It seems unlikely that their ShockWave Power Reactor would do much fusion, because the desktop fusion device seems to require absolutely spherical cavitation bubbles. The ShockWave Power Reactors induce cavitation by rotating a perforated cylinder through fluid at such a rate that it somehow induces lots of cavitation in the fluid. From the photos it doesn't look like the bubbles are anything close to spherical, which isn't surprising given the turbulent environment they're in.
I kind of wonder just how long these cavitation devices run before their cylinders erode away. I once worked briefly in the oil and gas automation business, and there we had to take great pains to assure the customer that the valves wouldn't be subject to cavitation wear. I saw some valve guts that had been eroded by cavitation. It's pretty amazing to see how much damage these little bubbles can do.
"The most amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how well he dances, but rather, that he can dance at all."
What this video shows is that, given compelling voice acting, video game tools are getting pretty close to enabling stand-alone content. Okay, it's still a dancing bear, but I was moved enough watching this that I could easily see myself sitting through a feature-length presentation in this format. (Of course, the quality is low enough that I'd probably wait to rent it for $.99, but still...)
It's not a matter of tradition. It's a matter of survival having evolved these differences. The selective pressures of early hominid life made every tiny advantage into a life-or-death difference. If a particular male happened to have a.5 millisecond advantage in reaction time, he would most likely be able to put his club through the skull of his opponent, thus taking his opponent's assets and assuring the passage of his ever-so-slightly better genetics.
Same goes for women - in a world where starvation comes once a year, women who are more willing to sacrifice to nurture their brood are more likely to pass on this ability, since their brood is more likely to survive.
It's not a matter of "tradition" or "assumed roles". It's biology. The same survival pressures that selected musculature in men and enlarged mammaries and wide hips in women gave rise to many brain and behaviorial differences.
I also apologise to the men and women who read/., for the obsequious, fawning PC BS that attempts to hide the differences between the sexes, as if such differences are somehow ugly.
Guys evolved bigger, fast-twitch muscles and the brain wiring for hunting and defense. They have pre-wired pathways to enjoy adrenaline, fight-or-flight games.
Gals evolved better socializing, nurturing and gathering skills. They have pre-wired pathways to enjoy social or not-so-violent questing games.
The biological reward pathway for guys is instantaneous, owing to the immediate success/failure of a fight-or-flight situation.
The biological reward pathway for gals is more gradual, accumulating more for repeatedly successful socializing, nurturing or gathering.
Guys will get an immediate payoff for playing games they're pre-wired for. Gals will need to play for some time to accumulate reward. So for guys, games are more addictive in the same way that injected drugs are more addictive than the same drugs swallowed - there is a much sharper "spike" in their reward system. For this simple, evolved biological reason, games will continue to be more attractive to guys, and guys will therefore continue to define the games market.
It is also a greater challenge to create a game that addresses the socializing, nurturing and gathering reward system of women, since fight-or-flight situations require only an immediate danger to be overcome, while creating a social environment with embedded, accumulating rewards for interaction, nurturing and gathering is a much more complicated proposition.
Guild Wars has free servers (i.e. buy the game and you can MMO as much or as little as you like at no extra cost).
If you're a casual weekend gamer and you need some henchmen to help with a difficult quest and you don't want to bother any human players, the game always has a few frendly computer henchmen waiting to be recruited by the gate.
The wiki is a good tool for collaboration. It's encouraging to see Valve step in with an official one. The flip side is that maybe they'll be reluctant to share any details that reverse-engineer too deeply. Here's a similar wiki for Battlefield 2, that focuses on the python code and it's largely unpublished interface. Because it enjoys independence from EA and DICE, the folks there are digging up pleanty of undocumented details.
You need experience. Your MSCS is very pretty and adds spice to a resume once you get something real to put on it. Degrees are like certificates from fencing school. They look nice on the wall, but you don't charge into battle waving a piece of paper. (I've programmed beside folks with an MSCS and better who really couldn't code their way out of a paper bag).
Take whatever development position will give you experience that looks good on your resume. You may not want to take a position coding in a dinosaur language. Search dice.com for languages and skillsets you're interested in and see what the demand for them is.
Once you get some real experience on your resume, then take your mentor's good advice and always pitch yourself at positions a little beyond your comfort zone.
This sort of thing is just gasoline on the fire for using biometrics for identification. Once all transactions are backed by solid proof of id, your SSN and credit card numbers can be openly published right next to your address and phone number.
Doesn't having DRM on board just mean that the user can successfully play DRM'ed IP they purchase? Is there anything in this DRM scheme that prevents construction of arbitrary device drivers that divert the un-DRM'ed content on it's way to the speakers/screen?
This crap just makes life harder for us contractors who understand the meaning of the paper we sign. I've had contracts that were terminated simply because the company had to adopt a policy of limiting how long a contractor can work for them, so as not to confuse a contractor with "permanent" employees. What's next? A class-action lawsuit by employees who discover that their cow-orkers are all earning a few bucks more than they are?
Breeders have been creating new plant variations for millenia. Do you think these new variations use entirely old DNA? Not on your life. Unlike GM organisms, breeders rely on random mutations to create changes in the DNA. Yep. They're just rolling the dice and hoping they get lucky. So along with one desirable new trait, they end up with perhaps dozens of recessive traits that may not be expressed until they hybridize their new wonder with another plant having different silent mutations. It's altogether possible (though obviously unlikely) that one of these recessive traits could express something akin to botox, turning a carefully cross-bred wheat plant into a deadly poisonous plant.
Okay, so you're saying that never happens, and we've been breeding plants for milennia. Bingo. If we haven't seen nasty unexpected side-effects from propagating random changes in DNA, many of which are invisible, what is it about carefully crafting a set of task-specific DNA changes that gives people the willies and conjures up "Attack of the killer tomatoes" scenarios?
Before getting all worked up about the responsibility of GM corporations, why not give a moment of thought to the callous and insensitive breeders, who will happily propagate any old mutation that, at least in part, improves a plant for their needs? Do they bother checking what other mutations their new breed has? Do they sequence all their candidate strain's DNA and verify it against a database before releasing it to the public? Hell no! They're all "look at the size of these grapefruit! Buy some of our seeds! Only $5.00!"
Art is an arrangement of sensory input that evokes a change of state in the observer. Like good science, good art exhibits two distinguishing qualities: accuracy and precision. Accuracy is the degree to which a work causes the intended change of state in the observer. Precision is the reliability of the work in bringing about the same change of state in direction and degree (whether it was the change of state the artist intended or not).
Therefore, computer-generated art can be considered good art at least to the extent it manifests these two qualities.
In order for it to be accurate, the algorithm producing the art should have a model of the change of observer state desired. This might include a model of human emotions, common memories, sensory associations and all that other subjective stuff.
To be precise, the resulting work should move all observers in the same direction to similar degree.
Anybody remember how visual programming languages were supposed to be the "next big thing"? But it turned out that just because you have a graphical representation of an algorithm, you still haven't done much to reduce the essential complexity of the problem. This notion of XPL via XML looks and smells a whole lot like visual programming, with klunky tags taking the place of little diamonds, circles and boxes.
Before a new paradigm can gain mindshare, it needs to address the fundamental problem of crafting software - reduction of complexity. Hardware doubles in capacity, what, every 18 months? What is the doubling time of software writing productivity? No where near 18 months. Not even close.
Unless someone clearly demonstrates how extensible programming languages allow me to solve problems at a higher level (more abstract expression, therefore fewer lines of code), I'm not gonna buy into it.
Grabbing all the connections available from the web server and hanging onto them has several advantages over the bandwidth-hogging approaches: it is much easier on bandwidth (overcoming one of the objections of the hand-wringers), and it consumes a potentially scarce resource at the spamvertiser's end, requiring fewer people to bring the site to a halt. Apache servers out of the box are configured to support only a couple hundred connections. Some servers will set up a bunch of other stuff when the connection opens, just to make it a bit more responsive. Some are foolish enough to allocate a DB connection from their pool. By grabbing all open connections, one quickly drains the pool, and new DB connections are notoriously expensive to create. This approach has potential. Of course, the power to take a web site off the net with trivial amounts of code is perhaps something best left unadvertised.
If someone does an OS distributed bandwidth-sucker against spammer sites, how do the spammers respond? Well, first they go with one-shot URLs that respond with a low-bandwidth 404 after being clicked once. Of course, a persistent SBS (Spammer Bandwidth Sucker) will simply go on racking up 404s, which do still cost the spammer something.
Next, the spammers will start converting all the zombie PCs they now use for distributed email attacks into web servers that provide their advertisers a distributed source of order-taking. This means that unsuspecting PC owners everywhere will soon rack up astounding bandwidth overruns as URLs that point to their PC get entered into the SBS program.
Nevertheless, an SBS does strike directly at the spammers, raising the hoop a bit higher and perhaps winnowing out the less 'professional' among them.
The only sure cure for spam, of course, is to take the battle one step further, by consuming all the resources of the advertisers directly - call their phones, request literature, place fraudlent orders with non-existant CC numbers (that, of course, pass Luhn MOD 10 checking) and provide contact phone numbers that ring forever. This will swamp them with orders that tie up their sales staff, cost them money and ultimately starve them.
The only problem with "the final solution" for spam is that it takes individual effort on a daily concerted basis. So spam endures by riding on the backs of those so clueless that they actually order products from spammers and those of us too lazy to do anything about it.
Spam exists because it is profitable. If each of us would take the time to select just one spamming business per day, and tie up their resources by calling their agents, requesting literature, doing whatever we can to decrease their profit, we could end spam by cuting it off at the root. As long as spam is a more affordable delivery vehicle, it will get used.
This is the killer app to finally justify fiber to the home. Maybe Level-3 will finally see some justification for all the megamiles of dark fiber its been camping on.
Why drill at all? The glass prevents dissolution of the waste, at least long enough for the material to be deeply buried by the natural subduction, which can add several cm depth per year in some areas. We should be able to simply dump the glass bits from a ship over subduction zones.
Horribly radioactive substances are found in nature, but are usually very dilute. This suggests that the ultimate disposal mechanism involves re-dilution. By slowly dumping individual glass nodules of encapsulated waste across a large area, we minimize the interaction of waste with localized volcanic disturbances, and assure ultimate dilution within earth's magma many tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now.
If they would dump the vitrified glass in a subduction zone, where one geologic plate is sliding under another, the glass would be buried as much as several hundred centimeters deeper each year, until it eventually melts and is presumably diluted in the magma of the earth's core. Anybody know why this isn't done?
Most open-source efforts can be (and are) started by a couple of dedicated geeks with some spare time. Modern game development requires a staff of dozens just to get a decent engine, tools and prototype hacked together. And these aren't generally your corporate drone type developers and artists, either. For the most part, they're rabid game fanatics who think nothing of sacrificing what may pass for their normal life on the altar of 60+ hour/week crunch time schedules that go on for months. They also spend a lot of time in each other's faces, coordinating how all the bits go together. Full-cycle title costs run into the millions of dollars. It's kinda like asking why there are so few "open-source" spaceflight companies.
We can still see some good open-source opportunities for smaller platforms, like cell phones and PDAs, but the odds of an open-source title becoming a blockbuster console or PC title are practically nil. It just requires too much dedication and coordination of too many resources, which, in an open-source world, are geographically spread out so much that high-bandwidth, in-your-face coordination just can't happen.
Now, if someone were to sponsor an X-prize like contest for open-source gaming, we might see some action.
I wonder if this is related to the observation that conservatives tend to order their beef rare and to twirl spaghetti onto their fork, while liberals tend to order their beef more fully cooked, and tend to cut their spaghetti? (No, really - take a survey. I didn't believe it either until I asked a bunch of friends. I got ~80% correlation. Weird).
Absolutely. Faronic's Deep Freeze is the way to go. You can give patrons complete access as an admin on the box to do whatever they want. Download, install, infect with trojans or virii - it doesn't matter. To revert, just press the reset button and all is well. Very convenient.
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I kind of wonder just how long these cavitation devices run before their cylinders erode away. I once worked briefly in the oil and gas automation business, and there we had to take great pains to assure the customer that the valves wouldn't be subject to cavitation wear. I saw some valve guts that had been eroded by cavitation. It's pretty amazing to see how much damage these little bubbles can do.
What this video shows is that, given compelling voice acting, video game tools are getting pretty close to enabling stand-alone content. Okay, it's still a dancing bear, but I was moved enough watching this that I could easily see myself sitting through a feature-length presentation in this format. (Of course, the quality is low enough that I'd probably wait to rent it for $.99, but still...)
Same goes for women - in a world where starvation comes once a year, women who are more willing to sacrifice to nurture their brood are more likely to pass on this ability, since their brood is more likely to survive.
It's not a matter of "tradition" or "assumed roles". It's biology. The same survival pressures that selected musculature in men and enlarged mammaries and wide hips in women gave rise to many brain and behaviorial differences.
I also apologise to the men and women who read /., for the obsequious, fawning PC BS that attempts to hide the differences between the sexes, as if such differences are somehow ugly.
Techbargains.com has their finger on the pulse of tech deals everywhere, including your local B&M compu-store.
Gals evolved better socializing, nurturing and gathering skills. They have pre-wired pathways to enjoy social or not-so-violent questing games.
The biological reward pathway for guys is instantaneous, owing to the immediate success/failure of a fight-or-flight situation.
The biological reward pathway for gals is more gradual, accumulating more for repeatedly successful socializing, nurturing or gathering.
Guys will get an immediate payoff for playing games they're pre-wired for. Gals will need to play for some time to accumulate reward. So for guys, games are more addictive in the same way that injected drugs are more addictive than the same drugs swallowed - there is a much sharper "spike" in their reward system. For this simple, evolved biological reason, games will continue to be more attractive to guys, and guys will therefore continue to define the games market.
It is also a greater challenge to create a game that addresses the socializing, nurturing and gathering reward system of women, since fight-or-flight situations require only an immediate danger to be overcome, while creating a social environment with embedded, accumulating rewards for interaction, nurturing and gathering is a much more complicated proposition.
If you're a casual weekend gamer and you need some henchmen to help with a difficult quest and you don't want to bother any human players, the game always has a few frendly computer henchmen waiting to be recruited by the gate.
The wiki is a good tool for collaboration. It's encouraging to see Valve step in with an official one. The flip side is that maybe they'll be reluctant to share any details that reverse-engineer too deeply. Here's a similar wiki for Battlefield 2, that focuses on the python code and it's largely unpublished interface. Because it enjoys independence from EA and DICE, the folks there are digging up pleanty of undocumented details.
Here's a Cellulosic Ethanol Fact Sheet that claims cellulosic ethanol can be created for an oil-equivalent-cost of $13/barrel.
Take whatever development position will give you experience that looks good on your resume. You may not want to take a position coding in a dinosaur language. Search dice.com for languages and skillsets you're interested in and see what the demand for them is.
Once you get some real experience on your resume, then take your mentor's good advice and always pitch yourself at positions a little beyond your comfort zone.
From the official Battlefield 2 README:
WINDOWS
- Minimum Specification, based on playing a 16 player game:
CPU: 1 Ghz
RAM: 384 Mb
- Recommended Specification, based on playing a 64 player game:
CPU: 3 Ghz. For AMD Athlon 64 CPU: 3500+ (2.2 Ghz)
RAM: 1 Gb
BANDWIDTH
- Minimum
2.5 Mbit
- Recommended
5Mbit
This sort of thing is just gasoline on the fire for using biometrics for identification. Once all transactions are backed by solid proof of id, your SSN and credit card numbers can be openly published right next to your address and phone number.
Doesn't having DRM on board just mean that the user can successfully play DRM'ed IP they purchase? Is there anything in this DRM scheme that prevents construction of arbitrary device drivers that divert the un-DRM'ed content on it's way to the speakers/screen?
This crap just makes life harder for us contractors who understand the meaning of the paper we sign. I've had contracts that were terminated simply because the company had to adopt a policy of limiting how long a contractor can work for them, so as not to confuse a contractor with "permanent" employees. What's next? A class-action lawsuit by employees who discover that their cow-orkers are all earning a few bucks more than they are?
Okay, so you're saying that never happens, and we've been breeding plants for milennia. Bingo. If we haven't seen nasty unexpected side-effects from propagating random changes in DNA, many of which are invisible, what is it about carefully crafting a set of task-specific DNA changes that gives people the willies and conjures up "Attack of the killer tomatoes" scenarios?
Before getting all worked up about the responsibility of GM corporations, why not give a moment of thought to the callous and insensitive breeders, who will happily propagate any old mutation that, at least in part, improves a plant for their needs? Do they bother checking what other mutations their new breed has? Do they sequence all their candidate strain's DNA and verify it against a database before releasing it to the public? Hell no! They're all "look at the size of these grapefruit! Buy some of our seeds! Only $5.00!"
Therefore, computer-generated art can be considered good art at least to the extent it manifests these two qualities.
In order for it to be accurate, the algorithm producing the art should have a model of the change of observer state desired. This might include a model of human emotions, common memories, sensory associations and all that other subjective stuff.
To be precise, the resulting work should move all observers in the same direction to similar degree.
Before a new paradigm can gain mindshare, it needs to address the fundamental problem of crafting software - reduction of complexity. Hardware doubles in capacity, what, every 18 months? What is the doubling time of software writing productivity? No where near 18 months. Not even close.
Unless someone clearly demonstrates how extensible programming languages allow me to solve problems at a higher level (more abstract expression, therefore fewer lines of code), I'm not gonna buy into it.
Grabbing all the connections available from the web server and hanging onto them has several advantages over the bandwidth-hogging approaches: it is much easier on bandwidth (overcoming one of the objections of the hand-wringers), and it consumes a potentially scarce resource at the spamvertiser's end, requiring fewer people to bring the site to a halt. Apache servers out of the box are configured to support only a couple hundred connections. Some servers will set up a bunch of other stuff when the connection opens, just to make it a bit more responsive. Some are foolish enough to allocate a DB connection from their pool. By grabbing all open connections, one quickly drains the pool, and new DB connections are notoriously expensive to create. This approach has potential. Of course, the power to take a web site off the net with trivial amounts of code is perhaps something best left unadvertised.
Next, the spammers will start converting all the zombie PCs they now use for distributed email attacks into web servers that provide their advertisers a distributed source of order-taking. This means that unsuspecting PC owners everywhere will soon rack up astounding bandwidth overruns as URLs that point to their PC get entered into the SBS program.
Nevertheless, an SBS does strike directly at the spammers, raising the hoop a bit higher and perhaps winnowing out the less 'professional' among them.
The only sure cure for spam, of course, is to take the battle one step further, by consuming all the resources of the advertisers directly - call their phones, request literature, place fraudlent orders with non-existant CC numbers (that, of course, pass Luhn MOD 10 checking) and provide contact phone numbers that ring forever. This will swamp them with orders that tie up their sales staff, cost them money and ultimately starve them.
The only problem with "the final solution" for spam is that it takes individual effort on a daily concerted basis. So spam endures by riding on the backs of those so clueless that they actually order products from spammers and those of us too lazy to do anything about it.
Ain't humanity grand?
Spam exists because it is profitable. If each of us would take the time to select just one spamming business per day, and tie up their resources by calling their agents, requesting literature, doing whatever we can to decrease their profit, we could end spam by cuting it off at the root. As long as spam is a more affordable delivery vehicle, it will get used.
This is the killer app to finally justify fiber to the home. Maybe Level-3 will finally see some justification for all the megamiles of dark fiber its been camping on.
Horribly radioactive substances are found in nature, but are usually very dilute. This suggests that the ultimate disposal mechanism involves re-dilution. By slowly dumping individual glass nodules of encapsulated waste across a large area, we minimize the interaction of waste with localized volcanic disturbances, and assure ultimate dilution within earth's magma many tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now.
If they would dump the vitrified glass in a subduction zone, where one geologic plate is sliding under another, the glass would be buried as much as several hundred centimeters deeper each year, until it eventually melts and is presumably diluted in the magma of the earth's core. Anybody know why this isn't done?
We can still see some good open-source opportunities for smaller platforms, like cell phones and PDAs, but the odds of an open-source title becoming a blockbuster console or PC title are practically nil. It just requires too much dedication and coordination of too many resources, which, in an open-source world, are geographically spread out so much that high-bandwidth, in-your-face coordination just can't happen.
Now, if someone were to sponsor an X-prize like contest for open-source gaming, we might see some action.
I wonder if this is related to the observation that conservatives tend to order their beef rare and to twirl spaghetti onto their fork, while liberals tend to order their beef more fully cooked, and tend to cut their spaghetti? (No, really - take a survey. I didn't believe it either until I asked a bunch of friends. I got ~80% correlation. Weird).
Absolutely. Faronic's Deep Freeze is the way to go. You can give patrons complete access as an admin on the box to do whatever they want. Download, install, infect with trojans or virii - it doesn't matter. To revert, just press the reset button and all is well. Very convenient.