.
So I pounced on her new exposure to protein folding, and we signed up for folding@home. I figure this will amplify her interest in biological sciences, either upward or down. It's worth the electricity to let her learn more about her own interests.
Incidentally, folding@home has quite a bit more information on their web site, that I'm deliberately avoiding. I hope that after school's out, she'll lead on this - or not. At a strategic time, I may well mention climate@home.
You're right, in considerably more detail than me.
But my argument is still that behind those septic - or many (*but not all) other regulations - is someone who did it wrong in the first place, and stuck others with the consequences.
*I suspect another source of regulations is a friend of a friend of an official, trying to protect his business from competition.
From what I remember, which may be defective, Linux put out the first Linux kernel as a 'Minix-like' OS kernel, not that there was any shared code at all. More like an inspiration or comparison point than a starting point.
and obviously not Minix, the immediate ancestor of Linux.
But it makes me wonder about Xenix - the one Microsoft owned, for a while. Guess that didn't exist, either.
If I had mod points, you'd get some.
Think government regulations would be stupid if some incompetent idiot tried an X Prize launch too close to a populated area, and crashed it on your house?
I won't defend what government regulations have become, but I can understand how they got to where they are.
Example: Guys at work were griping about septic systems, and how it takes an engineer to "certify" that the thing is correctly done. Yet the septic system isn't really "designed", but rather taken from some tables out of a book. X type of soil, household for Y people, therefore use Z sized tank and W feet of leach line.
But the regulation, engineer, and inspector most likely (IMHO) have their roots in an unscrupulous builder who put in an undersized tank, then ran the output into an arbitrarily-sized pit filled with some gravel - no leach lines at all. After selling houses in the neighborhood, the contracting company reorganized, or otherwise became 'unavailable' by the few years afterward when the homeowner discovered he didn't even really have a septic system, but a fake.
There will always be people trying to sleaze others. Sometimes they can be caught through the Law, but (IMHO) as often as not those sleazy people know how to sleaze the Law, too. Hence new regulations.
Sometimes you can substitute incompetent or thoughtless for sleazy. From what I've read of the X-Prize contestents, non of them are any of the above. But remember that they ARE playing with high explosives.
Finding the comfortable middleground for regulations is difficult, perhaps impossible, considering the way the sleazes try to game the system. Again, I realize that the sleazes are not currently a factor in the X-Prize, but just wait until the concept is proven, and space tourism becomes a growth industry. Then you'll seem them crawling out of the woodwork.
...is that they sort of leaked the information about this in mid-April, when the college selection process is supposed to be nearly done. As a result, we're thrown into another round of decision turmoil, with a deposit at one university and an acceptance at Champlain.
It sounds as if Champlain is working with industry on this program, and will certainly do all they can to help their first graduating classes get placed. But aren't game jobs pretty much game-to-game, like the Star Trek: Elite Force 2 folks who got laid off at Raven right after the game went gold?
How generally versatile will a game design degree be, anyway. I suspect careful choice of electives will be the key.
Sorry I missed that. Sometimes when you're /.-ing while waiting for a script to finish, you read too quickly.
I MUST differ.
While the educational system may not be perfect, IMHO the real fault lies within the HOME.
My cousin sent me a humor quip, 'No tooth left behind' about a fictional dental equivalent to 'No child left behind'. It held dentists responsible for kids' cavities, *regardless* of the kids' diets at home, or their parents' enforcement of dental hygeine.
It was meant as a simily for teaching, and how education begins in the home. My wife has spend quite a bit of time subbing, so she sees what these teachers are coping with. By and large, the kids who do well, have support at home. What's even worse, are kids who *should* be doing well, and come from what *seem* like good homes, but to say it mildly, the parents' attitude is 'counterproductive'.
Examples:
Kid acts up, kid gets disciplined, parent backs kid and gives school a rough time. (Kid was caught drinking alcohol on a school trip, btw)
Male teachers afraid to enforce dress code against girls - what are YOU doing ogling me!
Then there are the kids who 'merely' need support at home, and don't get it.
There are (at least) two potential explanations for this:
First is that employers are entrenched in the Prisoner's Dilemna - each assumes that other employers will furnish high-paying jobs so that the other guy's employees can buy this employers products.
Second is that employers are in the process of losing any concern/regard for the US market, and are planning on expanding into India and China. One could look at this as a form of 'crop rotation', where the crop being harvested is the workers' output. As a labor market unionizes and becomes expensive, move to a labor market where they'll work absurd hours for peanuts. Then as that market 'matures' move to the next. Eventually the first labor market will have become so depressed that they'll work absurd hours for peanuts, and the cycle starts over. Not only that, but the cyclic standards of living implied also imply a wave of new sales as you rotate your workers.
But did they tell you if Paul is really dead, or anything about the whereabouts of the One True Elvis?
One thing worth mentioning about 'measurement' that I saw a few years back.
Sometimes people want consciousness to be involved in measurement, and that makes an absolutely stunning comment about the universe and our place in it. But a few years back, I read about an experiment involving interferometry, and placing a detector where it would destroy the wave nature. There have been numerous experiments involving this 'illegal' measurement, including 'destroying' the measurment and getting the wave nature back.
In this case, they simply unplugged the detector, leaving it in-place. The wave nature was still missing, the experiment still showed particles. The physical presence of the detector was sufficient for 'measurment', and the universe left more physically consistent, though less mystical.
Did anyone else see this line and immediately think of the actor who played the mad hermit Adam (his wife was named Eve, of course) in Northern Exposure, or who played the doctor in Chicago Hope, the one who wasn't played by Mandy Patinkin, and didn't look like Vlad Lenin. What the heck is an actor doing involved with medicine at this level - he only *played* a doctor on TV.
Oops, different Adam Arkin
Actually, the way I heard it, altitude is only 1/25 the trick to orbit. The other 24/25 is speed. I might presume that the kinetic energy necessary for LEO isn't really 24X the potential energy of that altitude, but perhaps that rather reflects hauling the fuel up there to build up the velocity. I need to sit down and do some math on this.
RATS! My mod points just expired within the last half-hour.
Actually, I generally buy NO games new. By and large, I wait until games are on the bargain shelves - Window, Linux, and in the olden days, DOS.